Manchester University Press

The Second World War and the German Occupation remain a major focal point in French culture and society, with new and sometimes controversial titles published every year – Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, both rapidly translated into English, offer just two examples of this significant phenomenon.

Gathering within one volume studies of genres, visual cultures, chronology, narrative theory, and a wealth of narratives in fiction and film, Framing narratives of the Second World War and occupation in France 1939-2009 brings together an internationally distinguished group of contributors and offers an authoritative overview of criticism on war and occupation narratives in French, a redefinition of the canon of texts and films to be studied and a vibrant demonstration of the richness of the work in this area.

Edited by two leading specialists, the book includes contributions by William Cloonan, Richard J Golsan, Leah Hewitt, Colin Nettelbeck and Gisèle Sapiro.

The US Economy Today provides an invaluable introduction to American economic history since 1929. Its coverage includes the New Deal, the post-war boom, “stagflation” in the 1970s, “Reaganomics”, the Clinton and Bush years, the 2008 - 2009 economic crisis and President Obama’s first hundred days. In addition, this volume considers core contemporary economic policy debates and draws conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the US economic “model”. It looks at the causes and consequences of inequality, the extent to which there is economic mobility, and the impact of globalization and foreign trade.

This book will be essential reading for those studying or teaching American economics, economic history or politics and all those looking for a thorough and comprehensive introduction to this area.

This is the first full-length study of the films of François Ozon, director of such diverse films as 8 femmes, Swimming Pool, 5x2 and Les amants criminels. Andrew Asibong’s passionate and critical analysis focuses on the extent to which Ozon’s seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty issue of existential transformation, a transformation that affects both his protagonists and his audiences.

A central question emerges: what is at stake, cinematically, ethically and politically, in Ozon’s alternatively utopian and cynical flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations.

Revealing Ozon as a highly adept ‘fan’ of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon’s importance for a thoroughly postmodern filmgoing generation to be given the attention it deserves.

The Bush Administration, sex and the moral agenda considers White House policy towards issues such as abortion, sex education, obscenity and same-sex marriage. The book suggests that although accounts have often emphasised the ties between George W. Bush and the Christian right, the administration's strategy was, at least until early 2005, also directed towards the courting of middle ground opinion.

This study offers a detailed and comprehensive survey of policy-making; assesses the political significance of moral concerns; evaluates the role of the Christian right, and throws new light on George W. Bush's years in office and the character of his thinking. The book will prove invaluable for those taking social science courses as well as as well as anyone with a general interest in the Bush presidency.

This completely revised and updated third edition of Scandinavian politics today follows the format of earlier editions by providing a uniquely comparative, thematic and insightful treatment of politics and government in the five nation-states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, along with the three Home Rule territories of Greenland, Faeroes and Åland that together make up the Nordic region or Norden.

Thirteen chapters cover Scandinavia past and present; parties in developmental perspective; the Scandinavian party system model; the Nordic model of government; the Nordic welfare model; legislative-executive relations in the region; the changing security environment and the transition from Cold War ‘security threats’ to the ‘security challenges' of today; and a concluding chapter looks at regional co-operation, Nordic involvement in the ‘European project’ and the Nordic states as ‘moral superpowers’.

This new edition will be of relevance to topical UK debates on the Nordic model, welfare system change, Scottish independence and the challenges facing small-state systems in a globalised world.

Jews on trial concentrates on Inquisitorial activity during the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition’s history: the first forty years of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews’ enclosure in the ghetto.

Scholars have in the past tended to group trials of Jews and conversos in Italy together. This book emphasises the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure, as well as the evidence examined, and argues that this was especially true in Modena where the secular authority did not have the power during the period in question to reject, or even significantly monitor, Inquisitorial trial procedure. It draws upon the detailed testimony to be found in trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.

This book will appeal to scholars of inquisitorial studies, social and cultural interaction in early modern Europe, Jewish Italian social history and anti-Semitism.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This original and innovative book examines a period in with the development of London was perhaps at its most intense, for in the opening decades of the nineteenth century a concerted attempt was made to transform the metropolis into a modern European capital.

For the first time the re-imaging of London is considered in relation to attitudes towards land, land ownership and the use of landscapes. The author contends that methods of land management and development and the associative values of landscape usually connected with rural environments, were in many ways equally applicable to country and city and formed essential components in the evolution of the metropolis.

