Agriculture
Local Agri-food Systems in a Global World: Market, Social and Environmental Challenges
Filippo Arfini, Maria Cecilia Mancini and Michele Donati, 978-1-4438-3664-7
Local Agri-food Systems in a Global World: Market, Social and Environmental Challenges is an important new collection of essays making a landmark contribution to the ongoing debate on local agri-food systems, local development in rural areas and new patterns of agri-food systems. There is a new awareness of the links between local and global strategies of food production and processing, and these have become an increasingly important topic of research worldwide. Effective analysis of the spatial dynamics of agri-food systems requires an interdisciplinary approach involving economics, geography, sociology, demographics and agronomy. Chapters cover areas such as: current spatial dynamics in agri-food systems; the socio-environmental impact of agri-food systems on rural development; the role of local resources in agri-food systems; the governance and public policies of local agri-food systems; and, last but not least, new methodological approaches to spatial dynamics of agri-food systems. The book provides an essential tool for researchers and academics in rural economics, sociology, geography and social sciences as well as policy makers. ...Read more

Bibliography, Library Science, Information Resources
Burridge’s Multilingual Dictionary of Birds of the World: Volume XLVI Japanese (日本語)
John T. Burridge, 978-1-4438-3655-5
Uniquely, the present work will present in one place the vernacular names of the almost ten thousand birds of the world in about fifty languages. It should thus serve as a valuable reference work and source of information that has been scattered through field guides, scientific journals, coffee-table volumes and across the internet, often buried under all sorts of other data. The compilations draw on official or other generally recognized authority wherever possible, and alternates are given where space permits. While the very fact that such extensive lists may, just by their existence, in future carry some authoritative weight in standardization of bird names, that is not its primary purpose, which is to present in a more useful format the nomenclature that is already in use. ...Read more

Business, Finance and Economics
Labour Regulation in the 21st Century: In Search of Flexibility and Security
Series Editors: Tayo Fashoyin and Michele Tiraboschi; Guest Editors: Tomas Davulis and Daiva Petrylaitė, 978-1-4438-3663-0
The economic crisis has highlighted major shortcomings in the EU flexicurity strategy which, although suitable to tackle structural unemployment in a period of economic growth, it proved unable to stand the impact of the recession, which requires specific measures to maintain employment. Against this background, the authors of the present papers, which were presented at the International Scientific Conference “Labour Market of the 21st Century: Looking for Flexibility and Security”, on the occasion of the 370th Anniversary of the establishment of Vilnius University’s Faculty of Law, that took place on 12–14 May 2011, investigate the development of labour regulation in the 21st century, with particular reference to the relation between flexibility and security and to the need to strike a balance between these two elements. The contributions address the issue in a comparative and transnational perspective and provide some insights into the development of national models of flexibility and social security. ...Read more

Outsourcing and Service Work in the New Economy: The Case of Call Centres in Mexico City
José-Luis Álvarez-Galván, 978-1-4438-3738-5
This book examines the impact of outsourcing on workers and their employment conditions in the new economy. To do so, the call centre industry in Mexico City is analysed through a large number of in-depth interviews with workers and managers, available statistics and visits to leading firms in the sector. The case of call centres is paradigmatic as it is often seen as a flag-ship industry of the new economy, rapidly growing and subject to high pressures for costs reduction. The Mexican experience is crucially relevant to understand employment conditions in a weak institutional setting where labour protection is low and business competition intense. Overall, outsourcing has gained popularity as a mechanism to deal with the uncertainty of increasingly challenging business environments. Nonetheless, the practice of outsourcing also raises important concerns. This book identifies those managerial practices which have a substantial impact on workers and their employment conditions such as: job designs; customer segmentation; non-standard contracts; intensified supervision; union avoidance; limited career opportunities; and strict social divisions in the workplace. These findings also suggest that a number of practices that were common in the ‘old’ economy are still dominant in the organisation of work in the twenty-first century. The book is a useful reference for scholars and students concerned with employment and labour studies, economic development, and globalisation. ...Read more

