Anthem Press

In this highly readable book, Doyle McCarthy covers some of the main ways that emotions have become important in our global societies. She explains that emotional culture is important for understanding today’s world, its markets, its politics and its mass media. To live today is to be emotionally intelligent in our relations and in our workplaces. In the modern age, global capitalism and mass media have shaped our emotions and made us more emotional. Public life has become a place where we search out emotional happenings: at shopping malls, concerts, sports events, memorials to death and disaster and in the pursuit of sports.

With the Asian economic upsurge in the recent decades, diasporas have emerged as significant agencies of the cultural diplomacy of respective nation states. Two of the most significant diasporic communities, the Indians and the Chinese, have long histories of migration to different corners of the world with considerable visibilities in different geo-political demographies. They have created many different local sites of interaction between themselves and with the host communities, particularly in Southeast Asia. The emerging concepts of ‘knowledge economy’, ‘global capitalism’, new trends of entrepreneurship, and a gradual shift of the economic power to the East has brought about a revision of relationships between homeland, diasporas and the different host nation-states.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays offers a window onto the overseas Indian and Chinese communities in Asia. Contributors discuss the interactive role of the cultural and religious ‘other’, the diasporic absorption of local beliefs and customs, and the practical business networks and operational mechanisms unique to these communities.

Growing out of an international workshop organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, this volume explores material, cultural and imaginative features of the immigrant communities and brings together these two important communities within a comparative framework, and offers an example for further cross-disciplinary comparative study of this type.

A very challenging subject like IB chemistry requires tremendous effort to understand fully and attain a high grade. ‘IB Chemistry Revision Guide’, written by one of the most experienced and respected chemistry teachers in the UK, simplifies the content and provides clear explanations for the material. 

Each chapter is separated into two-page spreads covering all the essential details in easy-to-follow sections. High level and Standard level material are clearly marked. Complicated calculations have worked out examples to help the student. Also included are ‘curveball’ examples of the sort of challenging questions IB examiners love.

Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment shows how early twentieth-century economic and social upheaval prompted new ways of conceptualizing the purposes and powers of language. Scholars have long held that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century reflect how the period’s material crises—from world wars to the spread of industrial capitalism—call into question the capacity of language to picture the world accurately. This book argues that this standard scholarly narrative tells only a partial story. Even as signal modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment. They show how language might matter less as a medium for representing reality than as a tool for recognizing others. 

The book develops this claim by engaging with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Writing in 1945, in the preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein laments, “It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely.” Worrying that “the darkness” of this historical moment renders his words unintelligible, Wittgenstein echoes the linguistic skepticism that scholars have found in literary modernism. But the Investigations ultimately pushes back against such skeptical doubts by offering a vision of language as a set of shared human practices. Even when it comes to a word like “pain,” which seemingly gestures toward something absolutely private and individual, Wittgenstein indicates that we learn what “pain” means by familiarizing ourselves with the contexts in which people use the term. In his pioneering reading of the Investigations as a “modernist” work, Stanley Cavell argues that Wittgenstein’s distinctive response to the problem of skepticism consists in the view that “other minds [are] not to be known, but acknowledged.”

The book argues that this concept of acknowledgment, as articulated implicitly by Wittgenstein and explicitly by Cavell, enables a broader reconceptualization of modernist fiction’s stance toward the referential capacities of language, and it bears out this claim by reading a series of modernist novels through the lens of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. From the residence halls of Cambridge to the farmsteads of rural Mississippians, the early decades of the twentieth century sowed serious doubts about the ability of individuals to find shared criteria for the meanings of words: the greater convenience of travel led to increased cross-cultural misunderstandings; technological developments facilitated new modes of race-, class-, and gender-based oppression, and two world wars irrevocably shattered an earlier generation’s optimism about the inevitability of political and moral progress. In this light, Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction contends that modernist representations of consciousness strive to capture the inner lives of socially marginalized figures, seeking to facilitate new forms of intimacy and community amongst those who have survived crushing losses and been subject to deeply isolating social forces. 

The book explores the Gothic tradition in Swedish literature – including Swedish-language literature by Finland-Swedish writers. It aims to give an overview of the development of Swedish Gothic from the Romantic age until today, and to highlight the characteristic features of the Swedish tradition of Gothic in relation to transnational developments, in particular in relation to the Anglo-American tradition. By using a contextualising comparative perspective, it highlights the most prevalent and prominent feature of Swedish Gothic, the significance of the Nordic landscape, the wilderness and local folklore. In Swedish fiction, the Gothic castle is replaced by the wilderness, and the monster is representative of untamed nature and a barbaric past. The terror is not pointing to the medieval period but is located in pre-Christian, pagan times. Especially in today’s Gothic narratives, the presence of mythical creatures and nature beings, such as trolls, tomtes, or vittras, enhances the Gothic atmosphere. Another domestic trend since the mid-nineteenth century, which has become increasingly popular in the last decade, is Gothic crime stories, where the formula of a modern detective story is combined with a Gothic mystery plot. In these stories, supernatural creatures and the interference of paranormal powers constantly obstruct the modern crime investigation. Another predominant feature of Swedish Gothic that will be expanded on is its use of gendered and female monsters. In these kinds of narratives, Swedish writers and filmmakers manipulated the established Gothic conventions of female Gothic in order to make societal anxieties and gender issues visible.

Drawing on a theoretical framework of gender theory and intersectionality, mainly theories on gender, race and eco-criticism, in combination with a transnational perspective used in today’s comparative literature, the book explores the characteristics of Swedish Gothic. It analyses and contextualises a selection of individual narratives to explore in what way representative Swedish writers modify, transform and domesticize the established Gothic conventions. One chapter is devoted to the significance of the Nordic wilderness and the use of local folklore. Next chapter explores the dominance of gendered female monsters and in what way female and male writers adapt the Gothic elements and aesthetics to a Swedish context. The last chapter on Gothic crime expands on the use of Gothic modes and aesthetics to explore the working of the human mind in relation to crime, repressed collective memories, and cultural taboos. 

How did the court audience of 1606 respond to Shakespeare’s most disturbing tragedy? This engaging book provides in-depth discussion of the various influences a contemporary audience would have brought to interpreting ‘King Lear’. How did people think about the world, about God, about sin, about kings, about civilized conduct? Historical, literary, political and sociological backgrounds are explained within the biblical-moral matrices by which the play would have been judged. This book links real life in the 1600s to Lear’s world on the stage. Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, parenting and family dynamics, court corruption, class tensions, the literary profile of the time, the concept of tragedy – and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play an unsettling picture of a disintegrating world in free fall.

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.

There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?

As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.

How would a Jacobean audience have assessed the story of these two classical celebrities? Are Antony and Cleopatra simply tragic lovers, or is the play a condemnation of poor male government derailed by passion for an unreliable, self-interested woman? This book provides detailed discussion of the various influences that a Jacobean audience would have brought to interpreting the play. How did people think about the world, God, sin, kings, civilized conduct? Historical, literary, political and sociological backgrounds are explained within the biblical-moral matrices by which the play would have been judged. This book links real life in the 1600s to the Roman world on the stage. Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, court corruption, class tensions, the literary profile of the time, the concept of tragedy – and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play an unsettling picture of a disintegrating world lost through passion and machination.

Vladimir Voinovich’s Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts is a wildly satiric send-up of the 1960s/1970s Soviet show-trials by one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, who was also sometimes called 20th Century Russia’s ‘greatest living satirist.’ Based upon his reaction to the Sinyavski/Daniel trial in 1966, which caused him to begin to write scathingly critical letters to Premier Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Writer’s Union and finally resulted in his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, Voinovich’s Tribunal is a monument to the Soviet dissidents of the Cold War period and a sardonic critique of the censorship and persecution of dissident writers everywhere. Following in the classical tradition of the theatre of the absurd that stretches from Aristophanes to Sartre, Frisch, and Havel, Voinovich’s comedy describes the black humoresque high jinks and wildly outrageous shenanigans that dizzily unfold when an unsuspecting couple of Soviet citizens, Senya and Larissa Suspectnikoff, clutching their free tickets in their innocent hands, walk into a crowded theatre, expecting to watch a Chekhovian comedy, only to become caught up in the sinister machinations of this Soviet criminal tribunal and its madcap version of the Moscow show trials. 

When The Suspectnikoffs arrive at the theater, they are surprised to find that the stage-sets for this curious theatrical production strangely resemble the precincts of a Soviet criminal justice tribunal, complete with tables and benches for The Prosecutor and The Public Defender and a wild beast-cage for The Defendant. There is also a Greek statue of The Goddess of Justice, Themis, who holds in her outstretched hand the wavering scales of Soviet justice, with on one pan, a hammer-&-sickle, and on the other, a Kalashnikoff. After a few uneasy moments while the stagehands put the props in place, The Bard strolls on stage and strums a few tunes on his guitar, in the futile attempt to set the audience at ease. But from outside the theater come the frightening sounds of screaming police-sirens and the flashing red-and-blue lights of an automobile cortege rushing past at great speeds; and when the hysterical rush of the speeding automobiles has passed, The Tribunal Members (The Chairman, The Secretary, and The Prosecutor, et al.) appear from the wings, strutting onstage in a burlesque chorus-line to the accompaniment of thunderous canned applause. And after this chorus-line of Communist Party bureaucrats has taken their places in the theater, the spectators are chilled to watch as black-clad security-police with submachine-guns appear at the theater-doors, blocking all the exits; and they discover, to their dismay, that they have become the captive audience in a mock-up version of a Stalinist show-trial. And so the third wall falls on this courtly theater, blurring the distinction between fiction and fact, falsehood and truth, nightmare and reality, as Voinovich describes the plight of Soviet citizens held hostage in the strange atmosphere of delirium and unreality that was characteristic of the declining and falling Soviet Union during stagnant chill of the 1970s Brezhnev years.

After a few more uneasy moments, Larissa stands up and whispers: “Senya, I don’t understand what’s going on here! Why are there so many people with guns?” To which Senya replies: “Oh, calm down, Lara! Why are you so nervous? It’s just a show!” The Suspectnikoffs do not realize that by questioning this sinister tribunal, they are destined to become the defendants in a Soviet show-trial. But the show-trial must go on! And as The Chairman says, “Where there’s a show-trial, you know, we need somebody to try!” Senya protests his innocence and attempts to get away. But protestations of innocence have no bearing on these proceedings. And by the end of Act I Scene 1, Senya has been arrested and placed in the defendant’s cage, while his faithful wife, Larissa, still stands behind her man, pleading for his release without quite believing in either his guilt or his innocence. And so Vladimir Voinovich’s Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts also goes on, wavering dizzily between the extremes of sardonic comic bathos and seriocomic tragedy, until Suspectnikoff finally becomes a world-famous dissident, calling upon the world’s leaders of to rise to his defense and inspiring protest movements in the Western democracies. But is Suspectnikoff to be admired for his heroic posturing? Or has he simply submitted to the pressures of the Western media to play the stereotyped role of The Soviet Dissident, who then becomes a pawn in the sinister spy-games of the Cold War superpower standoff between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R? The staggering climax of this absurdist melodrama leaves these difficult questions suspended in doubt as Suspectnikoff is dragged offstage and the stage-curtain falls on the whole cast of characters and the no-longer-innocent spectators of Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts.

This book provides a critical examination of paid parental leave policies in Australia and compares them with those of similar member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While all OECD member countries, except the United States, guarantee some form of paid parental leave to mothers, the duration, benefits, job protection, and eligibility vary greatly. The substantial disparity in parental leave policies between Australia and other OECD countries raises questions about the effect of Australian policies on gender inequality in the workforce, women's workforce participation, and child and parental health.

The book presents two key recommendations for Australia's paid parental leave policies. The first recommendation is to extend the current paid parental leave to a total of 52 weeks for optimal child and maternal health, in line with the World Health Organization's recommendation. The second recommendation is to introduce an individual 15-week 'maternity leave' provision exclusive to mothers, bringing the overall duration of leave available to mothers to 52 weeks, which is approximately 70% of the provisions offered by the featured OECD countries. These reforms may be introduced in stages.

The book discusses the parental leave schemes of Germany, Canada and Sweden as points of reference for Australia because of their similar funding of paid parental leave through general taxation and their clear and succinct legislation regarding paid parental leave rights. The recommendations, if enacted, will foster Australian mothers' rights through a reconstructive feminist lens by celebrating women's differences with men and removing any disadvantage women may have in meeting masculinized social norms.

