Anthem Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A giant case study with hundreds of micro-scenarios that can be used and further developed as narratives in coaching and training!”—Sabine Baer, Executive Coach, Brussels, coaching .sabinebaer @gmail .com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Emerging Market Economies and Financial Globalization” offers a comparative analysis of the capital account liberalization process and the variety of policy responses generated among a reduced group of Latin American and Asian countries. In particular, the book critically examines these varied responses from a three-fold perspective: macro, micro-financial and institutional. From a macro perspective, the book compares exchange rate regimes, monetary policies and capital account liberalization paths adopted at each of the selected countries. In other words, the book analyzes how emerging economies confronted the challenge imposed by the monetary trilemma posed by Mundell. The book analyzes different corner solutions (for example, exchange rate pegging) and whether there is life inside the triangle. The Asian financial crises have certainly induced a debate on the benefits of foreign exchange reserve accumulation and the increasing policy space generated since then. But emerging countries policy-makers realized the perils of sailing in uncharted waters and, consequently, began to introduce a series of instruments to prevent sudden reversals in capital flows.

The micro-financial perspective, in turn, directs our attention to the financial sector structure, how the process of financial deepening transformed it in recent years and how local authorities responded to the increasing pressures generated by an increasingly globally connected banking sector. But cross-funding, local regulation and financial stability are certainly difficult to match, even at developed countries as the European crisis demonstrates. This triplet conforms the so-called financial trilemma introduced by Schoenmaker, and analyzed in the book—particularly observing how selected countries performed it.

Finally, the institutional perspective center on the legal treatment granted to the capital account openness process—both at the multilateral and bilateral levels. From a policy perspective the interrelationship between open macro, international financial markets and institutions has been often neglected but hardly significant with sovereigns founding periodically challenged by legal constraints. The founding fathers of Bretton Woods institutions shared a common vision: avoid large imbalances created by international capital flows. Coincidences, however, vanished after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. Thereafter leading countries’ claims for the opening of the capital accounts and financial liberalization became common parlance. Institutionally, these pressures were present at both multilateral and bilateral fore.

A selection of ruminative nature writing on walking and the beauty of New England, here Thoreau’s characteristically wide-ranging and philosophical style offers a multitude of fascinating observations. Excursions presents Thoreau’s most studied and expansive collection of writing on the natural world. An early advocate of conservationism, he discusses here, in mesmerising prose, the complex but essential relationship between man and nature. This edition includes a remarkable Biographical Sketch by Thoreau’s great contemporary and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This choice collection of Thoreau’s nature writing includes the essays ‘The Succession of Forest Trees’, ‘Walking’, and ‘Autumnal Tints’ – each one an explorative reach into the heart of the natural world. Thoreau’s travels through the woods of New England are not only physical journeys through some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes in America but also spiritual excursions of the mind.

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

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

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

Tasos Leivaditis (1922-88), one of the undiscovered greats of Modern Greek literature, entered the poetic scene in the middle of the last century with three short poetry books, presented here in English translation for the first time. These works, received with both popular and critical acclaim upon publication in 1952-53, give compelling testimony to the violence of the twentieth century, witnessed by Leivaditis and his generation in the Nazi occupation of Greece in World War II and the subsequent civil war (1946-49) between the left and right-wing factions. The latter, internecine battle found Leivaditis, a committed communist, on the defeated side, and he was exiled to concentration camps on various islands for more than three years. Soon after his release, he published a remarkable triptych of poetic works that evoke the horrors of war and, in the midst of this, the yearning for justice and peace.

The first work in the trilogy, Battle at the End of the Night, is set on the Aegean island of Makronisos, which functioned in the civil war years as an internment camp for leftist dissidents. The entire action takes place over a single, seemingly endless, wintry night reeking of terror and death. But the narrator defiantly retains his faith in our common humanity and his conviction that justice will prevail. The second work, This Star Is For All of Us, is also set during the civil war, but this time the focus is the author’s beloved, Maria. Although imprisoned, he is confident that they will meet again, and his love for her becomes by the end universal in scope. The sense of solidarity also deeply marks the final work, The Wind at the Crossroads of the World, the shortest of the three but the most controversial. The book was banned and Leivaditis thrown into prison once again, the authorities unable to tolerate the book’s “subversive proclamation” of freedom and peace. 

This book evaluates exotic alternative investment opportunities such as life settlements, litigation funding, farmlands, royalties, weather derivatives, collectables and other unique asset classes. It provides an in-depth analysis of the returns, risks, opportunities and portfolio effects for anyone who wants to expand their investment horizons. This book is for individual investors, financial advisors and academics who desire knowledge about investment products beyond just stocks and bonds or vanilla hedge funds, private equity and real estate investments. It provides a critical link to industry data and original research to support the case for adding exotic alternative investments to traditional portfolios. 

The book includes an analysis of returns and risk from a wide range of direct investments in individual exotic asset classes as well as from investing in public shares and ETFs. It also includes a section on how these exotic investments performed relative to both traditional and alternative investments like hedge funds both before and after the Spring 2020 market crash.

The book is an excellent tool for practitioners wishing to understand the rationale and impact of allocating capital to these exotic and less-understood investment opportunities.

Based on detailed ethnographic material, ‘New Lithuania in Old Hands’ analyzes the impact that European Union membership has had upon the country’s ageing small-scale farmers. Addressing the highly relevant themes of European Union enlargement and the ‘Return to Europe’, this book describes how Lithuania’s EU membership has been a far cry from the scenarios of wealth and overabundance once promised.

On the contrary, membership of the EU has in many instances resulted in a return to subsistence production, increased insecurity and a reinforcement of kinship obligations. Within the agrarian sector, such changes threaten to have a large impact upon the future of family structures, and in turn, the future of the farming demographic as a whole.

While political forces have attempted to create a ‘New Lithuania’ in light of Europe’s geopolitical agenda, it has been the country’s ageing ‘Soviet generation’ that has actually brought into effect the restructuring of the agricultural sector. Thus, instead of treating the European Union as an elite project and voicing the support of various other parts of the population, ‘New Lithuania in Old Hands’ shows how the broader parts of the rural population have been affected by and engaged in the processes of change that followed Lithuania’s accession to the EU.

Hinge Epistemology is a new branch of philosophy inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view in On Certainty, that 'the questions that we raise, and our doubts, depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn' (OC 341). Hinge Epistemology is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting areas of epistemology and Wittgenstein studies. In connecting these two fields it brings a revived energy to both, opening them up to fresh developments. The essays in this volume extend the subject in terms of both depth and breadth in the following ways: 

(i) Fastening the hinges: In the opening essays of the book, proponents of the three major perspectives on the nature of hinge certainties strengthen their views, often by virtue of response to one another. These are followed by essays presenting new voices and challenges within hinge epistemology.

(ii) Opening the door: The second half of the book explores new applications and directions of hinge epistemology, particularly as it relates to the philosophy of mind, society, ethics, and the history of ideas. 

The book comes at a time when V. S. Naipaul has passed away, and it is important to assess his place within the Caribbean as compared to elsewhere. As the book positions itself in Trinidad, it provides an alternative view of Naipaul’s career from a non-metropolitan point of view. The book contrasts how Naipaul was read and received in the Caribbean against his reputation in the metropolitan centres.

The book is organized decade by decade, with 1950s beginning in 1950 to 1959, 1960s beginning with 1960 to 1969, etc. There are possibly two exceptions: A House for Mr Biswas (1961) is treated as a 1950s novel because it is thematically linked to his writings in the 1950s; “The Killings in Trinidad and The Death of Eva Peron” (1980) are about the happenings in 1970s and were published in 1980 only due to legal issues. 

The book places the writings of Naipaul in a dynamic dialogue with the events taking place in Trinidad. There is no event of political or historical importance in Trinidad (1950s–1990s) that went unnoticed and unwritten about by Naipaul. He was a writer who wrote for his countrymen because he realized that it was his countrymen that most enjoyed his writings. Though he lived in England and was grateful for the global recognition his writing received, he knew that his writing spoke only to the true Trinidadian who appreciated him, his stances and his rebuffs. 

Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. For example, the global Indian community (known in Indian official terms as the Non-Resident Indian or the NRI) has become an integral part of the cultural representation of India.