Chinese Studies
English in China Today at the Harbin Institute of Technology: Volume I
Martin Wolff and Tian Qiang, 978-1-4438-3716-3
This is the inaugural edition of English in China Today at the Harbin Institute of Technology, one of China’s Ivy League Universities. China currently has more than 2,400 public, private and joint venture colleges and universities and almost every one publishes a journal in Chinese. No Chinese college or university will accept or publish anything in any language other than Chinese. The instant journal, now a book series, is a first of its kind, limited to scholars from one Chinese Ivy League University and provides a platform for Chinese scholars to share their ideas with the global community, in the common lingua franca, English. This is the first Chinese university journal published abroad, about English, in English. English in China Today at the Harbin Institute of Technology provides accessible cutting-edge reports on most aspects of the language, including style, usage, dictionaries, literary language, Plain English, the Internet, English language teaching in China both as EFL and ESL, CALL, literature, culture, cross-culture communications, and translation. Its intended readership includes linguists, journalists, broadcasters, writers, publishers, teachers, advanced students of the language, university administrators and others with a professional or personal interest in communication. This journal and book series is unique in its opening up of China’s scholarly works to the English speaking world. ...Read more

Classics
Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil
Stephen Hodkinson and Dick Geary, 978-1-4438-3736-1
Slaves have never been mere passive victims of slavery. Typically, they have responded with ingenuity to their violent separation from their native societies, using a variety of strategies to create new social networks and cultures. Religion has been a major arena for such slave cultural strategies. Through participation in religious and ritual activities, slaves have generated important elements of identity, shared humanity, and even resistance, within their lives. This volume presents papers from a conference of the University of Nottingham’s Institute for the Study of Slavery – the only UK centre studying its history from antiquity to the present. It breaks new ground by juxtaposing slave strategies within the diverse religious cultures of Graeco-Roman antiquity and modern Brazil. After a wide-ranging historiographical survey, eleven experts examine how in both societies slave religious activities involved both constraints and opportunities, shedding particular new light on the neglected religious strategies of Graeco-Roman slaves. ...Read more

Cultural Studies
Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists
Avigail Abarbanel, 978-1-4438-3796-5
There is an expectation in Jewish communities around the world that all Jews embrace Zionism and offer unquestioning support for Israel, ‘right or wrong’. Jewish identity and Zionism are commonly and deliberately blurred. Jews who criticise Israel or question Zionism are often excluded, vilified and threatened. If they express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, they risk being branded as traitors and accused of ‘supporting the enemies of Israel’. Beyond Tribal Loyalties is a unique collection of twenty-five personal stories of Jewish peace activists from Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. There is an age difference of more than fifty years between the oldest and the youngest contributor. The stories focus on the complex and intensely personal journey that Jewish activists go through to free themselves from the hold of Zionist ideology and its requirement to support all Israeli policies. Like many Jews, most of the contributors were once unquestioning supporters of Israel and Zionism. Something happened in the life of each of these extraordinary people that caused them to question and re-evaluate their understanding of the conflict and their relationship with Israel and the Palestinian people. In many cases this journey involved a reassessment of personal values, belief systems and identity. Beyond Tribal Loyalties seeks to discover what makes it possible for Jewish peace activists to follow through with this transformative journey and their activist work, despite fanatical and sometimes violent opposition. This is an inspiring book for anyone who is interested in the experience of being a peace activist. It offers a fresh and unusual angle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is a unique contribution in a field where political analysis is common, but where the personal angle is often lacking. Find Beyond Tribal Loyalties on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Beyond-Tribal-Loyalties-Personal-Stories-of-Jewish-Peace-Activists/116150431829716?sk=wall ...Read more