This study of London landscapes will be of relevance to a broad range of researchers, academics and those with a lively interest in architectural, social, economic and cultural history.

This collection of essays on the alternative establishments which both Presbyterians and Catholics attempted to create in Britain and Ireland offers a dynamic new perspective on the evolution of post-reformation religious communities. Deriving from the Insular Christianity project in Dublin, the book combines essays by some of the leading scholars in the field with work by brilliant and upcoming researchers.

The contributions, all of which were commissioned, range from synoptic essays which fill in gaps in the existing historiography to tightly coherent research essays that break new ground with regard to a series of central institutional and intellectual issues and problems.

This is a book which will appeal to all those interested in the religious history of early modern Britain and Ireland.

The war that won’t die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers – from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró – rallied to support the country’s democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book’s focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century – including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco’s censorial dictatorship.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.

This book provides a distinctive and empirically rich account of the European Union’s relationship with the Common Market of the South (Mercosur). It seeks to examine the motivations that determine the EU’s policy towards Mercosur; the most important relationship the EU has with another regional economic integration organization.
In order to investigate these motivations (or lack thereof), this study examines the contribution of the main policy- and decision-makers, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, as well as the different contributions of the two institutions. It analyses the development of EU policy towards Mercosur in relation to three key stages.
Arana argues that the dominant explanations in the literature fail to adequately explain the EU’s policy, in particular, these accounts tend to infer the EU’s motives from its activity. Rather than the EU pursuing a strategy, as implied by most of the existing literature, the EU was largely responsive, which explains why the relationship is much less developed than the EU’s relations with other parts of the world.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Public relations was established in Britain by a group of liberal intellectuals in the aftermath of the slump. Central to the startling story of Britain's early public relations pioneers is Sir Stephen Tallents, the inaugural President of the Institute of Public Relations. Tallents was a public sector entrepreneur who lent his patronage to John Grierson's documentary film movement, the BBC Overseas Service, the development of Listener Research and the staging of the Festival of Britain.

A compelling portrait of how the social, economic and media revolutions of early twentieth century reshaped national life, Public relations and the making of modern Britain reveals a country struggling to cope with austerity and crisis that is at once very different from, and yet surprisingly similar to, our own.

This book includes the first reprint of Tallents' influential 'The Projection of England' for over fifty years. It will interest students and scholars of media studies and modern British culture, history and politics.

This collection of essays by scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Taiwan covers a wide range of topics about Ralegh's diversified career and achievements. Some of the essays shed light on less familiar facets such as Ralegh as a father and as he is represented in paintings, statues, and in movies; others re-examine him as poet, historian, as a controversial figure in Ireland during Elizabeth's reign, and look at his complex relationship with and patronage of Edmund Spenser. A recurrent topic is the Hatfield Manuscript in Ralegh's handwriting, which contains his long, unfinished poem 'The Ocean to Cynthia', usually considered a lament about his rejection by Queen Elizabeth after she learned of his secret marriage to one of her ladies-in-waiting.

The book is appropriate for students of Elizabethan-Jacobean history and literature.

Among the contributors are well-known scholars of Ralegh and his era, including James Nohrenberg, Anna Beer, Thomas Herron, Alden Vaughan and Andrew Hiscock.

Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected in academic debate in the fields of mass violence and genocide studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they are killed? In the context of mass violence, death does not constitute the end of the executors' work. Their victims' remains are often treated and manipulated in very specific ways, amounting in some cases to true social engineering, often with remarkable ingenuity. To address these seldom-documented phenomena, this volume includes chapters based on extensive primary and archival research to explore why, how and by whom these acts have been committed through recent history.

Interdisciplinary in scope, Destruction and human remains will appeal to readers interested in the history and implications of genocide and mass violence, including researchers in anthropology, sociology, history, politics and modern warfare.

The research program leading to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n° 283-617.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Since its emergence at the end of the seventeenth century, industrial capitalism as a specific form of social organisation has set recurrent challenges to its own persistence, and until today, it has proved to be successful to develop new ways of accumulation based on its capacity of adaptation. Is this process of transition now accelerating or reaching an end point? This book is a critical exploration of capitalism in transition, bringing together cutting edge, world renowned scholars who reflect from different disciplinary points of view. This collection engages with the primarily Western themes of welfare capitalism and social fragmentation. Structured over three parts, the book analyses; the transformations of welfare societies and capitalism with a focus on South European welfare states and their (in)capacity to tackle poverty; the transformation of work and migration with a special attention to informality and the question of social rights; and the transformation of cities.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1, No poverty.