The politics and ideology of Indian commercial cinema have become extremely complex, offering a fascinating case-study to scholars of Global Culture. Of particular interest is the re-positioning of individual identity vis-à-vis nation, religion, class, and gender. On one hand, the definition of 'nationhood' and/or community has become much more fluid, keeping in tune with the sweeping universal claims of globalization; the films have consequently revised the scope of their narratives to match India’s emerging global business ambitions. On the other hand, the political realities of India's long-standig enmity with Pakistan and the international rise of 'Hindutva' has also contributed to a new strain of jingoism in Indian cinema. ‘Bollywood and Globalization’ is a significant scholarly contribution to the current debate on Indian cinema, nationhood and Global Culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by students and scholars alike.

This book introduces a new thrilling field–neurocomputional poetics, the scientific ‘marriage’ between cognitive poetics, data science and neuroscience. Its goal is to uncover the secrets of verbal art reception and to explain how readers come to understand and like literary texts. For centuries verbal art reception was considered too subjective for quantitative scientific studies and still nowadays many scholars in the humanities and neurosciences alike view literary reading as too complex for accurate computational prediction of the neuronal, experiential and behavioural aspects of reader responses to texts. This book sets out for changing this view. 

It offers state-of-the-art computational models and methods allowing to predict which crucial textual features of prose and poetry, such as syntactic and semantic complexity or emotion potential, interact with reader features, such as empathy or openness to experience, in shaping a literary reading act. It contains hands-on practical examples on how to do computational text analyses of books and poems that can answer questions like: 

• Which is Jane Austen’s most beautiful book?
• Which poet created the most fitting poetic metaphors? or
• Which author of plays of the nineteenth century was the most literary?

The book’s first chapter about ‘The Two Boons of an Unnatural Daily Activity’ discusses the neuronal bases and other relevant aspects of immersive and aesthetic processes evoked by reading prose and poetry. In the second chapter, the author introduces a comprehensive model of verbal art reception that can explain what makes texts comprehensible and likeable and how they affect our body and mind. The model makes explicit important differences between the reading of prose and poetry and clarifies which text features make prose more immersive and poetry more aesthetic. The next two chapters discuss state-of-the-art methods for quantitative text, reader and reading act analyses from cognitive poetics, data science, psychology and neuroscience and shows how they can be used to dissect the complex author-text-reader nexus that shapes verbal art reception.

Chapters 5 and 6 then present hands-on practical examples on how to do simple and sophisticated computational text analyses including sentiment and topic analyses, cutting-edge machine learning methods, and multivariate predictive modeling using neural nets. Chapters 7 and 8 of the book then present a representative sample of empirical studies in both computational and neurocognitive poetics the author and his collaborators have carried out during the last decade. The results of these studies provide comprehensive insights into the complex workings of the brain during verbal art reception from the processing of single words and sentences to the aesthetic evaluation of metaphors or entire poems and novels, including a qualitative-quantitative analysis of the reading of Shakespeare sonnets that will change the ways of scientific studies of literature. The book ends with a short chapter about conclusions and future developments.

The model and methods introduced in the book offer game-changing insights for both fundamental and applied science that will affect standard metrics of readability and the way text processing and verbal art reception are viewed in literary studies, education, psychology or the media sciences.

Boundaries, borders and margins are related concepts and realities, and each of these can be conceptualized and organized in closed or open ways—with degrees of closure or openness. The logics of statis and closure, as well as cults of exclusivist and exclusionary sovereignty, are reflected and embodied in the closed xenophobic conceptualization and organization of boundaries, borders and margins. But, an open conceptualization of the borderlands, where mixing and hybridity take place at a rapid, even dizzying, pace, gives rise to Creolization—at the threshold of sovereignties, as something that can also be imagined.

At present, our border zones are spaces of anxiety-ridden security arrangements, violence and death. The existing politics of boundary maintenance is wedded to a cult of sovereignty at various levels, which produces bare lives, bodies and lands. We need the new art of border-crossing to bedefined by the notion of camaraderie and shared sovereignties and non-sovereignties. Border zones can also be zones of meetings, communication, transcendence and festive celebration of the limits of our identities. Thus, we need a new art and politics of boundary transmutation, transformation and transcendence, in the broadest possible sense, that entails the production of spatial, scalar, somatic, cognitive, affective and spiritual transitions.

Crossing Borders is a powerful theme and metaphor for all of us in the midst of COVID-19 (since 2020) and the current geopolitics of war that is hovering over Eurasia. We need these modes of knowing and being that shun violence; ontologies that are fluid and seeking instead of aggressive, self-certain, arrogant and violent. Amidst this chaos, we need new modes of knowing, or epistemologies, where knowing of, or about, the other is also a festive and artistic process of knowing with the other. We need an artistic ontological-epistemology of participation for a new art of border-crossing where the boundary between ontology and epistemology is continually redrawn with emergent negotiation and creativity.

This collection of eleven chapters, written by scholars who have frequently made Parsons’s ideas a central component of their work, is set in two parts. In Part I, consisting of chapters 1 through 6, a variety of issues that were of particular empirical and theoretical concern to Parsons at various points in his career are analyzed, critiqued and updated: German totalitarianism, political power in liberal democracies, the student protest movements on U.S. college campuses, the therapist–patient relationship in psychotherapy, the phenomenon of death and the reception of his ideas on the social system. Together these chapters point to some of Parsons’s interests in political and humanist matters, all of which, at one time or another, were—if not always tidily, at least satisfactorily—subsumed within and addressed by his general theory of action as it continued to develop. Thus, Nazism as a totalitarian social structure could be explained by the pattern variables, the notion of power became one of the generalized media of interchange, the expressiveness inherent in the 1960s campus unrest and in the therapeutic relationship was understood in terms of the AGIL schema and death was considered in connection with the telic order. 

Part II, which includes chapters 7 through 11, focuses on two interrelated themes that characterize the late phase of Parsons’s work: progressive evolution and the societal community. Beginning in the mid-1960s the process of evolution—both in its societal and cultural aspects—was given primary of place by Parsons in further explaining social differentiation and integration—but also, and more fundamentally, in dealing with the problem of social change. For Parsons, evolutionary development, with crucial cultural innovations taking place in the “seed-bed” societies of Israel and classical Greece, had culminated in modern society, which in the Western context brought about the industrial, democratic and education revolutions, and in the American context led to the development of an “institutionalized individualism” reinforced by the core value of “instrumental activism.” Both of these latter concepts are given extensive treatment in Parsons’s last book, the posthumously published American Society. Of special significance in this work is the notion of the societal community—particularly of the American variety—that Parsons contends contributes to internal integration though citizenship and the normatively defined obligations that citizenship engenders. In short, Part II demonstrates the importance that Parsons gave to modern civil society in general as well as to the exceptional status that he attributed to American society in particular.

 A new edition of Kaplan’s landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan’s classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and the political economy of deregulatory reform. The study focuses on the radical legal changes “freeing” the grain trade in the 1760s, and the ensuing subsistence crisis that violently buffeted the realm and profoundly impacted French life. In the course of the analysis, Kaplan offers crucial insight into the liberal movement, the reform impulse within the government, the character of parliamentary politics, the operation of local administration, the collective attitudes and behaviour of consumers, the famine plot persuasion, the organization of the grain and flour trades, and the management of royal victualing enterprises.

Anthem Press is proud to reissue this path breaking work together with a significant new historiographic companion volume by the author, “The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy’ Forty Years Later.”

Recovering a lost world of the politics of science in Imperial Germany, Gregory B. Moynahan revisits the work of the philosopher and historian Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and explores his relations with the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen. “Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899–1919” covers the epochal transformations of the natural sciences at the turn of the century, and reveals Cassirer’s view of an emergent mode of understanding based purely on relational structure which, he perceived, could be applied fruitfully to the social sciences and humanities, or human sciences, “Geisteswissenschaften.”

Moynahan relates that the result was a permanently fluid but rule-based definition of the permutation of objects and subjects, as well as knowledge and reality, within different fields of knowledge. Cassirer’s project placed the development of the sciences, “Wissenschaften,” within a wide historical and ethical ambit, and sought to establish a new definition of experience, society and modernity; this project, Cassirer argued, was pivotal to the future of Germany. On this basis, Moynahan posits that Cassirer’s early work furthered the foundation of a distinctly Central European argument for democracy, liberalism and civil rights. [NP] Moynahan defends Cassirer’s critique as formative in the origins of twentieth-century social sciences, philosophy of science and law, and he argues for its direct relevance to a generation of scholars before the Second World War (including Elias, Kelsen and Panofsky), as well as after (such as Blumenberg, Foucault and Luhmann). The only text in English to focus on the first half of the polymath Cassirer’s career, this work illuminates one of the most important – and in English, least-studied – reform movements in Imperial Germany.