English Dictionaries as Cultural Mines
Roberta Facchinetti, 978-1-4438-3647-0
Dictionaries are mines whose word-gems encapsulate centuries of language history and cultural traditions; they are store-houses of meanings and uses, ‘lamp genies’ to be set free at the very moment readers set their eyes on their entries. This book is an attempt to free such lamp genies, by discussing the role of dictionaries in the identification and expression of cultural aspects in language, with special reference to English. As such, its eleven chapters have been arranged to focus on general, genre-specific, monolingual and bilingual lexicography, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. The book will be of use to lexicographers and lexicologists, as well as to corpus linguists, historical and contemporary English scholars, students of English, and anybody interested in the juice of culture(s) that can be fruitfully extracted from dictionary entries. ...Read more

How Far Can We Go? Pain, Excess and the Obscene
Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, 978-1-4438-3643-2
The public does not desire horror, yet enjoys it in art and suffers it in life. When we deal with the monstrous marriage of the abject and the sublime, the consequent thrill of enjoyment is never appeased, always problematic, often unresolved and finally borders on physiological if not pathological narcissism. The public is well acquainted with this ‘rhetoric of effects’; rhetoric of extreme effects, which transforms the spectator into voyeur or victim, into an apathetic torturer, whenever cruelty is shown without respite. A look of horror greets the enjoyment of extremes and enjoyment to the extreme as well; the Eighteenth Century teaches us that lesson. The century of good taste elaborates a sense of the limits, since representing horror means choosing not so much to domesticate it as to render it more enjoyable. It is a game of limits that are not limits anymore, as we can allude to an infinity that often shows the features of the sublime. ...Read more

Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living Together in the German-Speaking World
Yael Almog and Erik Born, 978-1-4438-3733-0
Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living Together in the German-Speaking World is a bilingual collection of nine essays on culture, film, language, literature, and theory. The essays in this collection address questions of community and cohesion in the modern German-speaking world, a complex sociolinguistic community that is no longer defined by territorial boundaries but that remains, in many respects, a neighborhood. How can neighborliness be possible for this world in an age of mass migration and increasing globalization? Given the fluidity of modern identity, what could make communities uniform, harmonious, or even cohesive, if they can be created and dissolved in an instant? To what extent do modern technology and mass communication facilitate and/or inhibit the ability to inhabit multiple cultures and multiple worlds? Examining the specific constitution of the modern German-speaking world, this volume contributes to recent scholarship in critical theory on the figure of the neighbor and the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The essays in this volume, proceeding in a roughly chronological order, expose how images of neighbors and neighborhoods have developed in the German-speaking world over the course of the twentieth century. The examination of these developments should enrich both the study of multiculturalism and (trans-)nationalism in German Studies and that of subjectivity and political theology in critical theory. Offering a wide range of approaches to one critical topic, the essays in this volume will be useful to students and scholars in the fields of German Studies, cultural studies, language and literature, and film and media, especially those with an interest in secularism and globalization. ...Read more

Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Intercultural Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and “the Orient”
Ignacio López-Calvo, 978-1-4438-3714-9
This volume is a collection of essays dealing with the critical dialogue between the cultural production of the Hispanic/Latino world and that of the so-called Orient or the Orient itself, including the Asian and Arab worlds. As we see in these essays, the Europeans’ cultural others (peripheral nations and former colonies) have established an intercultural and intercontinental dialogue among themselves, without feeling the need to resort to the center-metropolis’ mediation. These South-to-South dialogues tend not to be as asymmetric as the old dialogue between the (former) metropolis (the hegemonic, Eurocentric center) and the colonies. These essays about Hispanic and Latino cultural production (most of them dealing with literature, but some covering urban art, music, and film) provide vivid examples of de-colonizing impetus and cultural resistance. In some of them, we can find peripheral subjectivities’ perception of other peripheral, racialized, and (post)colonial subjects and their cultures. ...Read more