How can we study globalisation in a way that transcends the material/ideational rift? How has globalisation resonated and/or dominated in different national contexts? What role has been played by national political economies and domestic institutions in this process?

Producing globalisation attempts to scrutinise the nature of the interplay between globalisation and national institutional settings. Rather than taking globalisation as a given, this book explores how concrete political actors produced the phenomenon of globalisation. Such an approach aims to bring human agency and its importance to the forefront of theory and practice in world politics and economics. The analysis is based on two case-studies, Greece and Ireland. By examining and comparing the discourses, policies and strategies of key, national institutional actors in these two countries, Producing globalisation offers new insights into the emergence of globalisation as a hegemonic discourse, as well as into the theory of hegemonic discourse itself. Thus the author invites us to think differently both about the nature of globalisation and the nature of the hegemonic within international political economy.

Noah’s Flood is one of the Bible’s most popular stories, and flood myths survive in many cultures today. This book presents the first comprehensive examination of the incorporation of the Flood myth into the Anglo-Saxon imagination. Focusing on literary representations, it contributes to our understanding of how Christian Anglo-Saxons perceived their place in the cosmos. For them, history unfolded between the primeval Deluge and a future – perhaps imminent – flood of fire, which would destroy the world. This study reveals both an imaginative diversity and shared interpretations of the Flood myth. Anglo-Saxons saw the Flood as a climactic event in God’s ongoing war with his more rebellious creatures, but they also perceived the mystery of redemption through baptism.

Anlezark studies a range of texts against their historical background, and discusses shifting emphases in the way the Flood was interpreted for diverse audiences. The book concludes with a discussion of Beowulf, relating the epic poem’s presentation of the Flood myth to that of other Anglo-Saxon texts.

In recent years there has been a significant growth in interest of the so-called “law in context” extending legal studies beyond black letter law. This book looks at the relationship between statute law and legal practice. It examines how law is applied in reality and more precisely how law is perceived by the general public in contrast to the legal profession. The authors look at a number of themes that are central to examining ways in which myths about law are formed, and how there is inevitably a constitutive power aspect to this myth making. At the same time they explore to what extent law itself creates and sustains myths. The book will be of general interest to a number of different disciplines such as legal theory, general law, criminology and sociology.

This book examines the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratisation that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades. It offers a historical overview of Christianity’s engagement with the development of democracy, before focusing in detail on the period since the 1970s. Successive chapters deal with: the Roman Catholic conversion to democracy and the contribution of that church to democratisation; the Eastern Orthodox ‘hesitation’ about democracy; the alleged threat to American democracy posed by the politicisation of conservative Protestantism; and the likely impact on democratic development of the global expansion of Pentecostalism.

The author draws out several common themes from the analysis of these case studies, the most important of which is the ‘liberal-democracy paradox’. This ensures that there will always be tensions between faiths that proclaim some notion of absolute truth and political orders that are rooted in the idea of compromise, negotiation and bargaining.

Written in an accessible style, this book will appeal to students of politics, sociology and religion, and prove useful on a range of advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Through a series of thematic chapters, Julie Anderson explores the nature of injured and disabled bodies before, during and after the Second World War.

Beginning at the end of the First World War and finishing with the publication of the Piercy Committee’s report in 1956, the book examines medical practice, State support, societal attitudes and cultural meanings surrounding disabled war veterans and civilians. The book focuses on the embodied nature of the rehabilitative process, its gendered nature and the concentration on bodily fitness during the war. Using a series of case studies, this wide-ranging book seeks to understand the processes, methodology and practice of rehabilitation for those injured and disabled in war, and reflect on its adoption in post-war Britain.

War, disability and rehabilitation in Britain will interest historians of medicine, war and disability studies.

Based on a wide range of original sources, including folktales, anthropological studies, court statements, poetry and speeches, this book sheds new light on the struggle of people of African descent for full and equal citizenship in the post-emancipation British Caribbean. It examines the messages that African-Jamaican women were given about their place and roles from within and outside their own community, the extent to which these messages intersected with class and colour ideologies, and African-Jamaican women’s attempts to realise these ideals of femininity amidst various constraints.