“Network Persistence and the Axis of Hierarchy” reimagines the very nature of social life starting from quite ordinary, even banal considerations, culminating in conclusions that challenge central, universally held tenets. The main argument shows how networks, modestly redefined as a strong, yet imperfect tendency for pairings to recur day after day, that is, stickiness, imply a singular axis of stratification. This is contrary to the nearly universal insistence that stratification is multidimensional. Reanalysis of three central mobility data sets strongly sustains the novel claim. Network concepts provide a supple base for analysis whereby order and regularity are firmly enforced in network neighborhoods by repetitive, often collective, action and mutual regulation but are not necessarily uniform or universal across locales. This provides new takes, often quite radical, on accounts of structure and order by authors such as Bourdieu, Collins and Parsons. The new formulation local rules but not necessarily global rules allows for a plural reality where varied theoretical ideals are possible and could occur but are not inevitable or universal. This tames the otherwise inevitable cacophony of competing foundational accounts whose claims to universality exclude some to much of what is claimed by rivals. Meanwhile, the potential lability of plural possibilities is sharply constrained by the overarching principal axis of stratification which is the joint condition of social life.

‘Mesoscale Modelling for Meteorological and Air Pollution Applications’ combines the fundamental and practical aspects of mesoscale air pollution and meteorological modelling. Providing an overview of the fundamental concepts of air pollution and meteorological modelling, including parameterization of key atmospheric processes, the book also considers equally important aspects such as model integration, evaluation concepts, performance evaluation, policy relevance and user training. Based on research topics that are the most relevant to the development, with models for high resolution meteorology and air quality simulations, and also based on the experience of a large number of meteorological services and air pollution modelling research and user groups, mainly from Europe and North America, ‘Mesoscale Modelling for Meteorological and Air Pollution Applications’ encapsulates the basic concepts of numerical modelling of air quality, model structures, operational characteristics and applications of air pollution mesoscale models for research as well as operational tasks.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to all three volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, with advice on further reading and points for further discussion. Recognizing the contemporary relevance of ‘Capital’ in the midst of the current financial crisis, Kenneth Smith has produced an essential guide to Marx’s ideas, particularly on the subject of the circulation of money-capital. This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of ‘Capital’ in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’, which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected would develop. While the guide can be read as a book in its own right, it also contains detailed references to Volumes I–III so that students, seminars and discussion groups can easily make connections between Smith’s explanations and the relevant parts of ‘Capital’.

Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema. As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea-change after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital, the largest cultural industry has followed suit. For example, the global Indian community (known in Indian official terms as the Non-Resident Indian or the NRI) has become an integral part of the cultural representation of India.

The politics and ideology of Indian commercial cinema have become extremely complex, offering a fascinating case-study to scholars of Global Culture. Of particular interest is the re-positioning of individual identity vis-à-vis nation, religion, class, and gender. On one hand, the definition of 'nationhood' and/or community has become much more fluid, keeping in tune with the sweeping universal claims of globalization; the films have consequently revised the scope of their narratives to match India’s emerging global business ambitions. On the other hand, the political realities of India's long-standig enmity with Pakistan and the international rise of 'Hindutva' has also contributed to a new strain of jingoism in Indian cinema. ‘Bollywood and Globalization’ is a significant scholarly contribution to the current debate on Indian cinema, nationhood and Global Culture. The articles represent a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches, and the collection will be appreciated by students and scholars alike.

‘The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch’ is a collection of eight essays devoted to many aspects of Troeltsch’s thinking. Each of the contributors is a well-respected scholar who has written extensively on Ernst Troeltsch. This collection is, therefore, groundbreaking in two ways: it brings together scholars of the highest caliber and provides the first compilation of essays on Troeltsch’s thought in English.

In the editor’s Introduction Christopher Adair-Toteff provides a brief overview of Troeltsch’s life and works and then discusses his contributions to theology, sociology, philosophy and cultural criticism. Hans Joas concentrates on one of Troeltsch’s early programmatic texts and demonstrates its relevance for a historical-sociological understanding of religion today. Arie L. Molendijk introduces Troeltsch’s famous typology of “Church, Sect, Mysticism” and demonstrates that they were crucial for addressing the “intrinsic sociological idea of Christianity.” Mark D. Chapman focuses on Troeltsch as a “systematic theologian in the History of Religion School” and offers a detailed analysis of his approach to the structure of Christian dogmatic theology. Christian Polke examines Troeltsch’s notion of personality and reveals it to be the normative core of his philosophical and theological thinking. He shows how this is important for the development of a society which is founded upon value-experience and the ethos of responsibility. Lori Pearson focuses on Troeltsch’s uses of the concepts of “modernity” and “Protestantism” and demonstrates that he offers an understanding of the latter which reduces much of the alienating individuality of the former. Ulrich Schmiedel studies Troeltsch’s attempt to combine theological and sociological accounts of the history of Christianity in order to identify the religion. He argues that instead of providing a conceptual definition of Christianity, Troeltsch offers a performative one. Jeffrey Kinlaw concentrates on Troeltsch’s contention that normative authority is the central problem of religious pluralism and shows how this is an epistemological problem with extensive theological consequences. In the concluding chapter Adair-Toteff examines Troeltsch’s conception of historicism and shows how he tried to combat the relativism and negativity present in the writings of the proponents of this philosophy of history.

The eight essays in this volume reveal the depth and scope of Ernst Troeltsch’s thinking and demonstrate that he was not only a first-rate theologian but also a co-founder with Max Weber of the sociology of religion. They also help establish Troeltsch’s place as a major philosopher and a significant critic of modern culture.

 A new edition of Kaplan’s landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan’s classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and the political economy of deregulatory reform. The study focuses on the radical legal changes “freeing” the grain trade in the 1760s, and the ensuing subsistence crisis that violently buffeted the realm and profoundly impacted French life. In the course of the analysis, Kaplan offers crucial insight into the liberal movement, the reform impulse within the government, the character of parliamentary politics, the operation of local administration, the collective attitudes and behaviour of consumers, the famine plot persuasion, the organization of the grain and flour trades, and the management of royal victualing enterprises.

Anthem Press is proud to reissue this path breaking work together with a significant new historiographic companion volume by the author, “The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy’ Forty Years Later.”

Based on detailed ethnographic material, ‘New Lithuania in Old Hands’ analyzes the impact that European Union membership has had upon the country’s ageing small-scale farmers. Addressing the highly relevant themes of European Union enlargement and the ‘Return to Europe’, this book describes how Lithuania’s EU membership has been a far cry from the scenarios of wealth and overabundance once promised.

On the contrary, membership of the EU has in many instances resulted in a return to subsistence production, increased insecurity and a reinforcement of kinship obligations. Within the agrarian sector, such changes threaten to have a large impact upon the future of family structures, and in turn, the future of the farming demographic as a whole.

While political forces have attempted to create a ‘New Lithuania’ in light of Europe’s geopolitical agenda, it has been the country’s ageing ‘Soviet generation’ that has actually brought into effect the restructuring of the agricultural sector. Thus, instead of treating the European Union as an elite project and voicing the support of various other parts of the population, ‘New Lithuania in Old Hands’ shows how the broader parts of the rural population have been affected by and engaged in the processes of change that followed Lithuania’s accession to the EU.

Recovering a lost world of the politics of science in Imperial Germany, Gregory B. Moynahan revisits the work of the philosopher and historian Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and explores his relations with the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen. “Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899–1919” covers the epochal transformations of the natural sciences at the turn of the century, and reveals Cassirer’s view of an emergent mode of understanding based purely on relational structure which, he perceived, could be applied fruitfully to the social sciences and humanities, or human sciences, “Geisteswissenschaften.”