While the Australian government's 2021 announcement of an additional $1.7 billion investment in childcare will help mothers to return to work, it does little with regard to the government's parental leave scheme that places the onus for the care of the newborn or newly adopted child entirely on the mother, while failing to also provide paid parental leave for fathers. Moreover, while increased funding for childcare may help mothers return to work after the 18-week paid parental leave is over, such policy does not address the importance of raising the child at home with a parent for at least the first year of the child's life. The support of parents is instrumental in countries with an aging population and Australia is one such country. Overall, this book calls for urgent attention to be paid to parental leave policies in Australia to address issues of gender inequality, workforce participation, and child and parental health.

More and more, just a few canonical classics, such as Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca” (1942) or Victor Fleming’s “Gone With The Wind” (1939), are representing the entire output of an era to a new generation that knows little of the past, and is encouraged by popular media to live only in the eternal present. What will happen to the rest of the films that enchanted, informed and transported audiences in the 1930s, 1940s, and even as recently as the 1960s?

For the most part, these films will be forgotten, and their makers with them. Wheeler Winston Dixon argues that even obvious historical markers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) represent shockingly unknown territory for the majority of today’s younger viewers; and yet once exposed to these films, they are enthralled by them. In the 1980s and 1990s, the more adventurous video stores served a vital function as annals of classic cinema. Today, those stores are gone and the days of this kind of browsing are over.

This collection of essays aims to highlight some of the lesser-known films of the past – the titles that are being pushed aside and forgotten in today’s oversaturation of the present. The work is divided into four sections, rehabilitating the films and filmmakers who have created some of the most memorable phantom visions of the past century, but who, for whatever reason, have not successfully made the jump into the contemporary consciousness.

Unlike many partisan accounts of the nineteen sixties this book aims to give a considered explanation of the context in which the sixties radical movements arose and, also, their significance from the standpoint of various nations' actors, often ignored by North American and West European standpoints. Secondly, it examines how the radical decade sowed the seeds of various liberation or 'rights movements' – initially in the West but also globally as movements became increasingly diffused. Contributors' varied international backgrounds and specialities provide expertise in examining the international context. Thirdly, many nineteen sixties' radicals' values and strategies recur in contemporary social movements; albeit in different technological and, post 9/11, political and cultural environments. Unravelling similarities and differences is a key theme. Fourthly, many participants in sixties radicalism saw it as 'cultural' as well as 'political' and in some historical treatments as primarily or 'only' cultural. Detailed examinations of this perspective involve critical discussion – particularly in the light of the allegedly 'mere' (i.e. apolitical) cultural hedonism and escapism of youth in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Contrarily, the contributions here assess resonances between the radical/libertarian emphasis on civil society 'freedoms' in sixties' cultural radicalism and, arguably, today’s more self-consciously political global human rights movement. The conclusion suggests that, in some senses, the sixties live on today in discursive and political themes.

Written in reverse, the chapters go backwards. The book starts from present (approximately Chapter 50, 2020, back 30 years, to Chapter 20, 1990). The story coincides with an imbedded “road itinerary.” Years are rarely mentioned in the text; and, in most cases, only initials are used for all characters. People, places and things are all real in relation to the timeline. The work involves the interpolation of common conversations—from sources such as texting and emails—to shed light on the fallibility of human relations. To a large degree, and within reason, the length of conversations are meant to be overbearing, countered by other aspects of the writing. Ron Westray’s father and grandfather’s stories are imbedded in the work. His mother’s free-verse-poetry is the muse/soul that binds the work together like a second, invisible narrator.

Through contextual analysis and by reassessing the chronicle evidence, ‘King John: An Underrated King’ presents a compelling reevaluation of the reign of King John, England’s most maligned sovereign. With its thought-provoking analysis of the key issues of John’s reign, such as the loss of the French territories, British achievement, Magna Carta, relations with the church, and civil war, the volume presents an engaging argument for rehabilitating King John’s reputation. Each chapter features both narrative and contextual analysis, and is prefaced by a timeline outlining the key events of the period. The volume also contains an array of maps and diagrams, as well as a collection of useful study questions.

‘Holland House and Portugal’, a study in political and diplomatic history, focuses on the relations between Lord Holland and Portugal from 1793 to 1840. The book traces the evolution of Holland’s views on Portugal from the time of his first visit to Spain to his later contribution to the establishment of a constitutional regime in Portugal. It pays particular attention to the Hollands’ visits to Portugal in 1804–5 and 1808–9. On their travels, they met a number of prominent Portuguese, notably Palmela, who were to remain in contact with Holland House for many years. The Portuguese journeys and the continuing contact with people like Palmela were to play an important part in the development of Lord Holland’s views, not only on Portugal but also on broader political and constitutional issues.

Thus ‘Holland House and Portugal’ investigates Lord Holland’s influence on the establishment of a constitutional regime in Spain in 1809–10 and – indirectly and unintentionally – in Portugal in 1820–23. It includes a study of Holland’s contribution to the creation of a government in Brazil in 1808 – when the Braganças moved from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro – and his indirect influence on the establishment of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in 1815.

Lord Holland’s contribution to the establishment of a Liberal regime in Portugal in 1834 is examined at some length in ‘Holland House and Portugal’. The book includes a study of the extent of Holland’s support for the Portuguese Liberal Cause after Dom Miguel’s usurpation of the throne in 1828 and of his subsequent role in the ‘Liberal invasion’ of Portugal. To this end it investigates relations between Portuguese émigrés and the Holland House Circle, and Holland’s role in the triangular diplomacy between Lisbon, St James and South Audley Street in 1828 and later. Finally, it considers Holland’s contribution to the end of the Portuguese Civil War in 1834 and to the subsequent establishment of a constitutional regime in that country.

Subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services are available on many online video streaming platforms (VSPs) in China, such as iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video, backed by Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent groups (BAT), respectively. The video content on these platforms matches those broadcasted on national or provincial television, or originally produced and exclusively streamed on the VSP. Meanwhile, VSPs purchase the distribution rights of foreign films and television series to enrich the content pool—for instance, the first season of the U.S. sitcom Friends (1994) is now available on Tencent Video. The content on VSPs can be viewed on a computer screen, iPad, or cell phone or be streamed on the television screen, facilitated by 4G or 5G networks. Audiences now have the option of watching video alone on their preferred screen while interacting with other viewers through bullet screen comments. So television has grown to be an increasingly flexible and dynamic mode of communication.

In this context, this book aims to provide an account of Chinese television, particularly online drama series, or webisodes, with an awareness of the existence and competition of Netflix. Currently, Chinese VSPs of webisodes cannot defeat Netflix in terms of production value, nor can they be like Netflix, as is the case for its Belgian alternative. The chapter analyzes the strategies that these VSPs deployed for survival and development. However, the media convergence of broadcasting, telecommunications, and the internet is far more complicated than technology convergence. It involves negotiations of power relations, commercial interests, and national cultural security concerns. 

Traditional models of TV drama distribution are being transgressed. China Central Television (CCTV) and provincial stations no longer dominate the market. TV drama release schedules have changed from “TV station first, internet later” strategies to synchronous schedules, or even “internet first, TV station later” strategies. Audiences 18 to 30 years old represent 67.2% of the audience of TV dramas online. The relationship between state administration and VSP marketization is by no means straightforward or easy to grasp. It is a consensus among Chinese television scholars that there is a paradox between implementing a neoliberal strategy of marketization and maintaining control over ideology and national cultural security. TV drama production and consumption are at the center of this paradoxical relationship. This book, therefore, covers topics on business strategies of VSPs, original content production trends, trans-media stories telling cases, practitioner insights, and audience behavior. 

Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s' departs from the dominant scholarship in South Asian history that focuses narrowly on railways, and instead argues that any discussion of railway-generated changes needs to see such changes, at least up to the 1880s, as situated amidst existing patterns and networks of circulation within which roads and ferries were crucial. The volume also offers a detailed exploration of early colonial policies on road building and ferry improvement – an area that has hitherto remained unexplored.

Just as the new development of steam technology required and necessitated ‘lateral growth’ alongside the older technologies, so too were trade linkages marked by the interconnectedness of local and supra-local ties in which the world of peddlers intersected with that of native merchants and capitalist sahibs. This volume contends that the history of colonial communication is not a story of ‘displacement’ alone – either of one means by another or of one group by another – but also of realignment. Combining the understanding of production of knowledge about routes with the ways the practice of surveying and mapping led to territorial construction of the national space of India, this book reinterprets the ‘colonial state–space’ as constituting a series of layered components, both of ‘inherited spaces and networks’ from pre-colonial times and of the processes of objectification that colonial rule initiated.

The aim of this volume is to contribute to the ‘history of social spaces’, a new field of study in which neither cultural nor economic discourse is overridden by the other. This is achieved via a micro-historical study of local circulatory regimes, together with an exploration of colonial and imperial cultural discourses on communications.

In this highly readable book, Doyle McCarthy covers some of the main ways that emotions have become important in our global societies. She explains that emotional culture is important for understanding today’s world, its markets, its politics and its mass media. To live today is to be emotionally intelligent in our relations and in our workplaces. In the modern age, global capitalism and mass media have shaped our emotions and made us more emotional. Public life has become a place where we search out emotional happenings: at shopping malls, concerts, sports events, memorials to death and disaster and in the pursuit of sports.

Ruskin Bond's life - and, for that matter, his semi-autobiographical works - are allegories of the colonial aftermath. His is an odd but exemplary attempt at absorption as a member of the Anglo-Indian ethnic minority, a community whose role in the shaping of the postcolonial Indian psyche has yet to be systematically analysed. This study explores the dialogue between the biographical and authorial selves of Ruskin Bond, whose subjectivity is informed by the fantasies of space and time.

Bond's experiences of socio-political discrimination underwrite his repressed concerns. He seeks to allay his anxieties through an attempt to signify defiance of the functional agencies of those parameters, which ironically become more active as he attempts a symptomatic mastery of their inductive agencies. Nevertheless, for a nostalgic writer the unconscious - which is shaped by the impressions of the experiences of negotiation between double inheritances - exerts a problematic yet discerning influence on Bond's literary self. This study offers a chronological reading of Bond's texts, seeking to bring out the constant presence of this repressed anxiety and the psychological compulsion to dramatize the Self-Other dynamics as a symptomatic method to acquire a conviction of the self.

The book, anchored in stimulating debates on enlightenment ideas of the public that culminated and ended in the early 20th century, focuses on historical changes in the core phenomena of publicness: possibilities, conditions and obstacles to developing a public sphere in which publics create, articulate and express public opinion by means of reflexive publicity within an established democratic public culture. Specifically, it is focused on three central topics:

• a general historical transformation from “opining” – essentially some people’s view of what “the public” thought – through the identification of “public opinion” in opinion polls, up to the contemporary establishment of “what people think/want” using computer-based analysis of the big data available from digital records, in which the enlightenment idea of public expression of opinion has been replaced by the technology of extracting opinions; 
• the origins and consequences, and the similarities and differences of the rise and fall of two related concepts – public opinion and the public sphere – in historically particular periods, which have in common that they both lie in the boundary area between normative-theoretical and empirical orientation and suffer from unreliable definition and operationalization, which can only be resolved by a closer connection between the two concepts and areas.
• a specific historical intervention created by the domestication of the German concept Öffenntlichkeit in English as “the public sphere,” heralding a new critical impetus in theory and research of publicness at a time when critical social thought sharply criticised and even abandoned the notion of public opinion due to its predominantly administrative use.

The book seeks to transcend the division into normative-critical theoretical conceptualisation and “constructive” empirical application in the social sciences to show how critical theory can be empirically applicable and empirical research normatively constructive, and to demonstrate the need for greater connectivity between them. 

Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ‘Mapping the Nation’ offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870–1920. Centering upon the “mapping” of India – both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal – this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England.

The anthology’s selection defines India in various ways: as being against Britain in loyalty and/or critique; in “exile” in or through memories of England; through a reconstructed past; through satirical or earnest depictions of her contemporary politics; through depictions of the subcontinent’s landscape and scenery; through her various regions and their inhabitants, customs, cultures and religions; or through odes to British and Indian literary figures and politicians. This rich bounty of content is complemented by an equally detailed array of auxiliary notes, including annotations and appendices of poets’ prefaces, assessments of other contemporaries, and a collection of formerly lost archive material.