Incorporating the full realm of African-Jamaican women’s experiences, exploring not just their sexuality and reproduction but also their roles as labourers, citizens and freedom fighters, the book also links shifting gender ideologies to citizenship, race and nation. Essential reading for undergraduates and graduates interested in gender within the British Caribbean during the critical transformative period between 1865 and 1938, it will also interest political scientists and other scholars working on questions of nationalism, transnationalism and the gendered nature of citizenship.

This book explores the colonial mentalities that shaped and were shaped by women living in colonial India between 1820 and 1932. Using a broad framework the book examines the many life experiences of these women and how their position changed, both personally and professionally, over this long period of study. Drawing on a rich documentary record from archives in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North America, Ireland and Australia this book builds a clear picture of the colonial-configured changes that influenced women interacting with the colonial state.

In the early nineteenth century the role of some women occupying colonial spaces in India was to provide emotional sustenance to expatriate European males serving away from the moral strictures of Britain. However, powerful colonial statecraft intervened in the middle of the century to racialise these women and give them a new official, moral purpose. Only some females could be teachers, chosen by their race as reliable transmitters of genteel accomplishment codes of European, middle-class femininity.

Yet colonial female activism also had impact when pressing against these revised, official gender constructions. New geographies of female medical care outreach emerged. Roman Catholic teaching orders, whose activism was sponsored by piety, sought out other female colonial peripheries, some of which the state was then forced to accommodate. Ultimately the national movement built its own gender thresholds of interchange, ignoring the unproductive colonial learning models for females, infected as these models had become with the broader race, class and gender agendas of a fading raj.

This book will appeal to students and academics working on the history of empire and imperialism, gender studies, postcolonial studies and the history of education.

This book is about the lives of refugee women in Britain and France. Who are they? Where do they come from? What happens to them when they arrive, while they wait for a decision on their claim for asylum, and after the decision, whether positive or negative?
It shows how laws and processes designed to meet the needs of men fleeing political persecution often fail to protect women from persecution in their home countries and fail to meet their needs during and after the decision-making process. It portrays refugee women as resilient, resourceful and potentially active participants in British and French social, political and cultural life. It exposes the obstacles that make active participation difficult.
The book is an authoritative and thorough synthesis of all available material on refugee women in Britain and France. The style is accessible and highly readable, making this an ideal book for academics, students and interested readers.

Although the preoccupation of Gothic storytelling with the family has often been observed, it invites a more systematic exploration. Gothic kinship brings together case studies of Gothic kinship ties in film and literature and offers a synthesis and theorisation of the different appearances of the Gothic family.

Writers discussed include early British Gothic writers such as Eleanor Sleath and Louisa Sidney Stanhope as well as a range of later authors writing in English, including Elizabeth Gaskell, William March, Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite, Patricia Duncker, J. K. Rowling and Audrey Niffenegger. There are also essays on Dutch authors (Louis Couperus and Renate Dorrestein) and on the film directors Wes Craven and Steven Sheil.

Arranged chronologically, the various contributions show that both early and contemporary Gothic display very diverse kinship ties, ranging from metaphorical to triangular, from queer to nuclear-patriarchal. Gothic proves to be a rich source of expressing both subversive and conservative notions of the family.

Gothic kinship will be of interest to academics and students of European and American Gothic in literature and film, gender studies and cultural studies.

René Magritte: Beyond painting offers a rethinking of Magritte’s art from a position informed by contemporary developments in art theory.

The book employs a wide range of literary and philosophical/cultural theoretical frameworks to analyse Magritte’s art. It offers close readings of specific images, paying attention to neglected aspects of Magritte’s work, discussing the significance of cabinets of curiosities and encyclopaedias, trompe l’oeil, framing and forgeries. It addresses a range of intertextual relations between Magritte’s work and that of other Surrealist artists and the art-historical tradition.

This book explores how Magritte’s art challenges conventional notions of originality, canonicity and coherence, revealing his work as being shaped by co-operations and co-options. It demonstrates that uncertainty, incoherence and negation lie at the core of Magritte’s oeuvre.

Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars, Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three terms.

The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren, Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elléouët, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar.

Roadworks: Medieval Britain, medieval roads is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study of roads and wayfinding in medieval England, Wales and Scotland. It looks afresh at the relationship between the road as a material condition of daily life and the formation of local and national communities, arguing that the business of road maintenance, road travel and wayfinding constitutes social bonds. It challenges the long-held picture of a medieval Britain lacking in technological sophistication, passively inheriting Roman roads and never engineering any of its own.