Moynahan relates that the result was a permanently fluid but rule-based definition of the permutation of objects and subjects, as well as knowledge and reality, within different fields of knowledge. Cassirer’s project placed the development of the sciences, “Wissenschaften,” within a wide historical and ethical ambit, and sought to establish a new definition of experience, society and modernity; this project, Cassirer argued, was pivotal to the future of Germany. On this basis, Moynahan posits that Cassirer’s early work furthered the foundation of a distinctly Central European argument for democracy, liberalism and civil rights. [NP] Moynahan defends Cassirer’s critique as formative in the origins of twentieth-century social sciences, philosophy of science and law, and he argues for its direct relevance to a generation of scholars before the Second World War (including Elias, Kelsen and Panofsky), as well as after (such as Blumenberg, Foucault and Luhmann). The only text in English to focus on the first half of the polymath Cassirer’s career, this work illuminates one of the most important – and in English, least-studied – reform movements in Imperial Germany.

This new edition retains the features of the first edition that made it a popular choice in universities and colleges throughout the US, Canada and around the world. Moss's accessible history includes full treatment of everyday life, the role of women, rural life, law, religion, literature and art. In addition, it provides many other features that have proven successful with both professors and students, including: a well-organized and clearly written text, references to varying historical perspectives, numerous illustrations and maps that supplement and amplify the text, fully updated bibliographies accompanying each chapter as well as a general bibliography of more comprehensive works, a glossary, and chronological and genealogical lists. Moss's 'A History of Russia' will appeal to academics, students and general readers alike.

As recently as 2000, Hannah Arendt was considered an esoteric author within the fields of humanities and social science. Since that time, Arendt has moved from the fringes of intellectual discussion toward its center. A number of developments have driven this reappraisal: the renewed respectability of the concept of totalitarianism; the appearance of post-Nazi/Bolshevik genocidal movements in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East; the reemergence of stateless people; and the revival of interest in civil/classical republicanism as a political alternative to liberalism and socialism. All of these events evoke Arendtian themes. The greater porousness between the humanities and social sciences in recent years, as a result of the impetus toward trans-disciplinary studies, has encouraged academics to move across intellectual borders. Arendt, a wide-ranging thinker with much to say about politics, society, science, history, aesthetics, philosophy and education, is a natural beneficiary of this process.

Extant compendiums of Arendt's work show a strong bias toward philosophy and political theory. In contrast, The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt is written principally by sociologists and authors with a keen interest in sociology and social theory. The result is a genuinely original contribution to Arendt studies. Written with the higher level undergraduate student in mind yet sufficiently challenging to engage readers well versed in her work, the book examines Arendt's most important books as they bear on modern social theories, issues and disputes. Her key conceptual distinctions – totalitarianism and dictatorship; labor, work, action; power and violence; thinking, willing and judging – are clarified. The controversies in which Arendt was caught up – notably over the 'banality of evil' epitomized by Adolf Eichmann – are explained. The result enables students to grasp a fully rounded understanding of Arendt's contribution to social inquiry. Written by a distinguished group of international scholars, the clear descriptions and stimulating interpretations of The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt bring Arendt's work into the forefront of sociological discussion.

Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture focuses on financial management within entrepreneurial firms. Most of these are young firms, although some are more established. The book examines these firms at all phases of their life cycle, from the initial idea generation to the ultimate harvesting of the venture. The book covers firms in a diverse set of industries including high technology, low technology, and services. A significant fraction of the cases focus on non-U.S. ventures. Additionally, the issues of gender and diversity are addressed in a number of settings.

Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture entails understanding both sides of the balance sheet. Consequently, the book looks at issues related to both sides as well. The first section of the book explores how to evaluate entrepreneurial business opportunities, that is, the asset side of the balance sheet. The skills necessary to make good investment decisions include developing a framework of analysis for business opportunities. The process also entails reinforcing and enhancing valuation skills. With these tools, one will be able to qualitatively and quantitatively assess markets and opportunities.

The second section of the book examines how entrepreneurial investments are financed. An emphasis is placed on understanding financial institutions and deal terms. It then examines how entrepreneurial firms which have succeeded need to continually finance the scaling of their operations. What are the financial issues that affect these types of firms? How do the sources and terms of financing change? This transition to the second product or opportunity is often the most difficult time for the entrepreneurial enterprise. The book then concludes with an examination of harvesting. Unless an entrepreneur plans for the future realization on investment, he or she could get left holding the bag with little value having been created.

Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times is about leaders who do not lead by the book: people who score low on emotional intelligence, do not praise their subordinates and rarely provide constructive feedback or celebrate small wins. Yet it is also a book about high-performing transformational leaders – Alexander Dyukov (Gazprom Neft), German Gref (Sberbank), Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab), and Vitaly Saveliev (Aeroflot). Each of them has created a formidable enterprise that is delivering sustainable growth in profits and shareholder value, setting new standards for the industry to leave a positive impact on its employees and on the country and the regions it operates in, and – most remarkably – continuing to reinvent themselves.

Stanislav Shekshnia, Alexey Ulanovsky, and Veronika Zagieva have studied the work of these leaders for a decade and developed a model of leadership that delivers superior results in a specific context, that is, one of fast obsolescence, high turbulence, intense government interference, mediocre levels of human capital development, and traditionally high levels of managerial control. The model is called athletic leadership because of the strong parallels between the protagonists’ attitudes and behaviors and those of top sports people. Athletic leaders share a formative experience of practising competitive sports in their youth, facing early adversity as leaders of important projects and changing companies and industries along the way. They possess two traits that define their leadership personality: mental toughness and adaptability. Athletic CEOs also use specific iterative behavioral and mental strategies at work – “meta-practices” of athletic leadership. They deliver superior operational and financial results (leadership outputs) and transform their followers, companies, industries, and communities (leadership outcomes).

Written for people who are interested in the subject of leadership in business, Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times offers interesting ideas and practical insights for people from other walks of life such as politics, government, and education.

Mills was a protean thinker. In a fast-paced career of some twenty years, he wrote on a stunning range of issues—from the sociology of knowledge and methods of the social sciences to social stratification, the concentration of political and economic power, the media and the formation and translation of culture, the politics of the Cold War, and the prospects for economic progress and democratization in developing countries. [NP] This companion responds to his major themes: the elite coordination of political and economic power; its consequences, initially for the US middle classes and subsequently for the Soviet Union, Eastern European, and Latin America; intellectuality, the media, and the constitution and transmission of culture; and the inferences he believed social scientists should draw from these matters—conclusions that he advocated with remarkable tenacity and in a rhetoric that was often pugnacious. [NP] Comprising interpretive, critical, and exploratory essays on Mills’s chief writings as well as his interventions in the political conflicts of his time, the contributors to this volume consider important aspects and implications of his thought that have been largely neglected in the literature on his writings, including questions on which the literature is virtually silent. This is an effort to follow the path of analysis and reflexive critique that Mills himself pursued: the authors attempt to read Mills as he expected to be understood, attending to his intentions, elucidating his positions, and assessing their promise as well as their limits—holding him to his own standards and assessing the extent to which he met them. In this respect, it is conceived in a Millsian spirit. 

The volume draws on the concept of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text, ‘Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society’, in order to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form with cross-disciplinary implications. The significance of travel, the possibilities it holds for the individual and the impact it has upon our own society and those across the globe are debates that we encounter daily in the popular press and that have come sharply into focus in recent years at times of social, political, economic and humanitarian crises.

In its attention to the ‘keywords of travel’, this volume responds to what might be described as the ‘mobility turn’ in the arts and humanities over the past two decades. Travel writing has become a significant field of academic study across the humanities and social sciences, yet it is only in recent decades that it has been recognised as a serious area of enquiry and that the texts of travel have gained the status of important literary and cultural documents. At the same time, the volume acknowledges the way in which the notion of ‘keywords’ is being revised and considered in the academic community and more widely by other cultural stakeholders including museums and galleries. In terms of the keywords listed, whilst there is a marked absence of terms evoking ideas of travel and mobility in Williams’s original work, there is a notable emergence of travel-related terminology in recent publications that indicates the significance of keywords such as ‘diaspora’, ‘tourism’ and ‘place’.

In its attention to the ‘keywords of travel’, this volume takes into account the established status of studies in travel writing and the field’s significance for an audience beyond the academy. It responds to what might be described as the ‘mobility turn’ in the arts and humanities over the past two decades. Each entry is around 1,000 words, and the style is more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors providing a reflection on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. There is an emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions, ensuring that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the words selected are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.

