bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Threat of Force in International Law
Authors: Stürchler Nikolas
Published: December 2009

Threats of force are a common feature of international politics, advocated by some as an economical guarantee against the outbreak of war and condemned by others as a recipe for war. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter forbids states to use threats of force, yet the meaning of the prohibition is unclear. This book provides the first comprehensive appraisal of the no-threat principle: its origin, underlying rationale, theoretical implications, relevant jurisprudence, and how it has withstood the test of time from 1945 to the present. Based on a systematic evaluation of state and United Nations practices, the book identifies what constitutes a threat of force and when its use is justified under the United Nations Charter. In so doing, it relates the no-threat principle to important concepts of the twentieth century, such as deterrence, escalation, crisis management, and what has been aptly described as the 'diplomacy of violence'.
The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England
Authors: Biancalana Joseph
Published: December 2009

Fee tails were a basic building block for family landholding from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The classic entail was an interest in land which was inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to the lineal heirs of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins, development and use of the entail in later medieval England, and the origins and early use of a reliable legal mechanism for the destruction of individual entails, the common recovery. He untangles the complex history surrounding medieval landholding in this detailed study of the fee tail, the product of extensive research in original sources. This book includes an extensive index of over three hundred common recoveries with discussions of their transactional contexts. A major work which will interest lawyers and historians.
Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy
Authors: Dean Trevor
Published: December 2009

In this important study, Trevor Dean examines the history of crime and criminal justice in Italy from the mid-thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. The book contains studies of the most frequent types of prosecuted crime such as violence, theft and insult, along with the rarely prosecuted sorcery and sex crimes. Drawing on a diverse and innovative range of sources, including legislation, legal opinions, prosecutions, chronicles and works of fiction, Dean demonstrates how knowledge of the history of criminal justice can illuminate our wider understanding of the Middle Ages. Issues and instruments of criminal justice reflected the structure and operation of state power; they were an essential element in the evolution of cities and they provided raw material for fictions. Furthermore, the study of judicial records provides insight into a wide range of social situations, from domestic violence to the oppression of ethnic minorities.
Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque
Authors: Forster Marc R.
Published: December 2009

This book is a study of Catholic reform, popular Catholicism and the development of confessional identity in southwest Germany. Based on extensive archival study, it argues that Catholic confessional identity developed primarily from the identification of villagers and townspeople with the practices of Baroque Catholicism - particularly pilgrimages, processions, confraternities and the Mass. Thus the book is in part a critique of the confessionalization thesis which dominates scholarship in this field. The book is not however focused narrowly on the concerns of German historians. An analysis of popular religious practice and of the relationship between parishioners and the clergy in villages and small towns allows for a broader understanding of popular Catholicism, especially in the period after 1650. Local Baroque Catholicism was ultimately a successful convergence of popular and elite, lay and clerical elements, which led to an increasingly elaborate religious style.
Peter the Great
Authors: Bushkovitch Paul
Published: December 2009

A narrative of the fifty years of political struggles at the Russian court, 1671–1725. This book shows how Peter the Great was not the all-powerful tsar working alone to reform Russia, but that he colluded with powerful and contentious aristocrats in order to achieve his goals. After the early victory of Peter's boyar supporters in the 1690s, Peter turned against them and tried to rule through favourites - an experiment which ended in the establishment of a decentralized 'aristocratic' administration, followed by an equally aristocratic Senate in 1711. The aristocrats' hegemony came to an end in the wake of the affair of Peter's son, Tsarevich Aleksei, in 1718. After that moment Peter ruled through a complex group of favourites, a few aristocrats and appointees promoted through merit, and carried out his most long-lasting reforms. The outcome was a new balance of power at the centre and a new, European, conception of politics.
Modern Architectural Theory
Authors: Mallgrave Harry Francis
Published: December 2009

Modern Architectural Theory is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of architectural theory, primarily in Europe and the United States, during three centuries of development. In this synthetic overview, Harry Mallgrave examines architectural discourse within its social and political context. He explores the philosophical and conceptual evolution of its ideas, discusses the relation of theory to the practice of building, and, most importantly, considers the words of the architects themselves, as they contentiously shaped Western architecture. He also examines the compelling currents of French rationalist and British empiricist thought, radical reformation of the theory during the Enlightenment, the intellectual ambitions and historicist debates of the nineteenth century, and the distinctive varieties of modern theory in the twentieth century up to the profound social upheaval of the 1960s. Modern Architectural Theory challenges many assumptions about architectural modernism and uncovers many new dimensions of the debates about modernism.
Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History
Authors: Shanske Darien
Published: December 2009