As becomes evident, the diversity of India’s imagining by her poets during this period corresponds to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography. In grouping its poetry according to region of publication, this anthology makes a structural innovation that negotiates the politics of locality, nation and empire by acknowledging the importance of all three terms in constructing an Indian national and cultural identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The changes triggered by the global financial crisis in 2008, the immigration flows and the covid-19 pandemic in contemporary societies have transformed the way individuals communicate, create content, and ‘consume’ publicly available information. Consequently, political, societal, and financial pressures have led to alternative forms of media practice and representations and disrupted the core relationships and dynamics between politics, journalism, and society.

In this context, several challenges emerge which are related to deeper social and cultural changes. Such challenges influence political communication and its relationship with the media and further impact the boundaries between private and public domains. Some of these challenges also constitute a direct challenge to democratic values and in some cases work against the preservation and strengthening of democracy. Moreover, all these developments are taking place at a time when democracy itself and its ‘chronic diseases’ are under criticism by new forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

This edited book examines the key challenges in political discourse and journalistic practice in times of crisis. It focuses on European paradigms and links political rhetoric and media challenges with the societal, political, and financial crises from 2008 until the present.

‘Ricardo’s Gauntlet’ advances a critique of the mainstream economic case for international free trade. While the core of the case for free trade is David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, the book argues that this case relies on a cluster of interconnected and mutually enforcing ‘economic fictions’ – economic theories or doctrines that pretend to be fact but which upon examination turn out to be mirages. Exposing the layers of fiction nested in the subfields of mainstream economics empties comparative advantage of its persuasiveness, bringing down the case for free trade.

'Colonial Childhoods' is about the politics of childhood in India between the 1860s and the 1930s. It examines not only the redefinition of the 'child' in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, but also the uses of the child, the parent and the family in colonizing and nationalizing projects. It investigates also the complications of transporting metropolitan discourses of childhood, adulthood and expertise across the lines of race. Focused on reformatories and laws for juvenile delinquents, and boarding schools for aristocratic children, it illuminates a vital area of conflict and accommodation in a colonial society.

'Sciences' were named and formed with great speed in the nineteenth century. Yet what constitutes a 'true' science? The Victorian era facilitated the rise of practices such as phrenology and physiognomy, so-called sciences that lost their status and fell out of use rather swiftly. This collection of essays seeks to examine the marginalised sciences of the nineteenth century in an attempt to define the shifting centres of scientific thinking, specifically asking: how do some sciences emerge to occupy central ground and how do others become consigned to the margins? The essays in this collection explore the influence of nineteenth-century culture on the rise of these sciences, investigating the emergence of marginal sciences such as scriptural geology and spiritualism. 'Repositioning Victorian Sciences' is a valuable addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century science in its original context, and will also be of great interest to those studying the era as a whole.

‘Anthem Critical Thinking and Writing Skills: An Introductory Guide’ helps readers in the process of critical thinking and persuasive speaking and writing. The text discusses informal thinking, the formal processes of induction, deduction, and syllogistic reasoning, in a clear format that makes it easy for the 'beginning logician' to process. Students learn how to form a proposition, identify issues, gather evidence, and process an argument.

To get started, logic games, puzzles, and real life examples ask students to consider how we evaluate, analyze, and decide. What happens if Janie says, 'Mom, can I go to the party? All of my friends are going!' And Mom responds, 'What if all of your friends jumped off the empire State building?' Is 'all of my friends are going' a good reason? Does mom have a point? Language and logic will help students evaluate these everyday decisions. Then a more formal look at induction and deduction challenges students to practice higher-level thinking skills, such as using analogies for evaluation, and working through syllogisms to process ideas. After a review of the Greek Fallacies, readers can have some literary logic fun by analyzing old standards like 'Love is a Fallacy' and the persuasive love poem 'The Passionate Shepherd'.

The Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata, completed between 1933 and 1966, represents a landmark in the textual history of an epic with a nearly 1500-year history. Not only is the epic massive (70,000 verses in the constituted text, with approximately another 24,000 in the Vulgate) verses, but in its various recensions, versions, retellings, and translations it also presents a unique view of the history of texts, narratives, ideas, and their relation to a culture. Yet in spite of the fact that this text has been widely adopted as the standard Mahābhārata text by scholars, there is as yet no work that clarifies the details of the process by which this text was established. Scholars seeking clarification on the manuscripts used or the principles followed in arriving at the Critical Text must either rely on informal scattered hints found throughout academic literature or read the volumes themselves and attempt to follow what the editor did and why he did so at each stage.

This book is the first work that presents a comprehensive review of the Critical Edition, with overviews of the stemmata (textual trees) drawn up, how the logic of the stemmata determined editorial choices, and an in-depth analysis of strengths and drawbacks of the Critical Edition. Not only is this work an invaluable asset to any scholar working on the Mahābhārata today using the Critical Edition, but the publication of an English translation of the Critical Edition by Chicago University Press also makes this book an urgent desideratum.

Furthermore, this volume provides an overview of both historical and contemporary views on the Critical Edition and clarifies strengths and weaknesses in the arguments for and against the text. This book simultaneously surveys the history of Western interpretive approaches to the Indian epic and evaluates them in terms of their cogency and tenability using the tools of textual criticism. It thus subjects many prejudices of nineteenth-century scholarship (e.g., the thesis of a heroic Indo-European epic culture) to a penetrating critique. Intended as a companion volume to our book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (Oxford University Press), this book is set to become the definitive guide to Mahābhārata textual criticism. As both a guide into the arcane details of textual criticism and a standard reference work on the Mahābhārata manuscript tradition, this book addresses a vital need in scholarship today.

This fascinating book, based on extensive archival research in Britain and India, examines why mutineer-rebels chose to attack prisons and release prisoners, discusses the impact of the destruction of the jails on British penal policy in mainland India, considers the relationship between India and its penal settlements in Southeast Asia, re-examines Britain’s decision to settle the Andaman Islands as a penal colony in 1858, and re-evaluates the experiences of mutineer-rebel convicts there. As such this book makes an important contribution to histories of the mutiny-rebellion, British colonial South Asia, British expansion in the Indian Ocean and incarceration and transportation. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the mutiny-rebellion, this book will be of interest to academics and students researching the history of colonial India, the history of empire and expansion and the history of imprisonment and incarceration.

What happens when the dramatic art of Molière is unleashed onto the stage and explodes into new life? ‘Molière on Stage’ takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière’s plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years of experience directing and translating Molière, this original, in-depth study allows the reader to see how the playwright’s lines have been brought to new life on stage throughout the centuries.

The text explores how Molière strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter that fulfilled the universal need for union, and focuses on four key topics: the elements of Molière’s early life that are evidenced in his later theater works; his great central plays that focus on love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the theater; and the final words and performances of his vivid and exceptional life. Inspired by the actions of the great French masters, the text pays homage to the interpretations of Molière offered by the playwright himself, Louis Jouvet, Jacques Copeau and Jean-Louis Barrault, as well as those staged by American actors and directors such as Ron Leibman, Stephen Epp, Steven Wadsworth, Robert Falls and the author.

Womanizer – Delinquent – Glutton – Deserter; Visionary – Linguist – Explorer – Hermit. The lexical fields do not match, yet both sets of descriptors apply to one man: Blessed Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), one of nineteenth-century France’s most complex and challenging figures. Upon graduation from the prestigious École de Saumur, Foucauld went to North Africa with his cavalry regiment. In a sense, he never went home: the desert had called to him, converted him even, and the once-renegade scion devoted the rest of his life to studying the land and culture of North Africa and preserving its language and traditions. The two halves of his life part almost mathematically: a dissolute, disconsolate orphan whose wealthy family, peers, and superiors did not know what to do with him; and then an intuitive, dedicated scholar and priest who revolutionized European knowledge of Morocco’s geography and culture, and defied the mission civilisatrice by refusing to evangelize the Berber population among whom he lived. Foucauld’s biography typically divides into these two sections, with his youth glossed almost as a fleeting adventure and clear priority assigned to his later years as a hermit and spiritual director.

This book seeks to turn that model on its head. Rosemary Peters-Hill provides an in-depth examination of the year Foucauld spent exploring Morocco in 1883–1884, after he had resigned his army commission and taught himself Arabic and Hebrew. This book is more than merely a translation: it is a meticulously researched and documented critical edition that addresses the history of nineteenth-century French colonial endeavors and Moroccan resistance to them; cultural traditions and spaces within the closed country where Foucauld sojourned; the intersections of language, politics, and economics with religion; the praxis of Arabic and Berber interactions and the ways in which official cartographies neglect local knowledge of tribal and seasonal rituals; and the failures of Empire when it comes to defining or delimiting national identity. Peters-Hill, as a literary scholar, also brings to bear a careful examination of Foucauld as author: the ways he pitched his account toward government bodies likely to pay attention to them, his use of literary tropes within his memoir, his narrative agency. And the way these things change: through Foucauld’s encounter, and increasing identification, with Morocco as not just a backdrop for imperial expansion but a subject and a plurality of voices in its own right. As Foucauld’s narrative advances, so too do its Arabic inflections, its lyricism about landscape and cultural practices, its investment in documenting and preserving Morocco’s own specific history. Another, much later, Foucault (Michel) would write that space itself has a history: he might well have been inspired by Charles de Foucauld’s conversion and dedication to the specific selves and possibilities discovered during his immersion in Moroccan space.

Peters-Hill has written a study of Charles de Foucauld’s youthful undertaking in unknown territory that seeks to represent as honestly as possible both the evolution of Foucauld’s mindset regarding French engagement in Morocco and the consequences of his work in that country. While delving into how the author is changed by Morocco, she nonetheless holds Foucauld accountable for his nationalist and religious biases, the details he discounts or ignores, the unavoidable oversights in such a brief cultural encounter, the things he got wrong. She situates Foucauld’s year in Morocco as the exegesis of his ultimate desert calling, the transformation of a black sheep into a sacrificial lamb, a man the Catholic Church venerates as a martyr. This critical edition draws from several discrete fields, which nonetheless intersect in Foucauld – travel writing, botany, hydrology, and topography; cartography, ethnography and sociology; linguistics and amazighité, alongside formal literary criticism and French (post-) colonial studies – to present a fuller view of a writer whose legacy remains an inspiration, a frustration, and an enigma.

Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age is the first metrical and rhymed translation of nearly all the lyrics by Evgeny Boratynsky (1800–1844), one of the greatest poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Also included is the translation of two narrative poems (Banqueting and Eda) and the most characteristic passages from The Gypsy and The Ball. Each work is followed by a full annotation, in which, in addition to the background necessary for the understanding of the work, one finds an analysis of its form. In many cases, the poems on similar themes by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Yazykov and some later poets are included. In its entirety, the commentary provides a glimpse into Boratynsky’s literary epoch, his ties with his environment (Russian, French and German) and the influence he exercised on later poets. A special feature of Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age is the translator’s strict adherence to the form of the original. In all cases, Anatoly Liberman attempts to reproduce not only the rhyming and the metrical scheme of the poems but also the sound effects and some of the special features of Boratynsky’s vocabulary, while remaining as close to the poet’s wording as possible. A long introduction provides the expected biographical information and acquaints the reader with the poetic climate of the Golden Age and with the history of translating Boratynsky into English.

May Alcott Nierike, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the writings on art and travel by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Like other American women in the later nineteenth century, May was unable to receive the advanced training and exhibition opportunities in the USA that she needed to become a notable professional painter due to her gender. An additional obstacle for Alcott Nieriker was her family’s insecure financial status, making it difficult to travel or study abroad for training. Fortunately, following Louisa’s early publishing success, May was able to make three trips to London and Paris to immerse herself more fully in the art world, and eventually attained the prestigious honor of having two paintings accepted into the Paris Salon. However, the book argues that Alcott Nieriker’s main contributions to cultural history were not necessarily her artistic creations, but rather her publications on travel and art—specifically, four articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and an 1879 guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How To Do It Cheaply. 