The essays in Logos and Life, the earliest written in 2001 but mainly dating from 2014 and later, cover topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ethics and philosophy of language. There are discussions of the voluntary and the involuntary; reasons for action; the idea of an ‘inner state’; pleasure; the nature of ethics; justice; necessity and possibility; and a number of other topics. Numerous strands connect these four areas, which Roger Teichmann highlights: in this sense the collection exhibits thematic unity as well as diversity.

Several of the essays take as their starting points the ideas and philosophical methods of Wittgenstein and of Elizabeth Anscombe, and so will be of interest to anyone studying those philosophers. Anscombe was a friend and pupil of Wittgenstein, and Teichmann was fortunate enough to be a friend and pupil of Anscombe. He is now a leading authority on her philosophy.

A newly written Introduction serves to indicate the main themes and arguments of the book, and provide an overall statement of Teichmann’s philosophy. 

‘The Politics of Swidden farming’ offers a new explanation for the changes taking place in slash-and-burn (jhum or swidden) farming in the highlands of eastern India through an ethnographic case study. Today market-led agriculture is transforming land and labour relations. Jhum cultivators are beneficiaries of state schemes, including internationally funded, community-driven development or biodiversity conservation programmes.

The book traces the story of agroecological change and state intervention to colonial times (including post Indian independence) when Nagaland was seen as the frontier of state and civilization. Contemporary agrarian change can be understood by contextualizing farming not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation/biodiversity but also in terms of technologies of rule. For the colonial administrators of the Naga Hills – who saw their role partially in terms of rescue and record ethnography – jhum practices were part of backward Naga customs and traditions. Improving farming practices was bound up with indirect rule as a distinct process of governance involving forms of knowledge and intervention. It was political expediency rather than imperial science that changed local agroecologies and pressurized shifting cultivation. Crucially, neighbouring Naga terrace rice cultivators were promoted as offering a more civilized – yet local – alternative.

‘The Politics of Swidden farming’ demonstrates how contemporary agrarian development reflects this complex colonial heritage, including linkages between the state and village elites. Evangelical missionaries in the post-Independence period also contributed by appropriating local institutions to a Protestant (Baptist) ethic of work. Reinforcing the colonial state’s privileging of rice as the crop of civilization, the missionaries’ moral discourse installed new time disciplines geared to settled agriculture. To this end, the book adds a new dimension to the underdeveloped literature on shifting cultivation in South Asia by focusing on the social ecology of farming and agrarian change in the hills. It provides a comparative viewpoint to state-centred and donor-driven development in the frontier region by bringing in different actors and institutions that become the actants and agents of social change.

Methodologically, the author engages with the many voices that shaped his fieldwork, providing evidence from in-depth household-based participant observation and life histories, and a household survey, while also drawing extensively on original archival research and colonial photography to provide documentation of colonial representations of the swidden landscape. The research was undertaken in a milieu of fear and violence, which raises further methodological and ethical issues.

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are considered in the collection. The volume includes studies of explorers, missionaries, artists and writers, Romantics and socialists, colonialists and indigenes. It covers, therefore, a range of travels, travellers, and travellers' texts, and aims to establish some of the contexts in which travel took place. This volume is as much about departure points as it is about destinations, revealing the prejudices and precepts of the nineteenth-century traveller.

Throughout history, public corruption has been endemic. Exceptionally, it was significantly suppressed in modern times in northwestern Europe. Why did that happen? Why did politicians introduce measures that acted against their own interests? And are the political forces that then induced reform alive in today's world? Neild explores these highly topical questions by looking at the suppression of corruption in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in four countries – France, Germany, Britain and the USA; at the evolution of independent judiciaries; at developments in the twentieth century, including a reminder of how widely corruption was used as a weapon in the Cold War, particularly in the Third World. Finally, and most devastatingly, he analyses the rise and decline in standards of public life in Britain in the twentieth century.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to all three volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, with advice on further reading and points for further discussion. Recognizing the contemporary relevance of ‘Capital’ in the midst of the current financial crisis, Kenneth Smith has produced an essential guide to Marx’s ideas, particularly on the subject of the circulation of money-capital. This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of ‘Capital’ in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’, which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected would develop. While the guide can be read as a book in its own right, it also contains detailed references to Volumes I–III so that students, seminars and discussion groups can easily make connections between Smith’s explanations and the relevant parts of ‘Capital’.

This book is an annotated edition of The Correspondents: An Original Novel (1775), a work, as the introduction argues, derived from A Sentimental Journey, and one of the best of the many later efforts to capture Sterne’s unique blend of sensibility and sensuality. The introduction will make the case for its authorship being an actual exchange of love letters between George Lord Lyttelton (1709–1773) and Apphia Peach Lyttelton (1743–1840), his daughter-in-law, 30 years younger than her father-in-law at the time of the exchange. In our inability to understand precisely what happened between the two is the genius of their imitation of Sterne. It is an ambiguity that results from the conscious reshaping of original letters into a narrative, probably by Apphia Peach in the 2 years between Lyttelton’s death and its publication. The correspondents exchange some 80 letters in all, many with references and quotations to writers in the literary tradition; these allusions will be annotated when at all possible. Particularly important are the allusions to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which was the origin of the design of The Correspondents, and to Shakespeare, Apphia Peach joining Lyttelton’s good friend Elizabeth Montagu in this early indication that the eighteenth-century elevation of Shakespeare was often the direct result of his women readers.

‘Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times’ is about leaders who do not lead by the book: people who score low on emotional intelligence, do not praise their subordinates, and rarely provide constructive feedback or celebrate small wins. Yet it is also a book about high-performing transformational leaders – Alexander Dyukov (Gazprom Neft), German Gref (Sberbank), Eugene Kaspersky (Kaspersky Lab) and Vitaly Saveliev (Aeroflot). Each of them has created a formidable enterprise that is delivering sustainable growth in profits and shareholder value; setting new standards for the industry; leaving a positive impact on its employees and on the country and the regions it operates in; and – most remarkably – continuing to reinvent itself.

Stanislav Shekshnia, Alexey Ulanovsky and Veronika Zagieva have studied the work of these leaders for a decade and developed a model of leadership that delivers superior results in a specific context, that is, one of fast obsolescence, high turbulence, intense government interference, mediocre levels of human capital development and traditionally high levels of managerial control. The model is called Athletic Leadership because of the strong parallels between the protagonists’ attitudes and behaviors and those of top sportspeople. Athletic Leaders share a formative experience of practising competitive sports in their youth, facing early adversity as leaders of important projects, and changing companies and industries along the way. They possess two traits that define their leadership personality: mental toughness and adaptability. Athletic CEOs also use specific iterative behavioral and mental strategies at work – ‘meta-practices’ of Athletic Leadership. They deliver superior operational and financial results (leadership outputs) and transform their followers, companies, industries and communities (leadership outcomes).

Written for people who are interested in the subject of leadership in business, ‘Athletic CEOs: Leadership in Turbulent Times’ offers interesting ideas and practical insights for people from other walks of life such as politics, government and education.

The main purpose of 'Screen Writings' is to stake out territory for a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures, while film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, the author offers close readings of individual films that go beyond simple plot summaries and vague impressions about acting, yet refrain from hermetic theoretical pronouncements. With elegance, clarity, and rigor, the author explains how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant humanistic goals. Thus, in addition to chronicling the vitality and richness of international film art, ‘Screen Writings’ also aims to facilitate its understanding and appreciation.

The reviews and re-viewings contained in ‘Screen Writings’ are acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic sense - they are neither theoretical musings nor pedantic tracts. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists, including directors from a countries across the world. Contemporary films like ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and ‘Lost in Translation’ are treated, as well as classics like ‘Tokyo Story’, ‘Forbidden Games’, and ‘Some Like It Hot’. These review-essays are supplemented by a previously unpublished interview with LuchinoVisconti and a investigation of the new screen violence, as well as by a bibliography of related criticism, directors' filmographies, individual film credits, and a thorough index.

“Paradoxes of Populism” argues that populism, far-from-random similarities with ordinary manifestations of nationalism, should be approached not as a venture into the classical structures of nation-states and identities, but as a disruptive and destabilizing consequence of some of the constituent elements of sovereign nation-states becoming eroded and prised apart by contextual global processes and their agents. The book demonstrates that populism, in its many varieties, is riddled with even more paradoxes and inconsistencies than mainstream nationalism itself––confusing causes and appearances, realities and fantasies and turning the world inside out. This book definitively engages with real-world challenges that the age of populism, the Second Coming of Nationalism, poses in liberal democracies states as well as their political and cultural interpretations in the populist fantasia.