This book addresses the question of how and why history begins with the work of Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War is distinctive in that it is a prose narrative, meant to be read rather than performed. It focuses on the unfolding of contemporary great power politics to the exclusion of almost all other elements of human life, including the divine. The power of Thucydides' text has never been attributed either to the charm of its language or to the entertainment value of its narrative, or to some personal attribute of the author. In this study, Darien Shanske analyzes the difficult language and structure of Thucydides' History and argues that the text has drawn in so many readers into its distinctive world view precisely because of its kinship to the contemporary language and structure of Classical Tragedy. This kinship is not merely a matter of shared vocabulary or even aesthetic sensibility. Rather, it is grounded in a shared philosophical position, in particular on the polemical metaphysics of Heraclitus.
Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece
Authors: Farenga Vincent
Published: December 2009

This 2006 study examines how the ancient Greeks decided questions of justice as a key to understanding the intersection of our moral and political lives. Combining contemporary political philosophy with historical, literary and philosophical texts, it examines a series of remarkable individuals who performed 'scripts' of justice in early Iron Age, archaic and classical Greece. From the earlier periods, these include Homer's Achilles and Odysseus as heroic individuals who are also prototypical citizens, and Solon the lawgiver, writing the scripts of statute law and the jury trial. In democratic Athens, the focus turns to dialogues between a citizen's moral autonomy and political obligation in Aeschyleon tragedy, Pericles' citizenship paradigm, Antiphon's sophistic thought and forensic oratory, the political leadership of Alcibiades and Socrates' moral individualism.
Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness
Authors: Livingston Paul M.
Published: December 2009

The problem of explaining consciousness remains a problem about the meaning of language: the ordinary language of consciousness in which we define and express our sensations, thoughts, dreams and memories. This book argues that the problem arises from a quest that has taken shape over the twentieth century, and that the analysis of history provides new resources for understanding and resolving it. Paul Livingston traces the development of the characteristic practices of analytic philosophy to problems about the relationship of experience to linguistic meaning, focusing on the theories of such philosophers as Carnap, Schlick, Neurath, Husserl, Ryle, Putnam, Fodor and Wittgenstein. Clearly written and avoiding technicalities, this book will be eagerly sought out by professionals and graduate students in philosophy and cognitive science.
G. E. Moore's Ethical Theory
Authors: Hutchinson Brian
Published: December 2009

This 2001 book is a comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the twentieth century. Moore's ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from scepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Moore's arguments in detail and in the process relates the ethical thought to Moore's anti-sceptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing it, sceptical about the very enterprise of philosophy itself, and in this regard, as Brian Hutchinson reveals, was much closer in his thinking to Wittgenstein than has been previously realized. This book shows Moore's ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged.
Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship
Authors: Pangle Lorraine Smith
Published: December 2009

This book offers a comprehensive account of the major philosophical works on friendship and its relationship to self-love. The book gives central place to Aristotle's searching examination of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Lorraine Pangle argues that the difficulties surrounding this discussion are soon dispelled once one understands the purpose of the Ethics as both a source of practical guidance for life and a profound, theoretical investigation into human nature. The book also provides fresh interpretations of works on friendship by Plato, Cicero, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne and Bacon. The author shows how each of these thinkers sheds light on central questions of moral philosophy: is human sociability rooted in neediness or strength? is the best life chiefly solitary, or dedicated to a community with others? Clearly structured and engagingly written, this book will appeal to a broad swathe of readers across philosophy, classics and political science.
Peirce's Theory of Signs
Authors: Short T. L.
Published: December 2009

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.
Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution
Authors: Robert Jason Scott
Published: December 2009

Historically, philosophers of biology have tended to sidestep the problem of development by focusing primarily on evolutionary biology and, more recently, on molecular biology and genetics. Quite often too, development has been misunderstood as simply, or even primarily, a matter of gene activation and regulation. Nowadays a growing number of philosophers of science are focusing their analyses on the complexities of development, and in Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution Jason Scott Robert explores the nature of development against current trends in biological theory and practice and looks at the interrelations between development and evolution (evo-devo), an area of resurgent biological interest. Clearly written, this book should be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint
Authors: Kellogg Frederic R.
Published: December 2009