The book examines the art and travel writings of May Alcott Nieriker from three distinct but interrelated perspectives: (1) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings both relate to and yet stand apart from standard travel writing of the later nineteenth century; (2) how Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings smartly interweave art criticism and social as well as cultural advocacy, including her concerns about the lack of access to free museums in the USA; and (3) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings critique the social and cultural norms of the day in respect to equal opportunity for women artists, and in turn seek to empower women of modest means to navigate these obstacles and pursue careers as professional artists. In addition, the book provides more insight in general to the fields of nineteenth-century American art and art criticism, travel writing, gender studies, and American cultural studies. In sum, May Alcott Nieriker’s writings, a number of which are republished here for the first time since the 1870s, deserve further attention and interpretation because her texts give voice to critical social and cultural concerns of the nineteenth century, such as gender and class discrimination, that still resonate today.

The sound of a trumpet across a Japanese mountain valley leads a young man to befriend a mysterious stranger. During repeated visits to the cave where the stranger has set up home, the young man learns about his past – in the mines, villages and ports of the region. The stranger’s hilarious, bawdy and touching narratives captivate the young man, but he begins to doubt their veracity. Finally, as the young man decides his own fate, the full truth about the stranger is revealed.

‘Tales from a Mountain Cave’ is a translation of Hisashi Inoue’s highly popular ‘Shinshaku Tono Monogatari’ (新釈遠野物語), set in the Kamaishi area of Iwate Prefecture, Northeast Japan. Kamaishi was devastated by the tsunami of March 2011, and royalties on sales of this book will be donated to post-tsunami community support projects.

Eight American military veterans of the Vietnam/Cold War era describe their service and its influence on their lives since leaving active service in this book. Their stories are preceded by a concise history of America's methods of raising its military forces from colonial days to today. Particular focus is given to the 34 years in which the nation relied on the possibility of mandatory service (the draft, Selective Service) from young men. Drafted service was essential to America's role in World War I, World War II, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Special emphasis is given to Congressional acceptance of drafted service in World War I which shaped the remaining uses of the draft until 1973.

The largest part of the book provides the author's recollections of their service in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in the United States and overseas. Their service was compelled or stimulated by the presence of the draft. Their military service then shaped the next half-century of their working lives.

The final section of the book provides the author’s collective recollections of their military service as seen from the third decade of the 21st century and half a century after the end of the military draft. They reflect on the challenges faced by the current American military and the possibilities of a return to some form of drafted military service.

Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann’s case, this involved a practical and professional commitment, first, to the trade union movement and, second, to the Social Democratic Party that gave it political articulation. For Neumann, to be a labor lawyer in the sense developed by his mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, was to engage in a project to displace the law of property as the basic frame of human relations. The defeat of Weimar and the years of exile called many things into question for Neumann, but not the conjunction between a practical democratic project to establish social rights and an effort to find a rational strategy to explain the failures, and to orient a new course of conduct.

"Learning from Franz Neumann" pays special attention to Neumann’s efforts to break down the conventional divide between political theory and the empirical discipline of political science. Neumann was a remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, but he was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking.

Beckett’s dialogue with the arts (music, painting, digital media) has found a growing critical attention, from seminal comprehensive studies (Oppenheim 2000; Harvey, 1967, to name just two) to more recent contributions (Gontarski, ed., 2014; Lloyd, 2018). Research has progressively moved from a general inquiry on Beckett beyond the strictly literary to issues related to intermediality and embodiment (Maude, 2009; Tajiri, 2007), post humanism and technology (Boulter, 2019; Kirushina, Adar, Nixon eds, 2021), intersections with popular culture (Pattie and Stewart, eds., 2019). However, a specific analysis on Beckett’s relationship with Italian arts and poetry on one side–and on Italian artists’ response to Beckett’s oeuvre on the other–is still missing. The volume offers an original examination of Beckett’s presence on the contemporary Italian cultural scene, a stage where he became (and still is) the fulcrum of some of the most significant experimentations across different genres and media. The reader will look at him as an “Italian” artist, in constant dialogue with the most significant modern European cultural turns.

Specific objectives of the book include the discussion of the historical evolution of CBUM/Hip-Hop, and the development (and retention) of an informed perspective regarding legendary figures, bands, and genres in CBUM. The examination of the historical, social, and economic implications of CBUM that lead to the globalization of Hip-Hop, an understanding of how CBUM is perceived and measured in society, and the student’s ability to describe a range of effects fostered by the evolution of CBUM, all factor highly in this book.

Edited and with an introduction by Professor Habib, 'Confronting Colonialism' is a series of essays commemorating the second centenary of Tipu's final battle against the British at Sriranagapatnam in 1799. The essays, devoted to the history of Mysore under Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, underscore the need to defend the memory of two rulers, who were indomitable opponents of the colonial regime; they also emphasize the centrality of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan in Indian nationalist historiography. This collection is of particular importance, especially in light of the recent tendency to devalue the significance of the two rulers.

This fascinating book, based on extensive archival research in Britain and India, examines why mutineer-rebels chose to attack prisons and release prisoners, discusses the impact of the destruction of the jails on British penal policy in mainland India, considers the relationship between India and its penal settlements in Southeast Asia, re-examines Britain’s decision to settle the Andaman Islands as a penal colony in 1858, and re-evaluates the experiences of mutineer-rebel convicts there. As such this book makes an important contribution to histories of the mutiny-rebellion, British colonial South Asia, British expansion in the Indian Ocean and incarceration and transportation. Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the mutiny-rebellion, this book will be of interest to academics and students researching the history of colonial India, the history of empire and expansion and the history of imprisonment and incarceration.

This book brings together, for the first time, a collection of articles from leading scholars on the writing, and literary and social contexts, of the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist W. H. Davies (1871–1940). Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and poems such as ‘Leisure’, which came 14th in the BBC’s search to find ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’, no other volume of essays, or other critical monograph, concentrates on his work. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context (as a Welsh writer, the ‘tramp-poet’, a prominent Georgian poet, and a disabled writer), but also sheds light on the many more central literary figures he encountered and befriended, among them Edward Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Sitwell, Alice Meynell, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad. The aim of the book is to reconsider the major works of the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist W.H. Davies, and his place in the literary and cultural milieu of his period. Davies spent several years in North America as a young man, traversing the continent and living mainly as a tramp, and losing a leg in the process, as he attempted to jump aboard a freight train in Ontario. These experiences are at the heart of his famous memoir, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), which was edited by Edward Thomas and introduced by George Bernard Shaw. Davies also established a reputation as a poet and was included in all five of the immensely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies between 1912 and 1922. He continued to write, in particular about his life, and later books include many volumes of poetry and memoirs such as: A Poet’s Pilgrimage (1918), which details a walking tour across southern Britain and the people he encountered; Later Days (1924), about the literary and artistic communities he had recently belonged to; and Young Emma (written in the late 1920s but not published until 1980), a thinly anonymised memoir about how he met his wife, almost thirty years his junior. They are unique products of a unique life.

This is the first book of essays to be published on this fascinating author, who has largely been neglected by literary critics, despite his centrality to British memoir, travel writing, and poetry in the early twentieth century. It puts Davies in his literary and cultural context, provides reassessments of the work, and considers his influence as a writer and personality. It will be useful to readers coming new to the author and wanting a critical overview, while at the same time putting forward many new research findings and much new thinking.

Unlike almost any other kind of land use – from dumps to houses to factories – state and sometimes even the federal government actively preempt local decision-making regarding the siting of energy extraction and production. The Consensus Building Institute looked at conflicts over land and found in the last ten years that rapid advances in technology in both renewables (primarily wind and solar) and gas and oil extraction have created a host of new and intensive land-use conflicts across the United States. Wind turbines, for instance, seemingly clean, lean and ‘sustainable’, have stirred intense conflicts among abutters, developers, and communities. A resurgence in US gas and oil production via hydraulic fracturing technology, resulting in lower costs, more domestic production and less dependence on unstable supplies of foreign oil, has created statewide bans, protest films and national debate about ‘fracking’.

‘Resolving Land and Energy Conflicts’ seeks to develop a view of energy in the landscape across gas and oil, wind, transmission and nuclear waste disposal. The first three create conflict because of rapid or the need for rapid development or expansion. Each of these energy types or facilities are generally considered a public good and expansion promises future benefit, but they have concentrated impacts that can cause localized adverse effects and controversy. The last, nuclear waste, creates conflict because it is a public ‘bad’ and a legacy of choices made decades ago for benefit that, in some ways, has already been delivered (affordable electricity through nuclear power coupled with a reliable base load generating source).

The authors are particularly interested in the conflicts that emerge from specific sites and proposals, as well as how this unique land use plays out in terms of conflict and resolution across scales and jurisdictions while touching on broader issues of policy and values. Though each energy type and its production (or disposal) is governed between various jurisdictions, with different impacts and benefits, each shares commonalities that can be explored further. ‘Resolving Land and Energy Conflicts’ briefly explains the general context around the energy type; the impacts and conflicts that have arisen given this context; the role laws, rules and jurisdictions play in mitigating, resolving or creating more conflict; and the ways in which communication, collaboration and conflict resolution have been or could be used to ameliorate the conflicts that inevitably arise.

The book consists of a volume of essays in honor of the outstanding sociologist, Edward A. Tiryakian; whose work has spanned a considerable number of countries, regions and topics. He has been highly influential, particularly in American and French sociology.

The contributors include such luminaries as Alan Sica, Bryan Turner, George Ritzer, John Simpson, Piotr Sztompka, Hans Joas, Roland Robertson and John Torpey.

The contributions range across the numerous works of Tiryakian. These include his relationship with the great scholar Pitirim Sorokin, his existentialist sociology, metasociology, his contribution to modernization theory, his important work on civilizations, and his mediation between European and American sociology. Other contributions include chapters on global studies, Max Weber, multiple modernities and the axial age and the work of Robert Bellah on human evolution.

Democratization is a field where unexpected and sudden events have repeatedly challenged conventional wisdom. For example, who in the mid-1970s would have foreseen the democratization of Cambodia, Albania, South Africa or East Timor? Our current ‘wave’ of democratization is complex and diverse and understanding it requires a variety of theoretical approaches.

Most of the literature on democracy assumes that it is the best form of government. Theoretical works on democratic transition and democratization have also emphasized the internal conflict resolution capacity of democracy. It has been reasoned that democracy reduces the likelihood of discrimination, especially of ethno-political minorities, and thus the possibility of political repression. However, the democratic peace theory has not been explicitly tested with reference to third world post-colonial states, where most internal violent conflicts take place. Certainly, there is a dearth of practical advice for policy makers on how to design and implement democratic levers that can make internal peace and stability endure in the South.

This volume, drawing on the work of a variety of scholars, will contribute to identifying and understanding the challenges and opportunities of this ‘democratization project’ to the peace and development of the world both at the domestic level in selected countries, trends in regions of the world, and in the global system of the post-Cold War Era.

World trade and investment law is in crisis: new and progressive ideas are needed.

Rules that facilitated globalization and supported global economic growth are being challenged. A system of global governance that once seemed secure is now at risk as the US ignores the rules while developing countries struggle to escape restrictions. Some want to tear global institutions and agreements down while others try desperately to maintain the status quo. Rejecting both options, a group of trade and investment law experts from 10 countries, South and North, have joined hands to propose ideas for a new world trade and investment law that would maintain global growth while distributing costs and benefits more fairly. Paying special attention to those who have suffered from trade dislocation and to restrictions that have hampered innovative growth strategies in developing countries, they outline a progressive trade and investment law agenda in ‘World Trade and Investment Law Reimagined’ that includes new ways to link trade with protection for labour; measures to ensure that gains from trade are used to offset losses; new rules that can protect foreign investments without hamstringing developing governments or harming local communities; innovative procedures to allow developing countries the freedom to try innovative growth strategies; and methods to cope with new products.

May Alcott Nierike, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the writings on art and travel by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Like other American women in the later nineteenth century, May was unable to receive the advanced training and exhibition opportunities in the USA that she needed to become a notable professional painter due to her gender. An additional obstacle for Alcott Nieriker was her family’s insecure financial status, making it difficult to travel or study abroad for training. Fortunately, following Louisa’s early publishing success, May was able to make three trips to London and Paris to immerse herself more fully in the art world, and eventually attained the prestigious honor of having two paintings accepted into the Paris Salon. However, the book argues that Alcott Nieriker’s main contributions to cultural history were not necessarily her artistic creations, but rather her publications on travel and art—specifically, four articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and an 1879 guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How To Do It Cheaply. 