The book argues that contrary to its self-image, populism does not represent a return to a peaceful, well-ordered and secure place of identity, progress and belonging, but, first, the introduction of irreconcilable division into the domestic arena; second, the breakdown of trust and civilized communication between governors and governed elites and people; and third, the exposure of the increasing powerlessness of the international order.

“Paradoxes of Populism” is a book about the fantasies, promises and contradictions of populism, as also about its backgrounds and causes in liberal democracies. While demonstrating its many varieties, the book explains populism’s rising popularity and steers the reader through the many myths and misconceptions surrounding it.

On Becoming Reasonable explores the contributions that 18th Century Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and David Hume make to our understanding of important factors in the development of children as they gradually acquire central features of reasonableness. Smith and Reid explicitly discuss the importance of sentiment and reason in the development of children. Their views are favorably influenced by the writings of their English predecessor Joseph Butler. Hume, too, valued much of Butler’s thinking. But, unlike Smith and Reid, he said little about Butler’s specific reflections on sentiment and reason. Despite this, one of the aims of this little book is to show that each contributes to our understanding today of what the encouragement of the philosophical thinking of children can play in helping them to come to an appreciation of reasonableness. Although his earlier book, Reasonable Children (University Press of Kansas, 1996), made some use of Thomas Reid’s writings on practical ethics, He had yet to become acquainted with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), whose several editions were composed at the same time he was writing his more celebrated Wealth of Nations. Reading TMS has led him in this book to compare and contrast Smith’s views with those of his good friend David Hume and Hume’s notable critic, Reid. These further reflections have resulted in a revisiting of several major concerns of Reasonable Children.
His special focus is on their views about the moral development of children. He regards each of the three, in their differing but sometimes complementary ways, as welcoming the sorts of refinements of reason and sentiments that play a fundamental role in the moral development of children. He concludes that each can be regarded as supporting the general view that the moral development of children can fairly be characterized in terms of the degree to which they are becoming reasonable persons. This, he argues, fits in well with the more recent work of philosophers such as Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Gareth Matthews who began urging in the late 20th Century that the philosophical thinking of children should be encouraged.

This book addresses a neglected aspect of the history of Britain’s centuries-long involvement with transatlantic slavery. For a half century after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, individual Britons and British enterprises continued to own enslaved people and invest in slavery in Brazil. This study explores the material basis of this entanglement, in the context of British anti-slavery policy, to explain how the last vestiges of British slaveholding in the Americas were only extinguished by abolition in Brazil in 1888.

Based on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, this book provides the most complete survey of British slaveholding interests in Brazil. From extensive plantations and vast mining operations to the warehouses and workshops of individual merchants and artisans, slaveholding was a feature at all levels of the British community in Brazil. This book also looks beyond slaveholding in its direct form, to expose the entanglement of British merchant credit and banks with the illegal slave trade and slavery. As well as tracing the extent and diverse forms of entanglement, this book also provides analysis of the treatment of those enslaved by British masters and the strategies employed by British slaveholders to obfuscate, sanitise, and justify these practices to compatriots in anti-slavery Britain.
The book also examines how the proliferation of British slaveholding and other forms of entanglement squared with the explicitly anti-slavery foreign policy rhetoric of successive British governments during this period. This discussion pivots around a largely overlooked and little understood anti-slave trade law of 1843. An analysis of the parliamentary debates around this bill and crucially, attempts to implement its provisions in Brazil, shed light not only on practical difficulties of enforcing British law overseas, but an ambivalence both codified in legislation and embodied by British officials that ultimately facilitated the types of entanglement discussed throughout this study. Lastly, the book reflects on the varied legacies of this entanglement on both sides of the Atlantic.

The contemporary social science in general and economics in particular are dominated by the method of logical positivism in the British tradition. In contrast to the British philosophy, ‘Subjectivism and Interpretative Methodology in Theory and Practice’ adopts subjectivism and interpretation methodology to understand human behavior and social action.

Unlike positivism, this subjectivist approach, with its root in German idealism, takes human experience as the sole foundation of factual knowledge. All objective facts have to be interpreted and evaluated by human minds. In this approach, experience, knowledge, expectation, plans, errors and revision of plans are key elements.

Specifically, this volume uses the subjectivist approach originated in Max Weber’s interpretation method, Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge to understand economic and social phenomena. The method brings human agency back into the forefront of analysis, adding new insights not only in economics and management, but also in sociology, politics, psychology and organizational behavior.

Byron’s designation of the dream as ‘the mystical usurper of the mind’ captures two aspects of its perennial fascination. Dreams are mysterious and they take possession of our minds as if they had an irresistible power of their own. The usurpation of the mind by dreams has contributed to the belief that they accurately and supernaturally predict the future, reveal things unknown in the present or warn the dreamer to do or not to do something. This kind of dream goes by many names – admonitory, divinatory, precognitive, veridical, and prophetic – and even today most people believe in it. ‘Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800’ presents the history of conceptions of dreaming in Europe from Homer to the turn of the nineteenth century, the long period in which the admonitory dream was the centre of learned and popular interest.

By the end of the eighteenth century many researchers were interested in the dream as a psychological event rather than as a portent of the future. More of them were ceasing to ask what dreams are and how they work and asking instead which dreams reveal the future, how and their interpretation. In broader terms, western European thinking about dreams up to 1800 was primarily concerned with what they might mean or reveal. Although revelation of the future was the most common kind of significance, dreams were also thought to reveal the health of the dreamer, their wishes, character and daily pursuits. Hence the overwhelming concern with classifying dreams as significant (requiring attention) or insignificant (safe to ignore). Since the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an important shift in the study of dreams, the period from Homer to the turn of the nineteenth century should be taken as a whole – the period of the admonitory dream. During this period the admonitory dream was accepted, questioned or rejected. But it was rarely ignored or simply mentioned as a historical curiosity, as increasingly happened in nineteenth-century scholarly and scientific discourse.

‘Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800’ traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period in which the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest – from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance – and the period in which it begins to become a secondary focus – the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with the old questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, De Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.

Authored by one of the leading scholars of German Indology, “Fortified Cities in Ancient India” offers a comparative exploration of the development of towns and cities in ancient India. Based on in-depth textual and archeological research, Professor Dieter Schlingloff’s work presents for the first time the striking outcomes of intertwining data garnered from a wide range of sources. This volume scrutinizes much of the established knowledge on urban fortifications in South Asia, advancing new conceptions based on an authoritative, far-reaching study.

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu’s oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis.

The first set of essays traces the roots of Bourdieu’s thought in classical sociology by closely examining his intellectual connections with the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. The second set of essays is concerned with Bourdieu’s relation to modern social philosophy, in particular with regard to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Norbert Elias, Theodor W. Adorno, and Axel Honneth. The third set of essays explores the relevance of Bourdieu’s writings to key issues in the contemporary social sciences, such as the continuous presence of religion, the transformative power of social movements, the emancipatory potential of language, the political legacy of 1968, the socio-historical significance of the rise of the public sphere, and the social consequences of the recent and ongoing global economic crisis. The volume also contains a major interview with Bourdieu that has not been previously translated into, let alone published in, English.

By bringing together contributions from international scholars, the volume aims to initiate a fruitful dialogue across different sociological traditions and thereby stimulate further debate on the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in social and political thought.

‘H. G. Wells and All Things Russian' is a fertile terrain for research and discussion and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works (Yuly Kagarlitsky, a Soviet biographer of Wells, called him ‘a one-man think tank’). During the Soviet years, in fact, no ‘big’ foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands.

Wells’s views on the Soviet Union were often more complex than Soviet critics gave him credit for, but their whitewashing only served to secure his position as a sympathetic man of letters from the capitalist world. On the other hand, those who discerned his nuanced position towards totalitarian regimes, including the dystopian writer Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of an early Soviet study of Wells, found him to be a soulmate and an influence of a different kind, which worked to increase the English author’s popularity among those segments of the Russian reading public for whom his relationships with Lenin and Gorky meant very little.