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is considered by many to be the most influential American jurist. The voluminous literature devoted to his writings and legal thought, however, is diverse and inconsistent. In this study, which was originally published in 2007, Frederic R. Kellogg follows Holmes's intellectual path from his early writings through his judicial career. He offers a fresh perspective that addresses the views of Holmes's leading critics and explains his relevance to the controversy over judicial activism and restraint. Holmes is shown to be an original legal theorist who reconceived common law as a theory of social inquiry and who applied his insights to constitutional law. From his empirical and naturalist perspective on law, with its roots in American pragmatism, emerged Holmes's distinctive judicial and constitutional restraint. Kellogg distinguishes Holmes from analytical legal positivism and contrasts him with a range of thinkers.
A Theory of Argument
Authors: Vorobej Mark
Published: December 2009

A Theory of Argument is an advanced 2006 textbook intended for students in philosophy, communications studies and linguistics who have completed at least one course in argumentation theory, information logic, critical thinking or formal logic. Containing nearly 400 exercises, Mark Vorobej develops a novel approach to argument interpretation and evaluation. One of the key themes of the book is that we cannot succeed in distinguishing good argument from bad arguments until we learn to listen carefully to others. Part I develops a relativistic account of argument cogency that allows for rational disagreement. Part II offers a comprehensive and rigorous account of argument diagramming. Hybrid arguments are contrasted with linked and convergent arguments, and a novel technique is introduced for graphically recording disagreements with authorial claims.
Naturalistic Hermeneutics
Authors: Mantzavinos C.
Published: December 2009

Naturalistic Hermeneutics, first published in 2005, proposes the position of the unity of the scientific method and defends it against the claim to autonomy of the human sciences. Mantzavinos shows how materials that are 'meaningful', more specifically human actions and texts, can be adequately dealt with by the hypothetico-deductive method, the standard method used in the natural sciences. The hermeneutic method is not an alternative method aimed at the understanding and the interpretation of human actions and texts, but it is the same as the hypothetico-deductive method applied to meaningful materials. The central thesis advocated by Mantzavinos is, thus, that there is no fundamental methodological difference between natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Advanced students and professionals across philosophy, social and political theory, and the humanities will find this a compelling and controversial book.
Congregations in Conflict
Authors: Becker Penny Edgell
Published: December 2009

Congregations in Conflict examines the nature of American congregations as institutions, looking in particular at how they deal with conflict within their ranks, to gain insight into religious culture, or the moral order of local religious life. In detailed and well documented case studies of conflict in twenty-three congregations Becker examines such factors as organizational processes, the extent and types of ties between church members, their shared understandings about mission and identity, and level of public commitment. From these factors, the author develops four models of local religious cultures, each of which emphasizes different aspects of the mission imperatives that broadly characterize American religion - to reproduce an historic faith, to provide a caring community of believers, and to witness. Becker finds vital 'public religion': congregations that provide caring and support for members, service to the local community, and important arenas for moral debate and public activism.
Key Issues in Criminal Career Research
Authors: Piquero Alex R. , Farrington David P. , Blumstein Alfred
Published: December 2009

This 2007 book examines several contentious and under-studied criminal career issues using one of the world's most important longitudinal studies, the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), a longitudinal study of 411 South London boys followed in criminal records to age 40. The analysis reported in the book explores issues related to prevalence, offending frequency, specialization, onset sequences, co-offending, chronicity, career length, and trajectory estimation. The results of the study are considered in the context of developmental/life-course theories, and the authors outline an agenda for criminal career research generally, and within the context of the CSDD specifically.
Stone Vessels and Values in the Bronze Age Mediterranean
Authors: Bevan Andrew
Published: December 2009

The societies that developed in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age produced the most prolific and diverse range of stone vessel traditions known at any time or anywhere in the world. Stone vessels are therefore a key class of artefact in the early history of this region. As a form of archaeological evidence, they offer important analytical advantages over other artefact types - virtual indestructibility, a wide range of functions and values, huge variety in manufacturing traditions, as well as the subtractive character of stone and its rich potential for geological provenancing. In this 2007 book, Andrew Bevan considers individual stone vessel industries in great detail. He also offers a highly comparative and value-led perspective on production, consumption and exchange logics throughout the eastern Mediterranean over a period of two millennia during the Bronze Age (ca.3000–1200 BC).
Thinking as Communicating
Authors: Sfard Anna
Published: December 2009