The book examines the art and travel writings of May Alcott Nieriker from three distinct but interrelated perspectives: (1) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings both relate to and yet stand apart from standard travel writing of the later nineteenth century; (2) how Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings smartly interweave art criticism and social as well as cultural advocacy, including her concerns about the lack of access to free museums in the USA; and (3) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings critique the social and cultural norms of the day in respect to equal opportunity for women artists, and in turn seek to empower women of modest means to navigate these obstacles and pursue careers as professional artists. In addition, the book provides more insight in general to the fields of nineteenth-century American art and art criticism, travel writing, gender studies, and American cultural studies. In sum, May Alcott Nieriker’s writings, a number of which are republished here for the first time since the 1870s, deserve further attention and interpretation because her texts give voice to critical social and cultural concerns of the nineteenth century, such as gender and class discrimination, that still resonate today.

How America was Tricked on Tax Policy explains how regular citizens were “tricked” by the outdated view of economists that much heavier taxation of labor rather than capital is economically justifiable. The truth is that workers pay their taxes while the rich pay very little.  Based on reputable sources of information, including the publications of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), official statistics data, and the publications in high-ranked journals, the book paves the way for a new policy making process aimed to achieve more sustainable taxation and to increase the wellbeing of citizens as the main goal of any modern state policy. 

Dealing with critically important and underexplored topics in tax policy, the book challenges an enshrined dogma that is rarely challenged at the level of policy. In doing so, this book envisions policy changes that could be highly impactful in a new political administration. This book proposes that governments should look for not just corporate income tax rate reduction when announcing their tax reforms but should equally focus on the reduction of the overall tax burden on labor. The negative impact and high social cost of wage taxation is exemplified by the key areas of tax policy that are relevant for every wealthy state, such as taking due care of public health, investing in education and wellbeing of children, and supporting small business for the overall benefit to society. 

The book provides sound arguments that “labor” should essentially be treated as “human capital” and be given the same tax treatment as that of classically understood “capital”. This understanding is extremely relevant nowadays as we are facing the issues of digitalization, in general, and “robotization,” where a new type of labor, i.e., nonhuman labor, is entering the workforce. The book’s fresh novelty comes from its new approach to tax policy while addressing the issues relevant to the “digital” era such as taxation of artificial intelligence or “robots” that are currently partially substituting the human workforce. The book compellingly argues how tax policy could be improved by incorporating science and scientific methods.

A primary focus of this book is on the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the spaces of theatre. These spaces include more traditional sites of theatre, such as those involving stages and curtains, actors and audiences, as well as those other theatres or spaces of performance that range from performance and installation art, to the performance of a string quartet, and from the writing of performance, to the performance of writing. What unites them is the presence of time as the constant and corrosive agent of theatrical absence, a vanishing site that finally affirms these theatres as theatres of thought, as spaces of thoughtful and mirroring reflection.

With such time in mind, attention is directed toward theatre’s own blurred and porous boundaries and, implicitly, that most conventional theatrical form, the proscenium itself, evoking questions such as: where does the performance begin and where does it end? Who is watching and who is being watched? And what, as time takes its toll, is there to be seen at all? For it is from this demarcating line of representation that – like a ‘line in the sand’ – such spaces of thought, theatrical or not, largely determine where the various forms of representation begin and end, where time is told of others, and where time is finally told of each of us.

This book explores possible reforms to improve the operation of the international extradition process. The book commences by outlining why international extradition requires reform based on its current operation. Whilst extradition is important for enabling transnational criminal justice and policing cooperation, its implementation is fraught with political problems, time delays, and issues that result from outdated legal and jurisdictional geographies. This is because extradition is enforced at the domestic level, rather than through genuine transnational legal processes. Domestic legal and political issues can create conflict between the nations involved and compromise the human rights of individual extraditees.
This book discusses these issues alongside the significance of globalisation, the dominance of territorial sovereignty in determining criminal jurisdiction, and the delicate balance between state rights, international cooperation, and individual protections, which are associated with extradition processes. This range of issues demonstrates how the normative assumptions behind extradition ensure these processes are likely to prioritise the interests of comity between nation states, rather than the rights of individuals. The limited availability of judicial relief for extraditees reflects how state rights are prioritised, with the law implementing high thresholds needed to establish proof human rights violations will occur if a person is surrendered. Further technical issues, such as the rule of non-inquiry, restrictive evidence options, and judicial deference to the executive, also compromise fairness in extradition cases. This combination of issues are the driving force behind the book’s argument regarding the need for global reform of the extradition process.
The book uses several case studies to demonstrate these key problems. These include the high-profile cases involving Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom, as well as lesser-known cases involving Hassan Diab, Daniel Snedden, Dorin Savu, and Elias Perez. These examples span multiple jurisdictions and highlight the common problem that judicial decision-making prioritises international comity by favouring surrender of the extraditee over individual elements, such as mental health and a high risk of suicide if surrender is ordered. These examples also illustrate how questions of governmental overreach, the role of transnational digital communication systems in the commission of offshore offences, and the operation of complex rules of evidence, can lead to prejudicial trials, as well as broader problems with the extradition process that undermine procedural fairness, refugee rights, and other potential violations of international human rights reqirements. This combination of factors provides an important opportunity to reform extradition law and procedure.
The book argues that developing a defendant-centred approach is the overarching lens for examining extradition reform to prioritise fairness as a core value for promoting global justice. This includes introducing a more harmonised approach for transnational justice administration that contains clear protections for individuals by limiting established extradition rules. The book argues, for example, against the application of the rule of non-inquiry to enable greater post-extradition monitoring of people who are surrendered, while widening the capacity for extraditees to submit evidence to support a claim against surrender. Reform can also involve the development of new and more viable alternatives to the physical transfer of the extraditee, such as transferring evidence to shift a subsequent criminal trial to the location where most of the alleged offending activity occurred, and sentencing in the extraditee’s home jurisdiction. These reform proposals intentionally challenge the established assumptions of extradition and adjust the unequal levels of authority that favour the power of the state over the rights of the individual.

This book is a result of a ten-year follow-up to Telling Stories from Political Violence: A Filmmaker’s Journey (2012). It Stays with You: Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti (2018) addresses the impact of the use of lethal force in raids by the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) on the marginalized neighborhood of BoisNeuf, in Port-au-Prince, that left scores of civilians dead, many more injured, and domestic properties destroyed. Right Now I Want to Scream: Police and Army Killings in Rio -the Brazil Haiti Connection (2020) continues the issue of the use of lethal force in the increasing militarisation of security operations by authorities on civilians. In 2022, the final film in the trilogy We Never Give Up was producedon living with the legacy of apartheid violence in South Africa. Produced by the Human Rights Media Centre in Cape Town, the trilogy tells the stories of those from a variety of backgrounds – torture victims, displacement, assassination attempts – over a period of 20 years. Finally, the Prison’s Memory Archive is a collection of memories from the prisons during the political conflict known as the Troubles in the north of Ireland.

 In societies emerging out of, or still addressing, political violence, the need to create platforms for survivors to tell their stories as a form of public acknowledgement and personal healing is well documented. Some societies have created official forms, e.g. the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, while others rely on community, or bottom-up, initiatives, e.g. Accounts of the Conflict in Ireland. Each society, each community, and each project is contingent on the nature of the violence and the needs of the communities who have suffered. The use of documentary film, or audiovisual recording, is one such method of creating a platform for such purposes. The role of participatory practices is an important element in how such filmmaking might address issues of trauma, memory, and injustice.

'Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917-1938' provides ground-breaking research into the complex interrelations of linguistic theory and politics during the first two decades of the USSR. The work examines how the new Revolutionary regime promoted linguistic research that scrutinised the relationship between language, social structure, national identity and ideological factors as part of an attempt to democratize the public sphere. It also looks at the demise of the sociological paradigm, as the isolation and bureaucratization of the state gradually shifted the focus of research.

Through this account, the collection formally acknowledges the achievements of the Soviet linguists of the time, whose innovative approaches to the relationship between language and society predates the emergence of western sociolinguistics by several decades. These articles are the first articles written in English about these linguists, and will introduce an Anglophone audience to a range of materials hitherto unavailable.

In addition to providing new articles, the volume also presents the first annotated translation of Ivan Meshchaninov's 1929 'Theses on Japhetidology', thereby providing insight into one of the most controversial strands within Soviet linguistic thought.

This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, 'Persian Pictures' is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly 'secret, mysterious life of the East', the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram – the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. 'Persian Pictures' is both travelogue and meditation, an elegiac and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.

‘The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting: What your professors don't tell you... What you absolutely must know’ reveals the secret expectations harbored by business school professors when viewing your presentations. Offering a competitive advantage to anyone interested in a career in business, this award-winning guide provides a truly unique means of developing powerful presentation skills.

The guide identifies the seven verities of speaking that form the bedrock of superior presenting in the twenty-first century, and which imbue any speaker with power, energy and confidence: stance, voice, gesture, expression, movement, appearance and passion. These presentation techniques can transform a person’s professional life, ignite the potential for landing a higher position, and distinguish a business student from the vast majority of their competitors – all by correlating directly with the inherent values of corporate America.

The book also discusses the utility of business analysis tools, such as “SWOT,” “PEST,” “value chain analysis” and Porter’s “Five Forces,” and demonstrates how to work seamlessly and effectively with PowerPoint to deliver concise and persuasive presentations. It also addresses the innate challenges of working as a group and preparing group presentations – a requirement of all business students and a highly sought-after skill amongst corporate recruiters. In addition, a section on preparing for case competitions – a major rite of passage for business majors and MBAs – is included. The result is a masterpiece of business school wisdom and practicality.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive survey of the life and work of David Ricardo (1772–1823), a major contributor to the British classical school of political economy. John E. King’s editorial introduction sets Ricardo’s work in the economic, political and social context of his time, emphasising his strong defence of economic and political liberalism and his opposition to the beneficiaries of contemporary ‘Old Corruption’. King’s later chapter deals in more depth with Ricardo’s political views and his position on important questions of economic policy, as well as the controversial conclusions that were drawn from his theoretical works by the so-called ‘Ricardian Socialists’. 

A very different approach is taken by Wilfried Parys, whose discussion of Ricardo’s – highly successful – business activities raises the question of how they may have influenced the development of his theoretical ideas. A detailed examination of particular aspects of this theoretical work is provided by Ghislain Deleplace, who examines his theory of money; by Gilbert Faccarello whose subject is the Ricardian theory of international trade; by Christian Gehrke, who analyses Ricardo’s distinctive approach to explaining the distribution of income; by Alex Thomas, who is concerned with Ricardo’s role in British classical political economy, with particular reference to the theory of value; and by Bryan Turner, who sets out Ricardo’s complex and important relationship with Robert Malthus and the latter’s population theory.

Michael Howard explains how Ricardo was interpreted, and criticised, first by Karl Marx and then, over the next century and a half, by various strands of the Marxist movement around the globe. William Coleman’s chapter investigates similar issues from a very different perspective, exploring the critical reception and interpretation of Ricardo’s economic thought in the ‘New World’ society of Australia. And Heinz Kurz examines the causes and considers the consequences of some of the widespread misinterpretations of Ricardo in the two centuries since his death.

Vladimir Voinovich’s Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts is a wildly satiric send-up of the 1960s/1970s Soviet show-trials by one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, who was also sometimes called 20th Century Russia’s ‘greatest living satirist.’ Based upon his reaction to the Sinyavski/Daniel trial in 1966, which caused him to begin to write scathingly critical letters to Premier Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Writer’s Union and finally resulted in his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, Voinovich’s Tribunal is a monument to the Soviet dissidents of the Cold War period and a sardonic critique of the censorship and persecution of dissident writers everywhere. Following in the classical tradition of the theatre of the absurd that stretches from Aristophanes to Sartre, Frisch, and Havel, Voinovich’s comedy describes the black humoresque high jinks and wildly outrageous shenanigans that dizzily unfold when an unsuspecting couple of Soviet citizens, Senya and Larissa Suspectnikoff, clutching their free tickets in their innocent hands, walk into a crowded theatre, expecting to watch a Chekhovian comedy, only to become caught up in the sinister machinations of this Soviet criminal tribunal and its madcap version of the Moscow show trials. 