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society
David Henderson, 978-1-4438-3731-6
This collection embraces a range of lively and informed discussions of important themes in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. The chapters grow out of presentations at “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society,” a conference organised by the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, for post-graduate students and research fellows. The essays demonstrate that the future of psychoanalytic studies is full of promise. ...Read more

Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project: Exiles’ Reflections on Cultural Differences
Carolina Rodríguez-López and José M. Faraldo, 978-1-4438-3649-4
This book explores an aspect of the complex cultural history of 20th-century exile: the influences of transnational experiences on the views of emigrants and exiles concerning their own academic, scientific and intellectual cultures. These essays focus on the reflections of people who left their countries during the period of 1933–1945. Many of them reconsidered their own past in the old country and compared it with their actual experiences in the adopted homeland. The individual cases presented here share a similar theoretical framework. The book is divided into two sections: the first one focuses on the German and Spanish lost project, and the second one deals with the East European projects – focused on Polish and Rumanian examples above all. From the perspective of transnational history, Merel Leeman analyzes the cases of two special exiles: George Mosse and Peter Gay. Spaniards’ American projects is the main topic of Carolina Rodríguez-López’s analysis of Spanish scholars in the US. Natacha Bolufer focuses on associations and newspapers like Liberación which paid special attention to Spanish leftists suffering from Franco’s political measures. José M. Faraldo looks at the cases of refugees from Eastern European countries – mainly from Romania and Poland – who escaped to Spain after the fall of the axis in 1945. Mihaela Albu describes the diversity and plurality of Romanian exiles in the Western world, in diverse countries of Europe and also in the US. This book aims to encourage the dialogue and comparison among diverse exiles. ...Read more

Romance: The History of a Genre
Dana Percec, 978-1-4438-3734-7
Romance: The History of a Genre is a collection of essays devoted to the highly popular and no less controversial genre of romance. A genre often disregarded for its stereotypical language, shallow characters, and predictable plots, dismissed as “women’s” fiction, accused of conventionalism, romance is a genre which, after ups and downs in its millennial history, is now holding a leading position on the international bookselling market. This achievement has also been possible with the endorsement of contemporary media and modern technology, cinema, television, the Internet, etc. Much has been written in both traditional and more recent literary theory about the origins and evolution of the early forms of romance, from the classical Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance and early modernity in Western Europe. A corpus, which is becoming more and more substantial today, is already available about the gendered status of contemporary romance, both in terms of the writing ethos and in terms of reader response, with theories coming from the combined areas of feminism, social sciences, and psychoanalysis. The aim of the present volume is that of noting the fluid character of the genre, with the great number of subcategories, mixed and hybrid, bringing evidence to the polymorphous nature of contemporary popular culture. This book proposes, in four parts and twelve chapters, a fascinating and multifaceted journey into the history, substance and geography of romance. From its origins to the latest developments, from its subgenres to its features, from print to film, from television to Facebook, romance comes in various shapes and colours, which the reader can fully explore. The journey in the world of romance takes the reader from familiar corners to less familiar ones: from North America, Great Britain, Romania, or Turkey, to India or South Africa. The numerous approaches to romance generate diverse data, varied analytical frameworks and interesting, fresh and solidly grounded findings. ...Read more

Signs of Hope: Deafhearing Family Life
Donna West, 978-1-4438-3654-8
Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Signs of Hope tells the story of a narrative inquiry with three deafhearing families. For many of us, deafness represents loss and silence. For others, being deaf is a genetic quirk; an opportunity for learning, spiritual adventure and reward. For yet others, it is the most natural thing in the world; a connection to a genealogical layer of signing ancestors and the continuation of a culture. Amid the noise of mainstream, medical and educational discourses of deafness, here are family voices demanding to be heard – whether spoken or signed – that challenge audiological and surgical intervention, that call for scrutiny and critique of ‘inclusive’ deaf-related pedagogical practices, that rail against marginalisation of members of minority cultures. Over four years, Donna West has recorded the stories of three families who wish to counter and resist what they see as damaging misconceptions and discriminatory constructions of deafness and deafhearing family life. Here, spaces are created that respect and acknowledge human beings – adults, children, deaf, hearing – as storytellers. The poetic and performative narratives at the heart of this book reveal not only the ways in which hurtful definitions of, and discrimination towards, deaf people and signing deafhearing families is destabilised, but also the ways in which celebration of deaf culture and sign language are affirming and vital for healthy family life. ...Read more

Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text
Aparajita De, Amrita Ghosh and Ujjwal Jana, 978-1-4438-3665-4
“Ever since the Gramscian notion of the subaltern became the lynch-pin of the counter-hegemonic project developed by the Subaltern Studies group in the early 1980s, attempts to give voice to India’s unrepresented or under-represented classes have played a crucial role in commentary on the nation’s history and cultures. The subaltern project has explored possibilities for recuperating and articulating occluded discourses, interrogated the approaches of elite historiography and proposed alternative epistemologies. In the early twenty-first century, subaltern concerns have been prominent in cultural debates around the globe and they remain equally central to analyses of the gap between elite and marginalized classes within India itself. The present volume offers a stimulating collection of essays primarily devoted to literary representations of subaltern issues by Indian novelists writing in English and with a particular focus on gender, nation and language. It brings together essays on two writers who have been frequently associated with subaltern concerns, Amitav Ghosh and Mahasweta Devi, and discussions of other internationally acclaimed writers, such as Kiran Desai, Rohinton Mistry and Khushwant Singh, whose work also deals with disparities in Indian society and the problematics of representing this. Subaltern Vision has a valuable contextualizing Preface by Debjani Ganguly. The editor, Aparajita De’s Introduction, both illuminates the evolution to subaltern studies and introduces the individual essays. The volume is a significant intervention in the field and it is essential reading for anyone interested in the ways in which literature has responded to the challenges posed by the widening gap between India’s haves and have nots.” – John Thieme, Professor, University of East Anglia ...Read more

The City and the Ocean: Journeys, Memory, Imagination
Jonathan White and I-Chun Wang, 978-1-4438-3719-4
Throughout history cities have been locations of human encounter. Equally they have been contexts for the trade of goods and services, for the evolution of various forms of urban space, and for the production, development, and enrichment of culture and technology. Many cities grew up along shorelines, which themselves constitute some of the globe’s most important cultural boundaries. For above all else, it is water that has separated but also connected different communities, races, religions and nations, down through recorded time. With the rapid advance in technologies of communication, encounters between cultures have multiplied at a rate that no individual can follow or control. The present book constitutes a space of “memory” in its own right, one of its chief raisons d’être being that a group of diverse scholars herein maps certain key encounters between peoples, past as well as present, and the urgent issues generated in consequence. No one person could have traced such diversity and made sense of it, whereas a scholarly grouping of persons reporting on phenomena from around the world, such as is provided here, offers its readers a vision of global change and development. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of mega-cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centres. This expanded landscape is here interpreted with special attention, as already mentioned, to cities located at coastlines, hence (generally speaking) more exposed to globalizing trends. Migrants, exiles and refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, as well as alternative or countercultural groupings continue to complicate the ways in which cities articulate their now pluralized identities, in terms of (and by means of) literature, history, architecture, social events, and other forms of artistic and cultural production. The international scholars whose work is assembled in these pages are well placed to engage with the intersecting themes and issues of the volume. Contributors have mapped different examples from Homeric narrative, through Renaissance drama and its representation of crossways of culture such as Rhodes and Malta, to an earlier time in the development of a New World city such as Boston: others look at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ complexity of great world cities and of oceanic migration or trade between them. Shanghai, Singapore, London, Detroit, Shantou, Macau, and Saigon are some that are dealt with in detail. Emphasis falls on both the historical reality of those contexts as well as how they have been culturally represented. ...Read more