This book is an attempt to change our thinking about thinking. Anna Sfard undertakes this task convinced that many long-standing, seemingly irresolvable quandaries regarding human development originate in ambiguities of the existing discourses on thinking. Standing on the shoulders of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, the author defines thinking as a form of communication. The disappearance of the time-honoured thinking-communicating dichotomy is epitomised by Sfard's term, commognition, which combines communication with cognition. The commognitive tenet implies that verbal communication with its distinctive property of recursive self-reference may be the primary source of humans' unique ability to accumulate the complexity of their action from one generation to another. The explanatory power of the commognitive framework and the manner in which it contributes to our understanding of human development is illustrated through commognitive analysis of mathematical discourse accompanied by vignettes from mathematics classrooms.
Natural Law Liberalism
Authors: Wolfe Christopher
Published: December 2009

Liberal political philosophy and natural law theory are not contradictory, but - properly understood - mutually reinforcing. Contemporary liberalism (as represented by Rawls, Guttman and Thompson, Dworkin, Raz, and Macedo) rejects natural law and seeks to diminish its historical contribution to the liberal political tradition, but it is only one, defective variant of liberalism. A careful analysis of the history of liberalism, identifying its core principles, and a similar examination of classical natural law theory (as represented by Thomas Aquinas and his intellectual descendants), show that a natural law liberalism is possible and desirable. Natural law theory embraces the key principles of liberalism, and it also provides balance in resisting some of its problematic tendencies. Natural law liberalism is the soundest basis for American public philosophy, and it is a potentially more attractive and persuasive form of liberalism for nations that have tended to resist it. This book was first published in 2006.
The Mind of Jihad
Authors: Murawiec Laurent
Published: December 2009

This book examines contemporary jihad as a cult of violence and power. All jihadi groups, whether Shiite or Sunni, Arab or not, are characterized by a similar bloodlust. Murawiec characterizes this belief structure as identical to that of Europe's medieval millenarians and apocalyptics, arguing that both jihadis and their European cousins shared in a Gnostic ideology: a God-given mission endowed the Elect with supernatural powers and placed them above the common law of mankind. Although the ideology of jihad is essentially Islamic, Murawiec traces the political technologies used by modern jihad to the Bolsheviks. Their doctrines of terror as a system of rule were appropriated by radical Islam through multiple lines of communication. This book brings history, anthropology, and theology to bear to understand the mind of jihad that has declared war on the West and the world.
Legislative Deferrals
Authors: Lovell George I.
Published: December 2009

Why do unelected federal judges have so much power to make policy in the United States? Why were federal judges able to thwart apparent legislative victories won by labor organizations in the Lochner era? Most scholars who have addressed such questions assume that the answer lies in the judiciary's constitutionally guaranteed independence, and thus worry that insulated judges threaten democracy when they stray from baseline positions chosen by legislators. Originally published in 2003, this book argues for a fundamental shift in the way scholars think about judicial policy-making. Scholars need to notice that legislators also empower judges to make policy as a means of escaping accountability. This study of legislative deference to the courts offers a dramatic reinterpretation of the history of twentieth-century labor law and shows how attention to legislative deferrals can help scholars to address vexing questions about the consequences of judicial power in a democracy.
Politics and Volunteering in Japan
Authors: Haddad Mary Alice
Published: December 2009

Politics and Volunteering begins by painting a portrait of volunteering in Japan, and demonstrates that our current understandings of civil society have been based implicitly on a U.S. model that does not adequately consider participation patterns found in other parts of the world. The book develops a theory of civic participation that, incorporates citizen attitudes about governmental and individual responsibility, with societal and governmental practices that support (or hinder) volunteer participation. This theory is tested using cross-national and sub-national statistical analysis, and it is refined through detailed case studies of volunteering in three Japanese cities. The findings are then used to build the Community Volunteerism Model, which explains and predicts both the types and rates of volunteering in communities around the world. The model is tested using four cross-national case studies (Finland, Japan, Turkey and the United States) and three sub-national case studies in Japan.
Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside
Authors: Kurtz Marcus J.
Published: December 2009