When The Suspectnikoffs arrive at the theater, they are surprised to find that the stage-sets for this curious theatrical production strangely resemble the precincts of a Soviet criminal justice tribunal, complete with tables and benches for The Prosecutor and The Public Defender and a wild beast-cage for The Defendant. There is also a Greek statue of The Goddess of Justice, Themis, who holds in her outstretched hand the wavering scales of Soviet justice, with on one pan, a hammer-&-sickle, and on the other, a Kalashnikoff. After a few uneasy moments while the stagehands put the props in place, The Bard strolls on stage and strums a few tunes on his guitar, in the futile attempt to set the audience at ease. But from outside the theater come the frightening sounds of screaming police-sirens and the flashing red-and-blue lights of an automobile cortege rushing past at great speeds; and when the hysterical rush of the speeding automobiles has passed, The Tribunal Members (The Chairman, The Secretary, and The Prosecutor, et al.) appear from the wings, strutting onstage in a burlesque chorus-line to the accompaniment of thunderous canned applause. And after this chorus-line of Communist Party bureaucrats has taken their places in the theater, the spectators are chilled to watch as black-clad security-police with submachine-guns appear at the theater-doors, blocking all the exits; and they discover, to their dismay, that they have become the captive audience in a mock-up version of a Stalinist show-trial. And so the third wall falls on this courtly theater, blurring the distinction between fiction and fact, falsehood and truth, nightmare and reality, as Voinovich describes the plight of Soviet citizens held hostage in the strange atmosphere of delirium and unreality that was characteristic of the declining and falling Soviet Union during stagnant chill of the 1970s Brezhnev years.

After a few more uneasy moments, Larissa stands up and whispers: “Senya, I don’t understand what’s going on here! Why are there so many people with guns?” To which Senya replies: “Oh, calm down, Lara! Why are you so nervous? It’s just a show!” The Suspectnikoffs do not realize that by questioning this sinister tribunal, they are destined to become the defendants in a Soviet show-trial. But the show-trial must go on! And as The Chairman says, “Where there’s a show-trial, you know, we need somebody to try!” Senya protests his innocence and attempts to get away. But protestations of innocence have no bearing on these proceedings. And by the end of Act I Scene 1, Senya has been arrested and placed in the defendant’s cage, while his faithful wife, Larissa, still stands behind her man, pleading for his release without quite believing in either his guilt or his innocence. And so Vladimir Voinovich’s Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts also goes on, wavering dizzily between the extremes of sardonic comic bathos and seriocomic tragedy, until Suspectnikoff finally becomes a world-famous dissident, calling upon the world’s leaders of to rise to his defense and inspiring protest movements in the Western democracies. But is Suspectnikoff to be admired for his heroic posturing? Or has he simply submitted to the pressures of the Western media to play the stereotyped role of The Soviet Dissident, who then becomes a pawn in the sinister spy-games of the Cold War superpower standoff between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R? The staggering climax of this absurdist melodrama leaves these difficult questions suspended in doubt as Suspectnikoff is dragged offstage and the stage-curtain falls on the whole cast of characters and the no-longer-innocent spectators of Tribunal: A Courtly Comedy in Three Acts.

Techno-economic paradigm shifts are at the core of general, innovation-based theory of economic and societal development as conceived by Carlota Perez. Her book on the subject, ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital’, is a seminal enunciation of the theory, and has had immense influence on business strategy, state development programs and policy, and academic thinking on the subject.

‘Techno-Economic Paradigms’ presents a series of essays by the leading academics in the field discussing the theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts, and its role in explaining processes of innovation and development. This festschrift honours Carlota Perez, the founder of the theory 'techno-economic paradigm shifts'.

This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept that forms the underlying structure of the World Wide Web and innumerable software applications. Barnet combines an analysis of contemporary literature with her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of the hypertext innovation. She tells both the human and the technological story, tracing its path back to an analogue device imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945, before modern computing had happened.

‘Memory Machines’ offers an expansive record of hypertext over the last 60 years, pinpointing the major breakthroughs and fundamental flaws in its evolution. Barnet argues that some of the earliest hypertext systems were more richly connected and in some respects more flexible than the Web; this is also a fascinating account of the paths not taken.

Barnet ends the journey through computing history at the birth of mass domesticated hypertext, at the point that it grew out of the university labs and into the Web. And yet she suggests that hypertext may not have completed its evolutionary story, and may still have the capacity to become something different, something much better than it is today.

‘Adult Reactions to Popular Music and Inter-generational Relations in Britain, 1955–1975’ challenges the often unquestioned assumption that ‘the older generation’ largely reacted in a negative or hostile fashion to forms of music popular with young people in Britain from the 1950s to the mid-1970s (including rock ’n’ roll, skiffle, ‘beat’ and rock music), and that the music invariably exacerbated inter-generational tensions. Utilizing extensive primary evidence, from first-person accounts to newspapers, television programmes, surveys and archive collections, the book demonstrates the considerable variety which frequently characterized adult responses to the music, whilst also highlighting that the impact of the music on inter-generational relations was more complex than is often assumed. There has been a growing recognition among scholars of the need to reassess the alleged ‘generation gap’ of this era, but this theme has yet to be examined in depth via the prism of popular music. [NP] The book is also distinctive in the thematic approach it adopts. Rather than attempting a chronological survey, it identifies three key arenas of British society in which adult responses to popular music, and the impact of such reactions upon relations between generations, seem particularly revealing and significant, and explores them in considerable depth. The first chapter examines the place of popular music within family life, the second focuses on the Christian churches and their engagement with popular music, particularly within youth clubs, and the third explores ‘encounters’ between the worlds of traditional Variety entertainment and popular music. The work offers detailed appraisals of each of these areas, while also providing fresh perspectives on this most dynamic and turbulent of periods.

While each chapter possesses a certain cohesion in its own right, illuminating and adding fresh perspectives on key topics within post-war British history, certain key ideas reappear throughout the work. The nature and significance of ‘everyday’ multi-generational consumption of popular music constitutes one such theme, as does the manner in which the highly varied, and ever-evolving, character of ‘pop’ in this era frequently, and in various ways, rendered it more accessible to older people and more capable of traversing generational boundaries. The final unifying theme concerns the distinctive way in which ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural forces continued to interact in the lives of young and old during this transitional era.

The themes dealt with here include some of the most pressing issues for the Chinese and those who interact with China: the impact of China’s development on the world economic system and on its environment, the likely future stability of China, the very existence of a unified China and the fault lines along which this entity might break apart in the years ahead, and an assessment of the future of the one-party system and what might replace it. Jonathan Fenby’s enlightening foreword perfectly frames this engaging and timely exploration of one of the world’s most fascinating cultures.

This book assesses the validity of ‘anti-politics’ critiques of development, first popularised by James Ferguson, in the peculiar context of India. Ferguson’s memorable metaphor of development as an Anti-Politics Machine – that serves to entrench state power and depoliticize development – continues to appeal to those cynical of the widespread tendency of development discourses to treat various issues apolitically. The book examines this problem in India, a country where development planners after independence adopted a scientific stance and claimed to distance themselves from mass politics, but also one where the groundswell of democratic political mobilization has been considerable in recent decades. In a country with an extremely differentiated landscape of authority and diverse politics, what does it mean for the state to undertake a project (or indeed, projects) of depoliticization; for as scholars inspired by Foucault and Gramsci have variously agreed, depoliticization is a tentative project where outcomes are far from certain. The book examines these questions within the new context provided by decentralization, the potential of which to reorganize relationships amongst different levels of the state greatly complicates the very pursuit of depoliticization as a coherent state practice. It looks at these issues through a highly technocratic state watershed development programme in India that has witnessed key transformations towards participation in recent years.

Building on many years of inquiry into the sociology of intellectuals, notably through a series of books on the sociologist, Karl Mannheim, this book brings together the results of ten years of work on the special problems of intellectuals in exile. The historical materials all relate to the emigration from Nazi Germany, not only because this event has generated the richest literature in exile studies, but also because of the author’s personal connections to the situation and to a number of outstanding representatives of that exile. Case studies are devoted to the following figures: Johannes Becher, Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Gerth, Oskar Maria Graf, Kurt Hiller, Erich Kahler, Alfred Kantoriowics, Hermann Kesten, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, Hans Mayer, Franz Neumann, Nina Rubinstein, Oskar Seidlin and Carl Zuckmayer.

The book opens with a systematic proposal for the study of intellectual exile, entailing a critique of approaches that neglect concrete political dimensions in favor of a metaphorical cultural approach. In the distinctive approach elaborated through a series of problem-centered case studies, the focus is on the multiple, complex and changing negotiating processes and bargaining structures constitutive of exile, especially as the question of return interplays with the politics of memory.

The first three chapters deal with émigré intellectuals whose writings contain theoretically important reflections on exile and related conditions. The interplay and conflicts between the priorities of ambitious American university scholarship and the self-understanding of the exile cohort identified with the Humanities is the theme of the next detailed study. In the following long chapter, the focus is on the outcome of exile, documented by the first letters written by intellectual and literary exiles to individuals who had remained in Germany and with whom they had unfinished business. These diverse reopenings of negotiations are uniquely revealing about different ways of settling with the experiences of exclusion and the prospects of return.

The final section of the book reverts to its very beginnings in two senses: it offers a self-reflection by the author about his own relations to the exile under study as a member of the “second wave” generation that arrived from Germany as children, with special attention to the elective affinities between himself and members of the actual primary cohort.

Ambitious measures to reduce carbon emissions are all too rare in reality, impeded by economic and political concerns rather than technological advances. In this collection of essays, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton show that the impact of inaction on climate change will be far worse than the cost of ambitious climate policies.

After setting out the basic principles which must shape contemporary climate economics, Ackerman and Stanton consider common flaws in climate change policy – from mistaken assumptions that dismiss the welfare of future generations and anticipate little or no growth in low-income countries, to unrealistic projections of climate damages that dismiss catastrophic risks – and offer their own insightful remedies. They question the usefulness of conventional integrated assessment models (IAMs) that model the long-term interaction between economic growth and climate change, and propose an alternative in their Climate and Regional Economics and Development (CRED) model.

In this incisive work, Stanton and Ackerman offer a timely and original contribution to the fields of climate economics and global equity.

The book fills a gap since there is no quick reference in comparative law and economics at the moment. The book can be seen as a short introduction to comparative law and economics, a helpful guide to additional reading and a textbook for a short course or seminar. Comparative law and economics is a growing field in the interaction between law, economics and comparative political science. It includes both strands of the traditional literature, namely the role of legal families and microeconomic analysis of legal rules in a comparative perspective.

The book opens with a short introduction about the method and the standard discussion between common law and civil law. It brings in the debate over the legal origins’ theory and its consequences in terms of economic growth. It presents the study of courts at the global level and the importance of comparative judicial politics to stimulate a better understanding of comparative law and economics. The book also covers microeconomic analysis of legal rules with a few applications (titling of property, cost-shifting rules, plea-bargaining) and additional reading recommendations to the reader (for additional examples). The book then focuses on lawyering, with an emphasis on varying regulation of the legal profession around the world. The book concludes with a short summary of possible research developments in the next few years, namely behavioral and empirical advancements.

Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s' departs from the dominant scholarship in South Asian history that focuses narrowly on railways, and instead argues that any discussion of railway-generated changes needs to see such changes, at least up to the 1880s, as situated amidst existing patterns and networks of circulation within which roads and ferries were crucial. The volume also offers a detailed exploration of early colonial policies on road building and ferry improvement – an area that has hitherto remained unexplored.

Just as the new development of steam technology required and necessitated ‘lateral growth’ alongside the older technologies, so too were trade linkages marked by the interconnectedness of local and supra-local ties in which the world of peddlers intersected with that of native merchants and capitalist sahibs. This volume contends that the history of colonial communication is not a story of ‘displacement’ alone – either of one means by another or of one group by another – but also of realignment. Combining the understanding of production of knowledge about routes with the ways the practice of surveying and mapping led to territorial construction of the national space of India, this book reinterprets the ‘colonial state–space’ as constituting a series of layered components, both of ‘inherited spaces and networks’ from pre-colonial times and of the processes of objectification that colonial rule initiated.

The aim of this volume is to contribute to the ‘history of social spaces’, a new field of study in which neither cultural nor economic discourse is overridden by the other. This is achieved via a micro-historical study of local circulatory regimes, together with an exploration of colonial and imperial cultural discourses on communications.

Weighing up the costs and benefits of economic interdependence in a finance-driven world from a development perspective, this book argues that globalization, understood and promoted as absolute freedom for all forms of capital, has been oversold to the Global South, and that the South should be as selective about globalization as the North, rebalance domestic and external sources of growth, and better manage integration into unstable international finance.