Towards a New Orientation
Matko Městrović, 978-1-4438-3661-6
In a collection of nine inter-linked essays, Meštrović provides critical insights into the defining questions of our age. Mixing theoretical, empirical and normative insights, utilising inter-disciplinary or, more accurately, post-disciplinary modes of reasoning, Meštrović traces the current imbalance between market globalisation and globalised modes of sociability as a consequence of central contradictions within the current capitalist mode of production, not only between capital and labour but between capital and society and, indeed, capital and culture. The struggle to find a new narrative freed from the false binary between science and values, in the service of a sustainable future, found in the demands of movements for global justice and solidarity, may lead to the production of a new commons, for social interactions outside of, and beyond, the restrictions of the market. In a condition of capitalist crisis, in which biopolitical production is both required by, and interpreted through, the narrow confines of ‘autistic’ economic thought, Meštrović searches for new forms of subjectivity, in which a new multitude may form as a movement towards freedom in which the composition of singularities leads towards the increasing autonomy of each participating equally in the web of communication and cooperation. ...Read more

Education
English in China Today at the Harbin Institute of Technology: Volume I
Martin Wolff and Tian Qiang, 978-1-4438-3716-3
This is the inaugural edition of English in China Today at the Harbin Institute of Technology, one of China’s Ivy League Universities. China currently has more than 2,400 public, private and joint venture colleges and universities and almost every one publishes a journal in Chinese. No Chinese college or university will accept or publish anything in any language other than Chinese. The instant journal, now a book series, is a first of its kind, limited to scholars from one Chinese Ivy League University and provides a platform for Chinese scholars to share their ideas with the global community, in the common lingua franca, English. This is the first Chinese university journal published abroad, about English, in English. English in China Today at the Harbin Institute of Technology provides accessible cutting-edge reports on most aspects of the language, including style, usage, dictionaries, literary language, Plain English, the Internet, English language teaching in China both as EFL and ESL, CALL, literature, culture, cross-culture communications, and translation. Its intended readership includes linguists, journalists, broadcasters, writers, publishers, teachers, advanced students of the language, university administrators and others with a professional or personal interest in communication. This journal and book series is unique in its opening up of China’s scholarly works to the English speaking world. ...Read more

Equalities and Education in Europe: Explanations and Excuses for Inequality
Alistair Ross, Melinda Dooly and Nanny Hartsmar, 978-1-4438-3644-9
This book is about inequities in education in Europe. The authors have worked together on an analysis of educational inequalities in Europe, which they draw on through the book: they suggest that the countries of Europe, through the European Union, are beginning to address issues of educational disadvantage on a systematic, continent-wide basis. Because of this policy concern, this book is timely in the way that it addresses social and education inequities on the scale of Europe. This is not simply an account of practices and policies. The authors’ analysis of individual country and European Union policy documents will be of practical and theoretical use to the policy community and the community of practitioners who are concerned with inequities in society, and in education in particular. The authors want to do more than simply add to the literature and theory: they aspire to make an impact on how education can contribute to positively improving the lives of disadvantaged groups. While some suggest that education is doomed to simply reproduce existing social patterns and replicate social inequities, the authors believe that educational policies have the potential to challenge inequalities, and to transform lives. ...Read more