This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy. It demonstrates how the implementation of even very painful free-market economic reforms in Chile and Mexico have helped to consolidate democratic politics without engendering a backlash against either reform or democratization. This national-level compatibility between free markets and democracy, however, is founded on their rural incompatibility. In the countryside, free-market reforms socially isolate peasants to such a degree that they become unable to organize independently, and are vulnerable to the pressures of local economic elites. This helps to create an electoral coalition behind free-market reforms that is critically based in some of the market's biggest victims: the peasantry. The book concludes that the comparatively stable free-market democracy in Latin America hinges critically on its defects in the countryside; conservative, free-market elites may consent to open politics only if they have a rural electoral redoubt.
Decentralized Authoritarianism in China
Authors: Landry Pierre F.
Published: December 2009

China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime's imperative to control them politically. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an unusually decentralized authoritarian regime. Using unique data collected at the municipal, county, and village level, Landry examines in detail how the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. His research shows that the CCP's personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China's enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.
From Mao to Market
Authors: Wedeman Andrew H.
Published: December 2009

Andrew Wedemen argues that China succeeded in moving from a Maoist command economy to a market economy because the central government failed to prevent local governments from forcing prices to market levels. Having partially decontrolled the economy in the early 1980s, economic reformers baulked at price reform, opting instead for a hybrid system wherein commodities had two prices, one fixed and one floating. Depressed fixed prices led to 'resource wars', as localities battled each other for control over undervalued commodities while inflated consumer goods prices fuelled a headlong investment boom that saturated markets and led to the erection of import barriers. Although local rent seeking and protectionism appeared to carve up the economy, in reality they had not only pushed prices to market levels and cleared the way for sweeping reforms in the 1980s, they had also pushed China past the 'pitfalls' of reform that entrapped other socialist economies.
Crucibles of Political Loyalty
Authors: Wittenberg Jason
Published: December 2009

This book, first published in 2006, investigates one of the oldest paradoxes in political science: why do mass political loyalties persist even amid prolonged social upheaval and disruptive economic development. Drawing on extensive archival research and an original database of election results, this book explores the paradox of political persistence by examining Hungary's often tortuous path from pre- to post-communism. Wittenberg reframes the theoretical debate, and then demonstrates how despite the many depredations of communism, the Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches transmitted loyalties to parties of the Right. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Church resistance occurred not from above, but from below. Hemmed in and harassed by communist party cadres, parish priests and pastors employed a variety of ingenious tactics to ensure the continued survival of local church institutions. These institutions insulated their adherents from pressures to assimilate into the surrounding socialist milieu. Ultimately this led to political continuity between pre- and post-communism.
Mandate Politics
Authors: Grossback Lawrence J. , Peterson David A. M. , Stimson James A.
Published: December 2009

Whether or not voters consciously use their votes to send messages about their preferences for public policy, the Washington community sometimes comes to believe that it has heard such a message. In this 2006 book the authors ask 'What then happens?' They focus on these perceived mandates - where they come from and how they alter the behaviors of members of Congress, the media, and voters. These events are rare. Only three elections in post-war America (1964, 1980 and 1994) were declared mandates by the media consensus. These declarations, however, had a profound if ephemeral impact on members of Congress. They altered the fundamental gridlock that prevents Congress from adopting major policy changes. The responses by members of Congress to these three elections are responsible for many of the defining policies of this era. Despite their infrequency, then, mandates are important to the face of public policy.
The Divergent Dynamics of Economic Growth
Authors: Day Richard H.
Published: December 2009

This book explains how changing technology and economizing behaviour induce vast changes in productivity, resource allocation, labour utilization, and patterns of living. Economic growth is seen as a process by which businesses, regimes, countries, and the whole world pass through distinct epochs, each one emerging from its predecessor, each one creating the conditions for its successor. Viewed from a long-run perspective, growth must be characterized as an explosive process, marked by turbulent transitions in social and political life as societies adapt to new opportunities, the demise of old ways of living, and to the vast increase and redistribution of human populations. The book is based on a synthesis of classical economics and contemporary concepts of adaptation and economic evolution. Although it is based on analytical methods, the text has been stripped of all equations and with few exceptions is devoid of technical jargon.
Righteous Anger at the Wicked States
Authors: Johnson Calvin H.
Published: December 2009