Previous studies of medieval infrastructure tend to be discipline-specific and technical. This accessible collection draws out the imaginative, symbolic, and cultural significance of the road. The key audience for this book is scholars of medieval Britain (early and late) in all disciplines. Its theoretical foundations will also ensure an audience among scholars of cultural studies, especially those in urban studies, transport studies, and economic history.

‘Realist film theory and cinema’ embraces studies of cinematic realism and 19th century tradition, the realist film theories of Lukács, Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer, and the relationship of realist film theory to the general field of film theory and philosophy. This is the first book to attempt a rigorous and systematic application of realist film theory to the analysis of particular films.

The book suggests new ways forward for a new series of studies in cinematic realism, and for a new form of film theory based on realism. It stresses the importance of the question of realism both in film studies and in contemporary life.

Aitken’s work will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of film studies, literary studies, media studies, cultural studies and philosophy.

The Rushdie affair, September 11 2001 and 7/7 pushed British Muslims into the forefront of increasingly fraught debate about multiculturalism. Stereotyping images have proliferated, reducing a heterogeneous minority group to a series of media soundbites.

This book examines contemporary literary representations of Muslims by British writers of South Asian Muslim descent – including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and Nadeem Aslam – to explore the contribution they make to urgent questions about multicultural politics and the place of Muslims within Britain. By focusing on class, and its intersection with faith, ‘race’ and gender in identity- and community-formation, it challenges the dichotomy of secular freedom versus religious oppression that constrains thinking about British Muslims, and offers a more nuanced perspective on multicultural debates and controversies.

Writing British Muslims will appeal to academics and postgraduate and final-year undergraduate students in the fields of postcolonial studies, English studies and cultural studies.

This book takes the concept of postmemory, developed in Holocaust studies, and applies it for the first time to novels by contemporary British writers. Focusing on war fiction, Alden builds upon current scholarship on historical fiction and memory studies, and extends the field by exploring how the use of historical research within fiction illuminates the ways in which we remember and recreate the past.

Using postmemory to unlock both the transgenerational aspects of the novels discussed and the development of historiographic metafiction, Alden provides a ground-breaking analysis of the nature and potential of contemporary historical fiction. By examining the patterns and motivations behind authors’ translations of material from the historical record into fiction, Alden also asks to what extent such writing is, necessarily, metafictional. Ultimately, this study offers an updated answer to the question that historical fiction has always posed: what can fiction do with history that history cannot?

This is a vital new work; the first to take the University of Manchester’s Museum as its subject. By setting the museum in its cultural and intellectual contexts, Nature and culture explores twentieth-century collecting and display, and the status of the object in the modern world. Beginning with the origins of the Manchester Museum, accounting for its development as an internationally renowned university museum, and concluding at its major expansion at the turn of the millennium, this book casts new light on the history of museums.

How did objects become knowledge? Who encountered museum objects on their way to museums? What happened to collections within the museum? How did visitors use and respond to objects? In answering these questions, Nature and culture illuminates not only the history of one institution, but also contributes to wider discussions in the history of science, cultural history and museology.

Conspiracy theory and American foreign policy examines the relationship between secrecy, power and interpretation around international controversy, where foreign policy orthodoxy comes up hard against alternative interpretations. It does so in the context of US foreign policy during the War on Terror, a conflict that was covert and conspiratorial to its core.

Offering a new dimension to debates on post-truth politics, this book critically examines the ‘Arab-Muslim paranoia narrative’: the view that Arab-Muslim resentment towards America is motivated to some degree by a paranoid perception of American power in the Middle East. This narrative is traced from its roots in a post-War liberal understanding of populism through to foreign policy debates about the origins of 9/11, to the strategic heart of the Bush Administration’s War of Ideas. Balancing conceptual innovation with detailed case analysis, Aistrope provides a window into the ideological commitments of the US War on Terror.

Offering a fascinating insight into conspiracy and paranoia, this book is essential reading for those interested in the relationship between secrecy, power, and contemporary politics.

Lukácsian film theory and cinema explores Georg Lukács’ writings on film. The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács is primarily known as a literary theorist, but he also wrote extensively on the cinema. These writings have remained little known in the English-speaking world because the great majority of them have never actually been translated into English – until now. Aitken has gathered together the most important essays and the translations appear here, often for the first time.

