The social construction of Swedish neutrality

$29.95

Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the post-9/11 international environment, neutrality has been conceptualised as a problematic subject. With the end of bipolarity, neutrality as a foreign and security policy lost much of its justification, and in the ongoing ‘War on Terror’, no state, according to the Bush Administration, can be neutral. However, much of this debate has gone unnoticed in IR literature. This book, newly available in paperback, examines the conceptualisation of neutrality from the Peloponnesian War to the present day, uncovering how neutrality has been a neglected and misunderstood subject in IR theory and politics. By rethinking neutrality through constructivism, this book argues that neutrality is intrinsically linked to identity.

Using Sweden as a case study, it links identity, sovereignty, internationalism and solidarity to the debates about Swedish neutrality today and how neutrality has been central to Swedish identity and its world-view.

The social construction of Swedish neutrality

Dancing in the English style

$36.95

Dancing in the English style explores the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain from the end of the First World War to the early 1950s. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain's predominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the dance profession and dance hall industry and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a 'national' dancing style, which constructed, circulated, and commodified ideas about national identity. At the same time, the book emphasizes the global, exploring the impact of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain's place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age.

Chaplains in early modern England

$130.00

Who were early modern chaplains and what did they do? Chaplains are well known to have been pivotal figures within early modern England, their activities ranging from more conventionally religious roles (conducting church services, offering spiritual advice and instruction) to a surprisingly wide array of literary functions (writing poetry, or acting as scribes and editors). Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion explores the important, but often neglected, contributions made by chaplains of different kinds – royal, episcopal, noble, gentry, diplomatic – to early modern English culture. Addressing a period from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, it focuses on chaplains from the Church of England, examining their roles in church and politics, and within both domestic and cultural life. It also shows how understanding the significance of chaplains can illuminate wider cultural practices – patronage, religious life and institutions, and literary production – in the early modern period.

Healing with water

$130.00

Healing with water provides a medical and social history of English spas and hydropathic centres from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that demand for healing rather than leisure drove the growth of a number of inland resorts which became renowned for expertise and treatment facilities. These aspects were actively marketed to doctors and patients. It assesses the influence of these centres on broader patterns of resort development, leisure and sociability in Britain. The study explores ideas about water’s healing potential and the varied ways it was used to maintain good health and treat a variety of illnesses. Water cures were endorsed by both orthodox and unorthodox practitioners and attracted growing numbers of patients into the twentieth century. It examines how institutions and skilled workers shaped the development of specialist resorts and considers why the NHS support for spa treatment declined from the 1960s.

Ideology and politics in Britain today

$22.95

Politicians still call themselves socialists, conservatives and liberals, but among these groups exist very different understandings of what these terms represent. This new book provides a clear, comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the ideas and doctrines that have shaped, and will continue to shape, British politics. The first section of the book looks at different aspects of the wider context, the nature of political doctrines or ideologies and the role they play in politics in general. The main section of the book examines individual ideologies, broadly grouped into two categories of "mainstream" ideologies--conservatism, socialism, liberalism, and nationalism--and the "fringe"--namely the Greens, the far left and the far right. British democracy, economic policy and consensus, the nature of ideological thinking and its place in politics are also considered. Finally, a short section considers the future: what forces, such as globalization and postmodernity, will shape the further development of those doctrines which are part of British politics today?

Surface tensions

$140.00

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.

Amy Tan

$18.95

This is the most comprehensive study to date of Amy Tan’s work. It offers close readings of her texts in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality.

In contrast with Tan’s own American-born narrators, and mainstream critics, Bella Adams’s study looks beyond the stereotypes which appear in Tan’s books, and explores the ways in which Chinese immigrants and their American relatives struggle to understand each others ‘best qualities’ via the Chinese tradition of the ‘talk story’. She emphasises Tan's American narrators' process of becoming Chinese and discovering 'real China', and the significance of the ironic staging of these moments.

Students will find this study both accessible and probing, and scholars will welcome its contribution to our understanding of a significant figure in contemporary literature.