'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of  'classic' - as well as the changing perception of so-called classic movies over time. Implicitly theoretical as much as it is unashamedly practical, this book is a model not only of text analysis, but also of the enlightened deployment of cultural studies in the service of film study.  The book includes re-considerations of such classic films as ‘I vitelloni’, ‘Grand Illusion’, ‘Winter Light’, and ‘Tokyo Story’; it features genre examinations of the war film (‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’), farce (‘Some Like It Hot’), the road film (‘The Rain People’), the New York-centered movie (‘Manhattan’), and avant-garde pictures that privilege  narrative (‘3-Iron’ and ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Classic Mind’); and 'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' concludes with a searching investigation of the rise of the New American Cinema during a tumultuous decade of social change - from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.

Typically we think of power as economic, political, or military, but fictional narratives attached to kings, empires, religious founders, and societies have been used to create and enhance power and authority since the beginning of civilization. Invented History, Fabricated Power presents evidence from cultures ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, to demonstrate that narrative extends well beyond literary works (plays, poems, epics, novels) where it is usually studied by literary specialists. At the same time, there is much to be learned about the power of narrative from literary analyses which are herein undertaken for a number of lesser known works: Ramayana, Mahabharata, Shahnameh, Sejarah Melayu, Negarakertagama and Kebra Nagast. As an imaginative endowment of humans, however, “narrative knowing” is a cognitive universal—the primary way we organize, remember, and communicate our experience and knowledge. It is, thus, a faculty susceptible to narratives that construct and enhance power for persons, kings, empires, societies, religions, and cultures. 

The result of the book is a survey of narrative power in familiar Western cultures (Greek, Roman, Frankish, British), less familiar Asian cultures (Chinese, Indian, Japanese), and a number of lesser known cultures typically bypassed by historians (Persian, Ethiopian, Iroquois, Malaysian, Aztec). It also seems important to take a hard look at the Roman Church where a series of forgeries established papal power that persisted long after the forgeries were exposed. It also seems important to recognize that the Marxist economic analysis included an unlikely futuristic scenario that was corrupted by revolution and eventually failed. The astonishing Nazi ideology promulgated by Adolf Hitler was founded on fictional analyses of both “Aryans” and Jews but nevertheless inspired “willing executioners” to carry through the “final solution” of the Holocaust. 

Eventually we consider our own consuming ideology, most notably the idealistic narrative of liberal democracy now available to only a fraction of the world population. We have come to recognize it is propped up by a desire for control, comfort, and consumption—a way of life that now endangers human survival as environmental degradation, resource depletion, earth-system overshoot, and global warming are undercutting its narrative assumptions.

Soon after the UK referendum in June 2016, sociologists and other social scientists began to evaluate the implications of the decision both for the UK and, more importantly, for the European Union, Europe and the world. Some of these consequences were immediately evident. The vote revealed cleavages across the UK on a regional and class basis, paralleled, for example, in the support in France for the extreme-right Front National versus the Socialist Party. In the UK, there has been a revival of a kind of class politics, in which working-class voters swing right rather than left. The regional divisions are hard to explain: the most deprived areas of the UK, which have benefited substantially from EU development aid, were often those most hostile to UK membership of the EU.

In the rest of Europe, the vote has opened up as a serious prospect what was previously only a pipe-dream of the political fringes: withdrawal from the EU itself. Although one can put this in the context of the Union’s failure to attract the support of enough voters in Norway and Switzerland for membership, the shock effect is incomparably greater. The UK was always a semi-detached member state, with opt-outs from Schengen and the euro, but it still carried substantial weight in the formation of EU policy. Although one of the immediate responses has been a rise in support for the EU across much of Europe, Brexit has massively strengthened the forces of (mostly right-wing) populist insurgent politics, adding withdrawal to the more local themes of migration and ‘islamization’ which play out in different variations across Europe.

Brexit aims to trace the implications of the UK’s projected withdrawal from the EU, locating short-term political fluctuations in a broader historical and social context of the transformation of European and global society. It provides a forum for leading Eurosociologists (broadly defined), working inside and outside the UK, to rethink their analyses of the European project and its prospects, as well as to reflect on the likely implications for the UK.

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu’s oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis.

The first set of essays traces the roots of Bourdieu’s thought in classical sociology by closely examining his intellectual connections with the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. The second set of essays is concerned with Bourdieu’s relation to modern social philosophy, in particular with regard to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Norbert Elias, Theodor W. Adorno, and Axel Honneth. The third set of essays explores the relevance of Bourdieu’s writings to key issues in the contemporary social sciences, such as the continuous presence of religion, the transformative power of social movements, the emancipatory potential of language, the political legacy of 1968, the socio-historical significance of the rise of the public sphere, and the social consequences of the recent and ongoing global economic crisis. The volume also contains a major interview with Bourdieu that has not been previously translated into, let alone published in, English.

By bringing together contributions from international scholars, the volume aims to initiate a fruitful dialogue across different sociological traditions and thereby stimulate further debate on the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in social and political thought.

‘Music Scenes and Migrations’ brings together new work from Brazilian and European scholars around the themes of musical place and transnationalism across the Atlantic triangle connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe. Moving beyond now-contested models for conceptualizing international musical relations and hierarchies of powers and influence, such as global/local or centre/periphery, the volume draws attention instead to the role of the city, in particular, in producing, signifying and mediating music-making in the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world. In considering the roles played by cities as hubs of cultural intersection, socialization, exchange and transformation; as sites of political intervention and contestation; and as homes to large concentrations of consumers, technologies and media, Rio de Janeiro necessarily figures prominently, given its historical importance as an international port at the centre of the Lusophone Atlantic world. The volume also gives attention to other urban centres, within Brazil and abroad, towards which musicians and musical traditions have migrated and converged – such as São Paulo, Lisbon and Madrid – where they have reinvented themselves; where notions of Brazilian and Lusophone identity have been reconfigured; and where independent, peripheral and underground scenes have contested the hegemony of the musical ‘mainstream’.

The contributions to the volume are grouped according to three key thematic areas. ‘Colonial and Post-Colonial Transnationalisms, Migrations and Diasporas’ focuses on the musical movements and fluxes that have traversed the Atlantic world since the colonial period, including the diasporic extensions of African music-making; the role of early forms of mechanical music-recording in mediating between Portuguese and Brazilian popular songs in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro; the story of música caipira in articulating the ‘rooting’ and ‘uprooting’ migratory experience of the São Paulo peasantry in the twentieth century; and the contemporary phenomenon of Brazilian musicians living in the cities of Lisbon and Madrid, where they negotiate the needs and expectations of their expatriate communities, tourists and local audiences.

‘Relocating Rio de Janeiro’ considers how, in its identification with key musical traditions such as samba, pagode and choro, the city has been a contested space – geographically, symbolically and politically – whether in the memories and mythologies of key neighbourhoods and locations of music-making as expressed in the musical discourses themselves, through music’s involvement in the material forms of community life and popular culture, including religion, carnival and other festivals, or through the competing claims of official state institutions and policies, the recording industry and grassroots communitarian initiatives.

The essays in ‘Demetropolitanizing the Musical City: Other Scenes, Industries, Technologies’ explore how contemporary developments in the independent, underground and peripheral music scenes in Brazil and Portugal have challenged traditional narratives and hierarchies that dichotomized the field in terms of national tradition v. internationalism, mainstream v. margins, pop v. popular. Genres such as sertaneja universitária, funk, heavy metal, Brazilian jazz and instrumental music, post-Vanguarda Paulista MPB and rap are considered in the light of profound shifts in the economy and technology of the music industry, including fluctuations in the recording sector, the internationalization of audiences, and the rise of YouTube, among other video-based digital platforms, as a predominant medium for the consumption of music.

Authored by one of the leading scholars of German Indology, “Fortified Cities in Ancient India” offers a comparative exploration of the development of towns and cities in ancient India. Based on in-depth textual and archeological research, Professor Dieter Schlingloff’s work presents for the first time the striking outcomes of intertwining data garnered from a wide range of sources. This volume scrutinizes much of the established knowledge on urban fortifications in South Asia, advancing new conceptions based on an authoritative, far-reaching study.

‘Remembering Popular Music’s Past’ capitalises on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimised and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage in order to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this transformation. The collection is particularly interested in the ways in which popular music’s past becomes enacted in the present.