This book thus makes a decisive contribution to understandings of Lukács within the field of film studies, and, in doing so, also challenges many existing preconceptions concerning his theoretical position. For example, whilst Lukács’ literary theory is well known for its repudiation of naturalism, in his writings on film Lukács appears to advance a theory and practice of film that can best be described as naturalist.

Lukácsian film theory and cinema is divided into two parts. In part one, Lukács’ writings on film are explored, and placed within relevant historical and intellectual contexts, whilst part two consists of the essays themselves.

This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students working within the fields of film studies, literary studies, intellectual history, media and cultural studies. It is also intended to be the final volume in a trilogy of works on cinematic realism, which includes the author’s earlier European film theory and cinema (2001), and Realist film theory and cinema (2006).

This is the first comprehensive survey of the Irish state, and draws on a range of theoretical approaches to analyse its origins, its evolution, its nature and its role in Ireland’s recent economic success.

The book begins by outlining the fragmentary way in which the Irish state has been treated to date in the social sciences. Subsequent chapters by distinguished contributors then go on to examine the history of the Irish state from 1922 to 1973, the developmental nature of the Irish state since the 1980s, the Irish state as a partnership state, the gendered nature of the state, the changing nature of the state’s autonomy and capacity since independence, whether the Irish state can be described as a competition state, and the activities and policies of the Irish state as a welfare state. The editors examine the lessons learnt from these analyses before detailing a challenging agenda for further research.

The book will be of major interest to students of Irish politics and of Ireland’s recent economic and social development. Given Ireland’s status as a model of success in this globalised era, the book will interest scholars of globalisation and comparative politics, and makes a significant contribution to analyses of the role of the state in this context.

In what ways can we think through the complexities of identity? Identity is a contested concept, but it is more than a thing possessed by agents. Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. In this edited book, identity is explored through a range of unique interdisciplinary case studies from around the world. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. This combination showcases in particular the political implications of identity, how it is constituted, and the effects it produces.

This edited collection will be of particular interest to students of international relations theory, migration studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and policy-making at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

The introduction of FOI in Ireland was a watershed moment in Irish democracy. It gave citizens a right to know, and abolished eighty years of official secrecy that had existed since the foundation of the State. As the new 2014 FOI Act is extended to the gardaí and the Central Bank for the first time, this book critically examines the important contribution the legislation has made to the opening up of Irish democracy and society.

The book includes important contributions from the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Peter Tyndall, former minister Eithne FitzGerald and RTE journalist Richard Dowling. It will be a core text for students of politics and public administration, journalism, media and communications and law; and will be an important reference for policy makers and civil and public servants.

In 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Founding Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of Le Figaro. Between 1909 and 1912 the Futurists published over thirty manifestos, celebrating speed and danger, glorifying war and technology, and advocating political and artistic revolution. This collection of essays aims to reassess the activities of the Italian Futurist movement from an international and interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its activities and legacies in the field of poetry, painting, sculpture, theatre, cinema, advertising and politics.

The essays offer exciting new readings in gender politics, aesthetics, historiography, intermediality and interdisciplinarity. They explore the works of major players of the movement as well as its lesser-known figures, and the often critical impact of Futurism on contemporary or later avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Dada and Vorticism.

Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than ‘deeper’ or more ‘substantive’ aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter: in new objects, the surface is the site of qualities of finish, texture, the site of tactile interaction, the last point of contact between object and maker, and the first point of contact between object and user.

Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the faking of antiques; postmodern architecture and design; contemporary film costume. Of particular emphasis within the volume are textiles, which are among the most complex and culturally rich materialisations of surface. As a whole, the book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new.

This book is available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

At a time when payment is claiming a greater place than ever before within the NHS, this book provides the first in-depth investigation of the workings, scale and meaning of payment in British hospitals before the NHS. There were only three decades in British history when it was the norm for patients to pay the hospital; those between the end of the First World War and the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. Payment played an important part in redefining rather than abandoning medical philanthropy, based on class divisions and the notion of financial contribution as a civic duty.

With new insights on the scope of private medicine and the workings of the means test in the hospital, as well as the civic, consumer and charitable meanings associated with paying the hospital, Gosling offers a fresh perspective on healthcare before the NHS and welfare before the welfare state.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.