Myth and materiality in a woman’s world

$130.00

Shetland has a history unique in Europe, for over the past two centuries it was a place where women dominated the family, economy, and the cultural imagination. Women ran households and crofts without men. They maintained families and communities because men were absent. And they constructed in their minds an identity of themselves as 'liberated' long before organised feminism was invented. And yet, Shetland is a place which was made by the most masculine of societies - those of the Picts, Scots and above all the Vikings - and its contemporary identity still draws on the heroic exploits and sagas of medieval Norsemen. This book examines how against this tradition Shetland became a female place, and offers answers as to how, in this most isolated island community, the inhabitants transgressed and reversed their traditional gender roles. Reconstructing this 'woman's world' from fragments of cultural experience captured in written and oral sources, this book will appeal to scholars in the fields of social and cultural history, social anthropology, gender and women's studies.

Dada bodies

$130.00

This is the first comprehensive study of bodily images in Dada. Travelling between the international centres of the movement, from Zurich to Berlin, Paris to New York, it examines a diverse range of media, including art, literature, performance, photography and film. Its overall approach is to confront Dada’s bodily images not as organic unities but as fictions that reflect on the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe. These fictions occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield (in their satirical exposure of ideology) and the fairground (in their playful manipulation and joyful renewal of the body). The book features analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Höch, Marcel Duchamp and others, and will appeal to scholars and students of European history, cultural history, art and literature.

Political ideology today

$15.95

Ian Adams examines the tenets of liberalism, socialism, conservatism, Marxism, anarchism, and fascism. This new edition covers recent developments in religious and sexual politics, environmentalism, animal rights, post-Marxism, communitarianism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Recent events covered include the Asian financial crisis, the Balkan wars, and the election of the New Labour government. Adams shows how contemporary ideological thinking is still thriving, and discusses prospects for future ideological developments, including the growth of small scale and local ideologies.

Framing cosmologies

$140.00

How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book’s key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.

Dancing in the English style

$130.00

Dancing in the English style explores the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain from the end of the First World War to the early 1950s. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain's predominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the dance profession and dance hall industry and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a 'national' dancing style, which constructed, circulated, and commodified ideas about national identity. At the same time, the book emphasizes the global, exploring the impact of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain's place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age.

Working in a world of hurt

$130.00

Working in a world of hurt fills a significant gap in the studies of the psychological trauma wrought by war. It focuses not on soldiers, but on the men and women who fought to save them in casualty clearing stations, hospitals and prison camps. The writings by doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and other medical personnel reveal the spectrum of their responses that range from breakdown to resilience. Through a rich analysis of both published and unpublished personal from the First World War in the early twentieth century to Iraq in the early twenty-first, Acton and Potter put centre stage the letters, diaries, memoirs and weblogs that have chronicled physical and emotional suffering, many for the first time. Wide-ranging in scope, interdisciplinary in method, and written in a scholarly yet accessible style, Working in a world of hurt is essential reading for lecturers and students as well as the general reader.

Framing cosmologies

$45.95

How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book’s key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory.

Payment and philanthropy in British healthcare, 1918–48

$44.95

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.

Payment and philanthropy in British healthcare, 1918–48

Aesthetics of contingency

$130.00

This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of ‘England’s troubles’. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden’s last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew.

Myth and materiality in a woman’s world

$29.95

The place of women in Shetland society is unique. In this isolated island group off the north of Scotland, women dominated the family, economy and the cultural imagination for 200 years. Here, women were numerically preponderant and economically vital. They maintained families and communities because men were absent. In their minds they constructed an identity of themselves as ‘liberated’ long before organised feminism was invented.

It examines the opportunities and life experiences of women in a place where more of them worked and fewer got married than anywhere else in the British Isles. And it is about the relationship between myth-making and historical materiality and the ways in which the people of this northern archipelago have imagined their past. Reconstructing this ‘woman’s world’ from fragments of cultural experience captured in written and oral sources, the author recreates and explores Shetland using its inhabitants’ material experience and personal testimony.