This book is a history that explains the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in terms of what the proponents of the Constitution were trying to accomplish. The Constitution was a revolutionary document replacing the confederation mode with a complete three-part national government supreme over the states. The most pressing need was to allow the federal government to tax to pay off the Revolutionary War debts. In the next war, the United States would need to borrow again. The taxes needed to restore the public credit proved to be quite modest, however, and the Constitution went far beyond the immediate fiscal needs. This book argues that the proponents' anger at the states for their recurring breaches of duty to the united cause explains both critical steps and the driving impetus for the revolution. Other issues were less important.
Ancient China and its Enemies
Authors: Di Cosmo Nicola
Published: December 2009

Relations between Inner Asian nomads and Chinese are a continuous theme throughout Chinese history. By investigating the formation of nomadic cultures, by analyzing the evolution of patterns of interaction along China's frontiers, and by exploring how this interaction was recorded in historiography, this looks at the origins of the cultural and political tensions between these two civilizations through the first millennium BC. The main purpose of the book is to analyze ethnic, cultural, and political frontiers between nomads and Chinese in the historical contexts that led to their formation, and to look at cultural perceptions of 'others' as a function of the same historical process. Based on both archaeological and textual sources, this 2002 book also introduces a new methodological approach to Chinese frontier history, which combines extensive factual data with a careful scrutiny of the motives, methods, and general conception of history that informed the Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien.
Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865
Authors: Collier Simon
Published: December 2009

Chile enjoyed unique prestige among the Spanish American republics of the nineteenth century for its stable and increasingly liberal political tradition. How did this unusual story unfold? The tradition was forged in serious and occasionally violent conflicts between the dominant Conservative Party, which governed in an often authoritarian manner from 1830 to 1858, and the growing forces of political Liberalism. A major political realignment in 1857–8 paved the way for comprehensive liberalization. This book examines the formative period of the republic's history and combines an analysis of the ideas and assumptions of the Chilean political class with a narrative of the political process from the consolidation of the Conservative regime in the 1830s, to the beginnings of liberalization in the early 1860s. The book is based on a comprehensive survey of the writings and speeches of politicians and the often rumbustious Chilean press of the period.
Editing Piers Plowman
Authors: Brewer Charlotte
Published: December 2009

The fifty-plus extant manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to editors and readers. This 1996 book is an account of the editions of the poem which have appeared since 1550, when it was first published by the protestant reformer Robert Crowley. It examines the circumstances in which the editions were produced, the lives and intellectual motivations of the editors, and the relationship between one edition and the next. Brewer places the work of W. W. Skeat at the centre of Piers Plowman editing, showing how he towered above his predecessors and determined the path subsequently taken by editors of the poem, and presents much new biographical information about this extraordinary man. She uses a wide range of published and previously unpublished material to explain the difficulties of editing and to shed light on attempts to crack one of the major editorial conundrums in medieval studies.
Ben Jonson
Authors: Barton Anne
Published: December 2009

Since the Romantic period, Jonson has been an author more respected than read. Frequently compared with Shakespeare, he usually suffers unfairly from the comparison. In this book Anne Barton gives a reading of the plays which completely re-evaluates Jonson as a dramatist. Describing in detail his experimentation with different comic styles and his changing relationship to other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, particularly Shakespeare, she brings us closer than ever before to Jonson as a man, and as a great artist in comedy. The book proceeds chronologically, play by play, examining such important topics as Jonson's treatment of women, trust among individuals, father and son relationships, and proper names. Anne Barton argues that, despite his espousal of classical principles of decorum and restraint, Jonson was always drawn temperamentally towards the irregular, romantic Elizabethan tradition.
Landscape, Liberty and Authority
Authors: Fulford Tim
Published: December 2009

Eighteenth-century landscape description formed part of a larger debate over the nature of liberty and authority which was vital to a Britain newly defining its nationhood in a period of growing imperial power and rapid economic change. Tim Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Gilpin, Repton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others, revealing tensions that arose as writers struggled for authority over the public sphere and sought to redefine the nature of that authority. In his investigation of poetry and political and aesthetic writing, Dr Fulford throws light on the legacy of Commonwealth and Country-party ideas of liberty. Also discussed are the significance of the Miltonic sublime, the politics of the picturesque and the post-colonial encounter of the Scottish tour. Dr Fulford goes on to show how the early radicalism and later conservatism of Wordsworth and Coleridge were shaped, in part, by eighteenth-century literary political and literary authorities. His study offers an understanding of literary and political influence that cuts across conventional periodization, finding new links between the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Wordsworth's Reading 1770–1799
Authors: Wu Duncan
Published: December 2009