‘Liberalization, Financial Instability and Economic Development’ brings together a range of essays from Yılmaz Akyüz’s recent work, refuting the myth that emerging economies have now successfully decoupled from the North and have become new engines of growth. The book challenges the orthodoxy on the link between financial deepening and economic growth, as well as the relationship between the efficiency of financial markets and the benefits of liberalization. Rather, Akyüz’s work urges developing countries to use all possible tools to control capital flows and asset bubbles in order to prevent financial fragility and crises, and recommends regional policy options while recognizing the challenges posed by the institutional structures already in place.

‘Friends and Enemies’ delivers a lucid and provocative history of one of the world’s largest and most successful political organizations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Grounding his account in the origins of the CCP, Brown charts its early struggles and the emergence of the leadership of Mao Zedong in the 1930s, before unravelling the role of the Party during the Second World War and the vicious internecine struggle that culminated in the CCP’s ascent to power in 1949.

The narrative tackles the successes and failures of the CCP in the post-war era, analysing this chequered period with a close eye to the internal machinations of the Party, and then boldly considers the prospects of the CCP in the future. Brown produces a forthright analysis of where the Party stands in the 21st century, and assesses its three greatest challenges – energy, the environment and the economy – before culminating in a discussion of the potential for democratic reform and the risks the Party faces while it attempts to become a modern party in charge of a globally important economy.

‘Friends and Enemies’ is based on a combination of research and Brown’s own experiences as a business person and diplomat in China, where he lived for seven years. It has also benefited from the input of analysts of the Party from the UK and US, and from talks with Party officials at senior and working level in China.

Amidst cascading global financial and political crises of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, scholars have turned for insight to the work of the radical American thinker, Thorstein Veblen. Inspired by an abundance of new research, social scientists from multiple disciplines have displayed a heightened appreciation for Veblen’s importance and value for contemporary social, economic and political studies. “The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen,” edited with an introduction by Sidney Plotkin, is a stimulating addition to this new body of Veblen scholarship.

The essays in the first part consider Veblen’s method, philosophy and values. Sociologist Erkki Kilpinen peers deeply into Veblen’s highly original theory of action and its implications for a sociological understanding of “the instinct of workmanship.” In contrast, economist William Waller, building on contemporary work in evolutionary economics and psychology, urges a considerably more bio-psychological interpretation of Veblen’s instinct theory. Intellectual historians Rick Tilman and Kohl Glau, exploring the secular foundations of Veblen’s moral theory, furnish a sharp critique of recent efforts to wed Veblen with Catholic social thought. Challenging older understandings, Russell H. and Sylvia E. Bartley, careful students of Veblen’s biography, offer novel insights into the impact of Veblen’s education at Carlton College, while sociologist Stephan G. Mestrovic thoughtfully insists that Veblen unduly limited his affirmation of “idle curiosity” as a chief resource for learning to elite post graduate schools.

Contemporary applications of Veblen’s theory to studies of capitalism, social structure and politics are the focus of the contributions in the next part. Anthropologist John Kelly forcefully urges a reconsideration of Veblen’s critical theory as an inspiration for both students and activists in an age of capitalism “after post-modernism and post-coloniality.” Returning to Veblen’s most important early work, sociologist Ahmet Oncu skillfully weaves the theory of the leisure class into a rich and exciting re-interpretation of Turkey’s Ottoman ruling groups. Building on Veblen’s critical theory of absentee ownership and power, political scientist Sidney Plotkin analyzes Veblen’s embrace of local forms of political economic self-rule, but notes Veblen’s sense of the ideological ambiguity of popular resistance to centralized power. Finally, geographer Ross Mitchell applies the radical democratic potential of Veblen’s concept of “the masterless man” to an understanding of both the possibilities and limits of contemporary left movements. Throughout, the essays offer fresh material for ongoing reconsiderations of Thorstein Veblen as a major theoretical resource for the contemporary social sciences.

This annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century British periodicals, complete with a detailed subject index, reveals how Victorian commentaries on journalism shaped the discourse on the origins and contemporary character of the domestic, imperial and foreign press. Drawn from a wide range of publications that represent diverse political, economic, religious, social and literary views, this book contains over 4,500 entries, and features extracts from over 40 nineteenth-century periodicals.

The featured articles discuss both the prior and the contemporary press, from annuals to dailies, and examine topics such as circulation, content, audience and personnel. These nineteenth-century commentaries offer both a thorough and influential analysis of their journalistic milieu, presenting statistics on sales and descriptions of advertising, passing judgment on space allocations, pinpointing different readerships, and identifying individuals who engaged with the press either exclusively or occasionally.

The essays also examine the impact of outside forces – including technology, taxation, capitalism and compulsory education – whilst assessments of the press abroad add the further considerations of geography, ethnicity, resources and restraints to the collective analysis. Most importantly, the bibliography demonstrates that columnists routinely articulated ideas about the purpose of the press, yet rarely recognized the illogic of prioritizing public good and private profit simultaneously. The volume thus highlights implicitly a universal characteristic of journalism: its fractious, ambiguous, conflicting behavior – an endemic trait that appears to have survived well into the twenty-first century.

In the medieval and early modern periods, dreams were seen as having the potential to grant a glimpse of what was unknown or outside the dreamer’s body. Prophetic dreams were believed to possess spiritual, philosophical, and political meaning. But in the long eighteenth century, realism and Enlightenment thinking introduced both a sense of skepticism about the putatively divine significance of dreams and an interest in the natural causes for them. Under the influence of Enlightenment rationalism and medical science, dreams were considered to be aberrations – evidence of temporary internal disorder – and were removed from social and political importance. Concurrent with this diminished significance and increased interest is the rise of the Gothic, and fundamental to that rise is the narrative/poetic dream scene. This monograph examines how dreaming is reimagined in the Gothic, how Gothic dreams transform, and what these transformations reveal about Britain’s social, cultural and political anxieties – namely, those concerning historiography, revolution, slavery and empire – and how the Gothic dream is adapted and reimagined further in Caribbean novels.

To explore the changes and to historicize the Gothic dream, this monograph views dreams as temporally charged phenomena and employs eighteenth century ideas about solitude and Burkean notions of the sublime and the monstrous. These concepts provide a useful framework through which to understand the relationships between the dreamer and the dream as well as the dreamer and society. The aesthetic sublime requires spatio-temporal distance while the political monstrous constitutes the erosion of distance and the collapse of boundaries. In the final chapter, theories of islandness are used to examine how the Gothic dream becomes a political tool for postcolonial writers.

This monograph argues that the Gothic exposes and establishes dreams as social and political, not merely individual, phenomena.The Gothic counters the Enlightenment and reimagines dreaming by making either or both prophecy and liminality central to the dream scene. While the first British Gothic novels, The Castle of Otranto (1765) and The Old English Baron (1778), feature unambiguously prophetic and providential dreams, in later novels, prophetic dreams continue to be central to the Gothic, but these later moments are complicated by a cloud of uncertainty. What we continually see is a vacillation between the sublime and the monstrous that reveals anxieties about British claims of progress and liberty. In the process, the Gothic dream comes to be a liminal space for the dramatisation of imperial fantasies and prophetic nightmares. In the twentieth century, postcolonial writers adapt the Gothic dream to subvert the teleology of imperialism.

‘The Learning Economy and the Economics of Hope’ brings together contributions by an expert on policies, management and economics of innovation and knowledge. It offers original insights in processes of innovation and learning and it draws implications for economic theory and public policy. It introduces the reader to important concepts such as innovation systems and the learning economy. It throws a new light on economic development and opens up for a new kind of economics – the economics of hope. It offers a fresh perspective on many of the most important global challenges of today showing how full attention to the characteristics of the learning economy needs to be combined with innovation in global governance if we want to be able to handle these challenges.

‘The Learning Economy and the Economics of Hope’ presents work published between 1985 and 1992 and introduces the core concepts innovation as an interactive process. The analysis demonstrates that new technology is developed in an interaction between individuals and organisations and that innovation would not thrive in an economy similar to textbook models of pure markets and perfect competition. It also presents articles that were published between 2004 and 2010. These may be seen as further developments and evidence-based consolidation of ideas that were presented more than ten years earlier. It presents the learning economy through the perspective of the economics of knowledge. The concluding part of the book includes three papers that make use of the conceptual frameworks developed in an analysis of China’s innovation system and policy, Europe’s crisis and Africa’s underdevelopment.

‘Travellers to the Middle East from Burkhardt to Thesiger’ is a compendious anthology of travellers' writings produced during the high tide of Britain’s involvement in the Middle East. The anthology contains extracts from many of the canonical travel texts of the period, including passages by T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Robert Byron, as well as many more extracts from both female and male writers. The anthology is also enlivened by the broad geographical span covered, including descriptions of territories in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Arabia and Persia.

Geoffrey Nash’s introduction, notes and background material provide specialist historical analysis and biographical information informed by critical and theoretical perspectives relevant to the genre of travel writing. This anthology will satisfy the growing interest in the study of travel writing, in addition to offering the general reader valuable insights into British perceptions of the Middle East.

To date, masculinity has tended to be presented in cinema studies as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book demonstrates how the art-house film, in the form of personal cinema and its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, presenting a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, being undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstance. Hollywood, in the form of “male weepies,” offered preliminary insights into this failing masculinity, but it is with the flowering of Post-World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the “indie” waves of the late 20th century and the early 21st century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the “male melodrama,” the correlative of the woman’s film. 

The present volume offers a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. While these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino have been frequently discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date, with a few exceptions, they have not been examined in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.

A war correspondent's breathtaking account of early twentieth-century wars, including the Greek-Turkish War (1897) and the Spanish-American War (1898). These events have fallen into relative obscurity, following the two World Wars, yet remain important forces shaping modern politics. ‘Moments in Hell’ reveals the conflicting loyalties of the war correspondent, caught between political ideologies and personal suffering, and provides an enlightening background to recent conflicts. Harding Davis was a dashingly fashionable figure in turn-of-the-century New York, and cited as the inspiration for the 'Gibson man' – fitting the adventurous image of the journalist popular in film and literature. While his accounts highlight the brutality and inhumanity of war, they are riveting pieces of reportage. Harding Davis makes it clear that these moments in hell can make heroes and villains of us all.

How America was Tricked on Tax Policy explains how regular citizens were “tricked” by the outdated view of economists that much heavier taxation of labor rather than capital is economically justifiable. The truth is that workers pay their taxes while the rich pay very little.  Based on reputable sources of information, including the publications of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), official statistics data, and the publications in high-ranked journals, the book paves the way for a new policy making process aimed to achieve more sustainable taxation and to increase the wellbeing of citizens as the main goal of any modern state policy. 

Dealing with critically important and underexplored topics in tax policy, the book challenges an enshrined dogma that is rarely challenged at the level of policy. In doing so, this book envisions policy changes that could be highly impactful in a new political administration. This book proposes that governments should look for not just corporate income tax rate reduction when announcing their tax reforms but should equally focus on the reduction of the overall tax burden on labor. The negative impact and high social cost of wage taxation is exemplified by the key areas of tax policy that are relevant for every wealthy state, such as taking due care of public health, investing in education and wellbeing of children, and supporting small business for the overall benefit to society. 

The book provides sound arguments that “labor” should essentially be treated as “human capital” and be given the same tax treatment as that of classically understood “capital”. This understanding is extremely relevant nowadays as we are facing the issues of digitalization, in general, and “robotization,” where a new type of labor, i.e., nonhuman labor, is entering the workforce. The book’s fresh novelty comes from its new approach to tax policy while addressing the issues relevant to the “digital” era such as taxation of artificial intelligence or “robots” that are currently partially substituting the human workforce. The book compellingly argues how tax policy could be improved by incorporating science and scientific methods.

This guide is a unique resource for art lovers and tourists alike. Selected on the basis of international reputation, architectural appeal, historical and cultural significance and the quality of the collections, Europe’s foremost art galleries and museums are presented here in a comprehensive, accessible and attractive collection.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, offering concise venue descriptions, directions and historical information, ‘Anthem Guide to the Art Galleries and Museums of Europe’ is essential reading for holidaymakers with a passion for culture. The Guide also features up-to-date information on everything from ticket prices to special events and from dining opportunities to disabled access, this helpful guide caters for a variety of enthusiasts – from serious collectors to students on a budget.