Future Prospects for Music Education: Corroborating Informal Learning Pedagogy
Sidsel Karlsen and Lauri Väkevä, 978-1-4438-3658-6
Informal learning pedagogy has become a major topic within the international field of music education, due in no small part to Lucy Green’s groundbreaking research on popular musicians’ learning, as well as her subsequent efforts to turn her research findings into a pedagogy that can be implemented in comprehensive school music education. This has generated massive interest and attention among music education practitioners and scholars worldwide. With experience of studying and working within higher music education in the Nordic countries, the editors of this anthology, Sidsel Karlsen and Lauri Väkevä, are well acquainted with popular music-related informal learning pedagogies, which have formed an important aspect of comprehensive school music education in the Nordic countries for more than two decades. With this familiarity also comes a wish to contribute to the critical examination and further development of existing practices, by corroborating informal learning pedagogy in popular music from different angles. The introduction of this book explores different theoretical starting points for investigations of the formal-informal nexus. The following chapters, written by an international community of experienced music education scholars and practitioners, afford critical examinations of informal learning pedagogies from various perspectives, either theoretical or research-based. In the last chapter, Lucy Green paves the way for moving informal and aural learning into the traditional instrumental music lesson. Altogether, the anthology aims to explore some of the future prospects for music education with informal learning pedagogy as the focal point. ...Read more

Language Arts in Asia: Literature and Drama in English, Putonghua and Cantonese
C. A. DeCoursey, 978-1-4438-3669-2
This volume is the first of a series contributing to the academic study of Language Arts, as an English-language teaching paradigm. Language Arts has been widely used in native English-speaking countries including Australia and New Zealand. Its recent adoption into the second-language teaching curriculum in Hong Kong, as well as similar initiatives within secondary and tertiary education in mainland China, enhances its interest to scholars studying second-language teaching and learning in Asian contexts. This book offers many papers and discussions of interest to teachers, language professionals, scholars and administrators. Its chapters explore current topics in Language Arts research including trends in the rapprochment of stylistics and linguistics, teaching approaches and learning outcomes. At the same time, they offer diverse theoretical and methodological aproaches, of interest to the practitioner and policy-maker as well as the researcher. The value of this volume lies particularly in strengthening the theoretical and methodological foundations of Language Arts. The use of literature and the arts in humanist education has a long history within Europe, being traditionally appreciated for its ability to transform leaders, instill finer sensibilities and question social ills. In its postcolonial incarnations, as the traditional subject areas were informed by critical and linguistic theories, language arts subject areas were less often used, as they were understood to offer opportunities to analyse their functions as apology for leaders, coopting the young, and pacifying dissent but less often used to teach second language skills. Language Arts curricula arising since the 1980s have increasingly embraced authentic voices, styles and genres. Contemporary Language Arts curricula use literature to teach reading-based and communication skills, in conjunction with critical and creative thinking. The movement of English-language education beyond native English shores has placed Language Arts into a World Englishes frame, and therefore its curricula have included the teaching ethics, civics and intercultural sensitivity. The explosion of media and digital communications of the 1990s led to the adoption of media literacy as a crucial Language Arts skill. As digital innovations continue to impact the teaching of English, Language Arts has adopted multiliteracies. These developments are represented in the papers included in this volume. ...Read more

Lights! Camera! Action and the Brain: The Use of Film in Education
Maher Bahloul and Carolyn Graham, 978-1-4438-3657-9
Lights! Camera! Action and the brain: The Use of Film in Education is about an innovative pedagogy whereby performing arts and digital production play a key role in teaching and learning. The book combines theory and practice; as such, it lays solid neurological foundations for film and media literacy, and provides several relevant practical applications from worldwide scholars. The book contains thirteen chapters three of which address a number of theoretical issues related to the camera and the brain while the remaining ten are practical illustrations of the extent to which film and video are used as pedagogical tools. In the book preface, Nikos Theodosakis, author of ‘The Director in the Classroom’, writes that the book contributors ‘have built a wonderful bridge for us to travel over’. In fact, the book chapters transcend age restrictions to include diverse age groups, children and young adults. The topics range from learning language and philosophy to learning about one’s self, one’s environment, and one’s cultural identity. Much more importantly, the book addresses the needs of regular and special needs learners. Arts in general, and films in particular, are shown to display salient and dynamic roles in appealing to a wide variety of regular and special needs learners. In short, the book is highly beneficial to educators and to education managers; it ‘will have the power to change teaching and the way the curriculum is perceived’ for several generations to come. ...Read more