The chapters discuss a diverse array of topics but are unified by inquiry into the construction, curation, display, negotiation and perception of popular music’s past. The collection presents a critical perspective on academics’ involvement in ‘historian’s’ work of ‘reconstruction’ of the past through archival and analytical research. The cultural studies framework adopted in the collection encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly ‘Remembering Popular Music’s Past’ deals with issues of precarity in popular music heritage, history and memory. The collection is a timely addition to a subfield of popular music studies and critical heritage studies that has grown exponentially in the past ten years.

‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ explains the sociology of life chances, the opportunities and experiences of different generations in Australia, the United States and the UK, and how the differential distribution of life-enhancing opportunities affects our well-being. It is now four decades since the publication of Ralf Dahrendorf’s ‘Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory’ (1979), a surprisingly neglected work that has much to offer by way of explaining some of the social and political challenges of the present era. Dahrendorf’s life-chances theory is an expanded and innovative analysis of Max Weber’s original notion of ‘Lebenschancen’ and is used to support the theoretical and empirical arguments in Lyle Munro’s book. Dahrendorf defines life chances as a function of options (provisions and entitlements) and ligatures (networks that provide a sense of solidarity and belonging). For Dahrendorf, education is arguably the most important option individuals can utilise for improving their well-being and for overcoming social and economic disadvantages. While there are countless sociological accounts of inequality, Munro’s study takes a different and novel approach based on Dahrendorf’s model according to which education and social movements and their networks function to enhance the life chances of individuals and social groups respectively.

Munro emphasises the necessity of formal education and its transformative power in the lives of individuals; he stresses the importance of an individual’s life chances of achieving satisfactory levels of literacy, numeracy and oracy during a decade or more of formal schooling. While this might seem self-evident, the evidence in Australia indicates there is a disturbingly large number of students who leave school without these basic skills, the consequences of which are often dire.

At a broader level, ‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ stresses the importance of education movements in improving the lives of disadvantaged social groups. This is a topic that rarely features in the social movement literature, as a content search of the leading journals in the field reveals. Education movements, including the controversial widening participation movement and the lifelong learning movement and its several subsidiaries, such as VET and adult education, are advocated as alternatives to university, which for many students has proven to be either out of reach, beyond their means or a costly mistake. Munro is critical of the widening participation movement whenever it privileges university learning at the expense of technical and vocational education.

The last part of the book focuses on five social movements that seek to sustain the lives of human and nonhuman animals. The first movement to be analysed is the social justice movement that campaigns against racism, sexism and classism, the much-studied trinity in the discipline of sociology. Followers of Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation’ regard speciesism as the missing relative in race, gender and class relations and nonhuman animals as arguably the most vulnerable members of society. For an increasing number of movement theorists, speciesism – the prejudice and practice that posits the interests of members of one’s own species against the interests of members of other species – is seen as animal abuse, a social problem on a par with elder abuse, child abuse and the like.

The second movement against risks to our collective life chances seeks to protect human and nonhuman animals from some of the most dangerous developments confronting the planet such as climate change, environmental degradation, terrorism and nuclear war. Two of the most challenging risks to both people and animals – pandemics and climate change – and the link between them are discussed in some detail, since the link between human and nonhuman animals tends to be ignored by most commentators on ‘the risk society’.

Finally, student, worker and citizen movements are engaged in a quest to improve the lives of their constituents and more broadly as part of a proposed mass mobilisation against the corporate elites who are responsible for most of the social, economic and environmental problems we face in the current era. The book is predominantly about Australia, with comparative examples and case studies from the UK, Europe and the United States.

In 1955 ‘Jedda’ was released in Australian cinemas and the international film world, starring Indigenous actors Rosalie Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the Liberty Cinema in Yass. Twelve years later he was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country Bowning stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza. The local Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Bell’s father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people.

The central paradox of 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community, made wealthy by the occupation of Ngunnawal land, for a film that addressed directly the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism, a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local council and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples, and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile members of this pastoral community actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes.

Based on oral histories, documentary evidence, images and film, 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' explores the themes of colonial nostalgia, national memory and family history. Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), a shared artefact of mid-twentieth-century settler-colonialism, is its fulcrum. The book newly locates the story of the genesis of ‘Jedda’ and, in turn, ‘Jedda’ becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells.

Soon after the UK referendum in June 2016, sociologists and other social scientists began to evaluate the implications of the decision both for the UK and, more importantly, for the European Union, Europe and the world. Some of these consequences were immediately evident. The vote revealed cleavages across the UK on a regional and class basis, paralleled, for example, in the support in France for the extreme-right Front National versus the Socialist Party. In the UK, there has been a revival of a kind of class politics, in which working-class voters swing right rather than left. The regional divisions are hard to explain: the most deprived areas of the UK, which have benefited substantially from EU development aid, were often those most hostile to UK membership of the EU.

In the rest of Europe, the vote has opened up as a serious prospect what was previously only a pipe-dream of the political fringes: withdrawal from the EU itself. Although one can put this in the context of the Union’s failure to attract the support of enough voters in Norway and Switzerland for membership, the shock effect is incomparably greater. The UK was always a semi-detached member state, with opt-outs from Schengen and the euro, but it still carried substantial weight in the formation of EU policy. Although one of the immediate responses has been a rise in support for the EU across much of Europe, Brexit has massively strengthened the forces of (mostly right-wing) populist insurgent politics, adding withdrawal to the more local themes of migration and ‘islamization’ which play out in different variations across Europe.

Brexit aims to trace the implications of the UK’s projected withdrawal from the EU, locating short-term political fluctuations in a broader historical and social context of the transformation of European and global society. It provides a forum for leading Eurosociologists (broadly defined), working inside and outside the UK, to rethink their analyses of the European project and its prospects, as well as to reflect on the likely implications for the UK.

The great historical and economic transformations of the late twentieth-century city are vividly reflected in John Schlesinger’s oeuvre. In films of the early sixties ‘A Kind of Loving’ and ‘Billy Liar’, the city was imagined as industrial and residential, with the characters confronting life on the local and familial level. In ‘Darling’, ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, films made from 1965 to 1971, the city had become cosmopolitan, ruled over by international finance and riven by class tensions. And in two films of the eighties ‘The Falcon and the Snowman’ and ‘Madame Sousatzka’, Schlesinger was emphatic in showing the desperation with which youthful characters struggled to come of age, not in a local urban environment, but in a national and global one. The specific economic and political forces driving these urban changes have been extensively treated in the growing body of scholarship on the ‘cinematic city’. While these forces form an important backdrop to ‘The Films of John Schlesinger’ , the aim of the book overall is to demonstrate the centrality of Schlesinger's aesthetic imagination, but not as something divorced from political, moral and historical life.

The distinguished British cinematographer Billy Williams once described Schlesinger as the ‘most complete’ director he ever worked with. Schlesinger combined a directorial ‘eye’ (mastery of camera movement, framing, editing, production design, etc.) with a profound literary sense (understanding of character and situation). He began his career with the award-winning documentary ‘Terminus’ (1961) and went on to make a total of seventeen feature films and five films for television. Several of his films had a genuinely innovative impact: Andy Warhol said that ‘Midnight Cowboy’ ‘took a real drawing card from the underground’ in the way it dealt with ‘forbidden subjects’. Pauline Kael described ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ as ‘a novel written on film’ and, in being so, an entirely new achievement, ‘instantly recognizable as a classic’. Other Schlesinger films are also of lasting interest: ‘Billy Liar’, reissued by Criterion in 2001, is a comic gem. ‘The Day of the Locust’ is taught in film schools today. Yet there is a dearth of intelligent conversation about these rich works. Contemporary reviews by leading film critics are insightful, as are selected articles and the sole full-length study of Schlesinger, which appeared years before his career ended. A full-scale ‘interpretation’ of what Schlesinger’s oeuvre teaches us about modern life has yet to appear.

Schlesinger’s films have been undervalued for reasons that have little to do with their achievement: he fell out of favour in Hollywood, offended critics with his satire of American society and made a few relatively uninspired films just to keep working. The time is ripe for a revaluation of his oeuvre. ‘The Films of John Schlesinger’ engages the innovative content and form of the major films, and makes critical judgements identifying their strengths and weaknesses. It explores their major theme, which is the importance of survival, and of trying to make the best of what one has, particularly as this theme is played out in modern, urban society. It takes up different theories of film – that of Benjamin, Hansen and others – but it is not a theoretical analysis intended solely for academics.