This book addresses several important questions in the fields of modern, comparative, and world literatures. At a time in which “weak theory” and transnationalism are becoming increasingly pressing topics, the volume considers the utility of philosophical logic, literary worlds, and analytic Asian Philosophy to understand world literature. In doing so, it investigates the ways in which Chinese, English, French, and Japanese writers eager to tackle the challenges of modernity gazed both across the Eurasian landmass and back in time to their own traditions.

Transnationalism and Translation in Modern Chinese, English French, and Japanese Literatures contends that world literature consists of many smaller literary worlds that are founded upon and made to conform with the deep-level ontological assumptions of their native tradition. The translation of texts across times and cultures introduces new logical possibilities to literary traditions and the writers who sustain them. Yet each translation also amounts to the creation of a new literary world, in which the ontological assumptions of the original are made to cohere according to the possibilities afforded by the culture into which the text is translated. This clash of ontologies, often overlooked in world literary studies, forms the basis of modern translational literature.

This book presents four comparative case studies. It begins with Ted Hughes’ and Chou-wen Chung’s attempt to make the Bardo Thödol express the desires of an expatriate American-Chinese composer and a rising English poet in the 1950s; passes by Paul Claudel’s and Mishima Yukio’s mid-century adaptations of medieval Nō theatre; looks at Claudel’s and Kuki Shūzō’s efforts to make the poetry of the Kokin Wakashū and premodern Japan accord with the experience of being an expatriate in 1920s Tokyo and Paris; and finishes with Hughes’ and Bei Dao’s endeavours to place themselves as heirs to the traditions of both China and Europe. It is these fortuitous but often ignored points of contact between East and West, ancient and modern, that exemplify the challenges and possibilities of transnationalism, allowing for an innovative new way of comprehending the multidirectional flow of world literature.

Cities and towns continue to evolve and are utilizing a range of planning and design strategies in urban landscapes that focus on climate change, social accommodation and livability. All of the strategies are potential influences on future urban experience and identity. In order to produce positive results, communities are applying urban planning and design concepts based on current and future environmental prospects. The result is a range of concepts aligned with numerous planning and design standards for urban viability, now and in the future.

Urban Landscape Priorities, Opportunities and Prospect is unique in addressing current priorities and opportunities as standards for the future quality of urban landscape initiatives. A key standard is inductive, bottom-up context applications that produce livable and sustainable urban landscape contexts. Current participants in this vision are planners, designers and fine artists. The result is a text that emphasizes priorities, opportunities and potential prospects as interrelated planning and design influences on current and future urban landscapes.

Thomas Keneally is known as a best-selling novelist and public figure in his Australian homeland and has also managed a transnational career. He is, however, something of a conundrum in being regularly disparaged by critics and often failing to meet expectations of sales. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ explains some of the reasons behind such disparities, focusing in part on his deliberate transition from high-style modernist to ‘journeyman’ entertainer while continuing to write across both modes. 

Reactions to this shift have been framed by critical and cultural investments, and by an idea of the literary career common to both high literary and popular taste. This study examines the complex network that is a career, considering personality traits, authorial agency, agents, editors and shifts in publishing from colonial control to multinational corporations. As such, the study moves across and beyond conventional literary biography and literary history, incorporating aspects of book history and celebrity studies.

In doing so, this book relies on Keneally’s extensive archive, much of it previously unexamined. It shows his ambition to earn his living from writing playing out across three markets, his work in other modes (writing for the stage and screen, travel writing, historical narratives) and the breadth and depth of expressions of his social conscience, including political protest, leading professional associations and work for constitutional reform, the Sydney Olympics, and so on. Keneally is seen as playing a long game across several events rather than honing one specialist skill, a strategy that has sustained for more than 50 years his keenness to live off writing.

Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ‘Mapping the Nation’ offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870–1920. Centering upon the “mapping” of India – both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal – this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England.

The anthology’s selection defines India in various ways: as being against Britain in loyalty and/or critique; in “exile” in or through memories of England; through a reconstructed past; through satirical or earnest depictions of her contemporary politics; through depictions of the subcontinent’s landscape and scenery; through her various regions and their inhabitants, customs, cultures and religions; or through odes to British and Indian literary figures and politicians. This rich bounty of content is complemented by an equally detailed array of auxiliary notes, including annotations and appendices of poets’ prefaces, assessments of other contemporaries, and a collection of formerly lost archive material.

As becomes evident, the diversity of India’s imagining by her poets during this period corresponds to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography. In grouping its poetry according to region of publication, this anthology makes a structural innovation that negotiates the politics of locality, nation and empire by acknowledging the importance of all three terms in constructing an Indian national and cultural identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Fair Value Accounting: From Theory to Practice is a comprehensive guide to fair value measurement – one of the foundations of modern-day accounting. Fair value measurement is extremely important since it touches upon both accounting and finance. Many items in the financial statements are measured at fair value, e.g. financial instruments, items acquired in business combinations and, under IFRS, investment property. In addition, fair value is used extensively as a valuation base by corporate finance and valuation specialists. The book gradually unfolds the full theoretical framework for measuring fair value for accounting purposes, while providing clear, hands-on implementation guidelines. It includes concise and informative explanations, focusing on the theoretical and practical issues arising from the relevant accounting standards and using illustrative examples and further analysis.

The book covers fair value in accordance with the two most prevalent accounting systems used worldwide: International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP). Although they take very similar approaches to the topic, there are some slight, albeit significant, differences between them that are thoroughly discussed in the book.

The book combines professional accounting literature, standards and practice into a single well-rounded and user-friendly resource. The book is intended as an essential tool not only for professionals involved in preparing or auditing financial statements – such as accountants and financial managers – but also for practitioners in related domains, such as appraisers and preparers of valuations for legal proceedings based on fair value. The book includes many practical examples for students (specifically, accounting students as well as individuals preparing to take the CPA exams) and accounting and finance researchers as well as for other academic purposes. 

‘Travellers to the Middle East from Burkhardt to Thesiger’ is a compendious anthology of travellers' writings produced during the high tide of Britain’s involvement in the Middle East. The anthology contains extracts from many of the canonical travel texts of the period, including passages by T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Robert Byron, as well as many more extracts from both female and male writers. The anthology is also enlivened by the broad geographical span covered, including descriptions of territories in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Arabia and Persia.

Geoffrey Nash’s introduction, notes and background material provide specialist historical analysis and biographical information informed by critical and theoretical perspectives relevant to the genre of travel writing. This anthology will satisfy the growing interest in the study of travel writing, in addition to offering the general reader valuable insights into British perceptions of the Middle East.

The book has two, related parts: the first historical and the second theoretical. The first part traces the beginning of “religious studies,” as it now increasingly is called, to the early nineteenth century. It places those beginnings in the broader cultural context of what is generally referred to as Romanticism. A case is made that the principal relations between the origins of religious studies and Romanticism is that both arise as reactions to major characteristics of modern culture, primarily the turn of attention away from the past and toward the future and from textuality toward rationality and materiality, including the separation of the two from one another.

The first or historical half of the book is structured by three recurring and enduring interests in religion by scholars, mainly working in the social or human sciences, including history, that are shared during the period and continue, albeit in more complex and varied forms, today. The first of these three interests is the importance for religious people of the past and its continuing relevance to their present and future. This interest and evaluation of the past and origins is, either directly or implicitly, contrasted to Western modernity’s orientation to the future and neglect and devaluing of the past. The second interest or focus is on the emphasis among religious people on the intangible or spiritual in human lives and cultures. This interest is, either directly or by implication, a reaction to the importance in modernity that is ascribed to the tangible and material. The third interest taken by scholars in the cultures of religious societies is the adequacy and coherence of worldviews that they provide, which stand in contrast to the lack in modern culture of worldviews that have a comparable degree of coherence and adequacy. These three interests are treated by including for each of them brief sketches of the work of five scholars arranged in chronological order. The conclusion drawn from these surveys of fifteen scholars from the beginning of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, most of whom were working in the social or human sciences, is that they shared an interest in human needs, potentials, and well being and a recognition that in various ways and to varying degrees modern culture is questionable due to its inability to provide what can be seen as an active aspect of religiously constituted cultures, particularly those of peoples not affected by the principal characteristics of Western modernity. The conclusion drawn is that religion has provided and continues for many to provide benefits that modernity otherwise fails to provide and that if religion can no longer play this role, something else must or will be found to fill the need or provide the benefits that religion once provided.

The second or theoretical part of the book addresses questions and problems that appear in and for the study of religion. One of these is the question of what must be included if a person or a people is identified as religious. It is argued that an adequate answer to this question is a more complex and dynamic understanding of religion than is generally the case, that definitions of religion tend to be too simple and static. The case is made that there are three necessary and sufficient aspects or components of being religious. Another question addressed in this second part is why religion is so often marked by sharp differences, tensions, and even conflicts within a single religion, between differing religions, and between religious and nonreligious groups or people. Another question treated in this part concerns the differences that arise between studying religion while being religious and studying religion while being nonreligious.

The two parts of the book are held together by the recurring attention that is given to the last of these questions, that is, the difference between studying religion while being religious and studying religion in nonreligious or secular ways. The case is made that this problem, the relations of religious and nonreligious study of religion to one another, has troubled the field from its beginnings. The development of the field as presented in the first part of the book was carried on largely by scholars who, even when not themselves religious, saw religion as having had beneficial relations to human well being. But by the middle of the twentieth century, it became clear that religion as part of human life and culture in the West needed more directly to be religiously supported, and faculties of religious studies in higher education were formed or enlarged by scholars who had, for reasons given, more explicitly religious bases for their studies of religion. This difference within the field between religious and secular study of religion threatens the field’s coherence; one overarching purposes of the book is to identify how and why a greater rapprochement between the two sides is both badly needed and, if guided by the book, approachable.

Shots to the Heart explores how the work of the film actor inspires, provokes, and refigures our feelings and thoughts about the cinema. The book closely considers the art of film performance, the combined effect of actors’ gestures, movements, and expressions, in relation to the viewer’s sensitive and creative eye. As discrete moments of performative incarnation onscreen slowly accumulate, actors also become figures of meaning. For many viewers, the screen figures which result from performance are simply called “characters.” But in thinking about cinema, the words “character” and “characterization” signal post-experiential abstractions: when we quickly identify characters or summarize characterization after seeing a movie, we are leaping over the emotions felt through our loving attention to the bodies flitting through a film. Such concepts can never replace a careful regard for what actors onscreen are actually doing, moment by moment, gesture by gesture. Shots to the Heart is finally not too concerned with the narrative machinations within which these gestures are inscribed, and even resists the attempt to assemble these descriptions of performance into a “full” account of the film as a whole. What Shots to the Heart does is let little moments of performance live on, in writing, as they are strung together alongside performative fragments from other films, in a kind of alternative, cinephilic account of what was felt as actors moved on the screen before us.

This book explores the philosophy of economic forecasting under uncertainty. In economics the extreme events are difficult and often impossible to predict, especially when leaning upon the past only. Events can be approximately evaluated, as they may be sudden and erratic. The presentation of programs for years ahead is of little value because the uncertainty intervals expand when economic volatility increases, forming uncertainty bands. This book presents the effect of an expanding uncertainty band.

This book reasons that the economic system has sensitivity thresholds - critical states of economic processes at which they significantly alter their characteristics. In those critical states, economic phase transitions may occur. A slowdown in economic growth, especially a tangible recession, can result in negative qualitative changes in the economy, which can have a long-term impact. As in medicine, in economics, the diagnosis must not be rigid and permanent. Vital indicators could and will change throughout therapy. A rigid forecast resulting in an attempt to ensure the rigid stability of indicators is dangerous and fraught with irreparable economic losses.

To solve the issue of inflexible programs, this book presents the minimal uncertainty interval. This method is to open a logical path from the predicament of explaining its quantitatively precise indefinability of the indicators. The aim is to contribute to the flexible and realistic concept about possible dynamics of economic processes with interval forecasts and probabilistic evaluations of those events’ outcomes. It is indicated that exiting the allowable intervals of regulatory indicators contributes to the emergence of economic diseases. This book tries to explore and systematize economic diseases, presents the factors that affect forecast efficiency, and makes the forecast satisfactory. Based on the systematization of the conducted research, this book formulates the ten principles of forecasting, which are necessary for forecasting the economic processes and decision-making under uncertainty.