Wordsworth's Reading 1770–1799 lists all of the authors and (where possible) books known to have been read by William Wordsworth from his childhood until his move to Dove Cottage in 1799 at the age of twenty-nine. This information is presented in an easy-to-use form - in alphabetical order by author - and includes dates of reading and full discussions of the evidence. It draws on analyses of Wordsworth's manuscripts contained in current or forthcoming scholarly editions of his works, and incorporates a great deal of original research into the poet's intellectual development, including studies of the libraries of John Wordsworth Sr. (the poet's father), Hawkshead Grammar School, Racedown Lodge, and the Bristol Library Society. Where possible, surviving copies of Wordsworth's books are examined and described. This is a most complete study of Wordsworth's reading, and will be an essential reference tool for all scholars and students of his work.
The Spanish American Regional Novel
Authors: Alonso Carlos J.
Published: December 2009

Carlos Alonso's study provides a radical re-examination of the novela de la tierra or regional novel, which plays a central part in the development of Latin American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. He identifies the regional novel as a specific literary manifestation of the persistent meditation on cultural authochthony that has characterized Latin American cultural production from its beginnings, and which in his view springs from Latin America's problematic relationship with Modernity. He proposes a view of the autochthonous as a discourse rather than a referent. Professor Alonso presents his argument through challenging readings of three works that are universally acknowledged as archetypes of the autochthonous modality: Rivera's La voragine, Gallegos's Dona Barbara and Guiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra.
The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist
Authors: Allan Seán
Published: December 2009

This is an accessible 1996 study of the plays of Kleist (1777–1811), who ranks with Goethe and Schiller amongst nineteenth-century authors and who has been a major influence on contemporary German writers. Seán Allan examines Kleist's critique of the aspirations of both Enlightenment and Romantic metaphysics, notably his suggestion that the pursuit of 'transcendent' ideals of perfection constitutes a formidable obstacle to genuine progress in human affairs. In so doing, he offers resolutions of a number of long-running controversies in Kleist criticism, as well as summarizing the state of research on all the plays. The book includes discussion of two plays usually neglected by scholars - Das Käthchen von Heilbronn and Die Hermannsschlacht. All quotations are given in both German and English and full references are given to published English translations of Kleist's works as well as to the German originals.
The Usable Past
Authors: Zamora Lois Parkinson
Published: December 2009

How can we know the past? How can we speak of it in literary forms? Why should we want to? Concentrating on the past as both the subject of fiction and as a force for inscribing fiction, The Usable Past traces the ways in which writers self-consciously participate in the construction of an American canon. Successfully linking Latin American and North American fiction, Lois Zamora invokes authors as diverse in origin and manner as Carlos Fuentes and Willa Cather, Jorge Luis Borges and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sandra Cisneros and Mario Vargas Llosa to explore issues surrounding colonisation and independence, mestizaje and melting pot, domination and self-determination, and the ambivalence of history in a 'new' world. The Usable Past is an elegant examination of the historical attitudes and literary practices of writers located in American time and space - locations that yield insight into American literary visions and versions of history.
Andrei Platonov
Authors: Seifrid Thomas
Published: December 2009

The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes such figures as Vladimir Solov'ev, Mikhail Bakhtin and Boris Pasternak. This 1992 study investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery and the use of language in his prose. Thomas Seifrid shows how Platonov was particularly influenced by Russian utopian thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how his world view was also shaped by its implicit dialogue with the 'official' Soviet philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, and later with Stalinist utopianism. He discusses how in Platonov's masterpieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s linguistic parody comes together with existential angst and dystopian doubts about the course of Soviet history. The study concludes with consideration of the works Platonov wrote from 1934 to 1951, in the age of socialist realism. In these, he manoeuvred to preserve some of the essentials of his earlier world view and verbal manner while fusing them to the literary formulae that were expected of him.
Laughter in Interaction
Authors: Glenn Phillip
Published: December 2009

Laughter in Interaction is an illuminating and lively account of how and why people laugh during conversation. Bringing together twenty-five years of research on the sequential organisation of laughter in everyday talk, Glenn analyses recordings and transcripts to show the finely detailed co-ordination of human laughter. He demonstrates that its production and placement, relative to talk and other activities, reveal much about its emergent meaning and accomplishments. The book shows how the participants in a conversation move from a single laugh to laughing together, how the matter of 'who laughs first' implicates orientation to social activities and how interactants work out whether laughs are more affiliative or hostile. The final chapter examines the contribution of laughter to sequences of conversational intimacy and play and to the invocation of gender. Engaging and original, the book shows how this seemingly insignificant part of human communication turns out to play a highly significant role in how people display, respond to and revise identities and relationships.
Language in the World
Authors: Cresswell M. J.
Published: December 2009

What makes the words we speak mean what they do? Possible-worlds semantics articulates the view that the meanings of words contribute to determining, for each sentence, which possible worlds would make the sentence true, and which would make it false. M. J. Cresswell argues that the non-semantic facts on which such semantic facts supervene are facts about the causal interactions between the linguistic behaviour of speakers and the facts in the world that they are speaking about, and that the kind of causation involved is best analysed using David Lewis's account of causation in terms of counterfactuals. Although philosophers have worked on the question of the connection between meaning and linguistic behaviour, it has mostly been without regard to the work done in possible-world semantics and Language in the World is a book-length examination of this problem.
Creating and Transforming Households
Authors: Smith Joan , Wallerstein Immanuel , del Carmen Baerga Maria , Beittel Mark , Friedman Kasaba Kathie , McGuire Randall H. , Martin William G. , Stanley Kathleen , Thompson Lanny , Woodsong Cynthia
Published: December 2009

This book, first published in 1992, seeks an explanation of the pattern of sharp discrepancy of wage levels across the world-economy for work of comparable productivity. It explores how far such differences can be explained by the different structures of households as 'income-pooling units', examining three key variables: location in the core or periphery of the world-economy; periods of expansion versus periods of contraction in the world-economy; and secular transformation over time. The authors argue that both the boundaries of households and their sources of income are molded by the changing patterns of the world-economy, but are also modes of defense against its pressures. Drawing empirical data from eight local regions in three different zones - the United States, Mexico and southern Africa - this book presents a systematic and original approach to the intimate link between the micro-structures of households and the structures of the capitalist world-economy at a global level.
The Playing Self
Authors: Melucci Alberto
Published: December 2009

The Playing Self is a groundbreaking new work from influential cultural sociologist and clinical psychologist Alberto Melucci, best known for his work on social movements and collective identities. In this book, he delves deeper into questions about the self as both a psychological and socio-cultural entity, particularly in the context of a global society for which information has become a basic resource. His phenomenological approach accounts for the self both as a site of highly subjective and intimate experiences, such as crying, laughing and loving, and in relation to social structural dynamics, through more impersonal experiences, such as the experience of time, and links of the self to politics. Melucci explores the critical search for meaning at the boundary of visible collective processes and individual day-to-day experience.
The New Racism in Europe
Authors: Cole Jeffrey
Published: December 2009

In the last twenty years, immigration has become one of the most contested issues in Western Europe. The arrival of Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and others in Italy has reversed earlier trends of emigration. Debate, political activity and violence have raised questions of rejection and integration, of anti-racism and the new racism. Studies of these issues commonly focus on political activity and the plight of minorities, but this book breaks new ground in its emphasis on the everyday reactions of Italians to immigration and related issues. Drawing on research carried out in Palermo, Jeffrey Cole considers the role of class, culture, local history and political economy in the ambivalent responses of Sicilians to immigrants. He places Italian attitudes in a European context, and investigates why anti-immigrant politics are concentrated in the wealthy Italian North.
The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage
Authors: Lang Timothy
Published: December 2009

This 1995 book explores what the Victorians said about the Stuart past, with particular emphasis on changing interpretations of Cromwell and the Puritans. It analyses in detail the historical writings of Henry Hallam, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Rawson Gardiner, placing them in a context that stresses the importance of religious controversy for the nineteenth century. The book argues that the Victorians found the Stuart past problematic because they perceived a connection between the religious disputes of the seventeenth century and the sectarian discord of their own age. Cromwell and the Puritans became an acceptable part of the national past only as the English state lost its Anglican exclusiveness. The tendency to accommodate Cromwell and the Puritans, particularly in the work of Gardiner, thus reflected a process of nation building that sought to remove sectarian divisions and which reached its climax as the Victorian age came to its close.