Teaching and Learning English through Bilingual Education
Juan de Dios Martínez Agudo, 978-1-4438-3713-2
These days, numerous studies document and advocate the potential effectiveness of the CLIL approach, which is viewed as a real revolution in second language pedagogy. European bilingual education models are currently exemplified by CLIL – Content and Language Integrated Learning – a new generic and/or umbrella term for bilingual education, which has been rapidly spreading throughout Europe since the mid-nineties. Over the last decade there has been an explosion of interest in CLIL pedagogy in Europe and beyond. However, CLIL pedagogy also involves complex challenges concerning its implementation and the professional development of teachers. This publication provides readers with a collection of original papers covering essential aspects of CLIL pedagogy. This collection of papers serves as a good indication that valuable research is being conducted throughout Europe and that CLIL research is establishing itself as an important area of applied linguistics. This book is mainly addressed to those in-service teachers who teach in bilingual classrooms anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, and who wish to know more about CLIL pedagogy. It can also be used as a helpful handbook for EFL student teachers. The book is also for teacher trainers running both pre-service and in-service courses. ...Read more

Film and Theatre Studies
A World of Popular Entertainments: An Edited Volume of Critical Essays
Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow, 978-1-4438-3730-9
This groundbreaking volume of critical essays about popular entertainments brings together the work of eighteen established, emerging, and independent scholars with backgrounds in Archives, Theatre and Performance, Music, and Historical Studies, currently working across five continents. The first of its kind to examine popular entertainments from a global and multi-disciplinary perspective, this collection examines a broad cross-section of historical and contemporary popular entertainment forms from Australia, England, Japan, North America, and South Africa, and considers their social, cultural and political significance. Despite the vibrant, complex, and ubiquitous nature of popular entertainments, the field has suffered from a lack of sustained academic attention. Nevertheless, popular entertainments have a global reach and a transnational significance at odds with the fact that the meaning and definition of both ‘popular’ and ‘entertainment’ remain widely contested. Since the late-nineteenth century, class-based prejudices in Western culture have championed the superiority of art and literature over the dubious and fleeting pleasures of ‘entertainment.’ Similarly, the term ‘popular’ has carried pejorative connotations, indicating something common and outside the conventional and highbrow productions of the purpose-built theatre house or concert hall. Irrespective of whether ‘popular’ is code for a cultural product with a folk origin, or a term indicating the mass appeal of a cultural product, this volume’s re-assessment of popular entertainments from a global perspective is timely. The performance research embodied in this volume was first discussed at A World of Popular Entertainments International Conference (University of Newcastle, Australia, 2009) in response to a multi-disciplinary call for scholars to explore a variety of topics relevant to the study of popular entertainments. ...Read more

Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration
N. H. Reeve, 978-1-4438-3656-2
Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) is increasingly being recognised as one of the leading English novelists and short story writers of the middle of the twentieth century. Successive generations of readers have delighted in her subtle and penetrating exposures of the vanities and self-delusions of everyday life, her special sensitivity to frustration and disappointment, and the marvellous freshness of her wit and humour. Now, to mark the centenary of her birth, Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration presents several new critical assessments of her work by leading academics, together with a sizeable number of Taylor’s uncollected or unpublished writings: short stories, including the first and the last she completed, essays on writers and writing, and a selection of letters to various correspondents, including Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. Opening many previously unexplored perspectives on Taylor’s work, this volume will be essential reading for her admirers and for the wider study of the literature of her time. ...Read more

Lights! Camera! Action and the Brain: The Use of Film in Education
Maher Bahloul and Carolyn Graham, 978-1-4438-3657-9
Lights! Camera! Action and the brain: The Use of Film in Education is about an innovative pedagogy whereby performing arts and digital production play a key role in teaching and learning. The book combines theory and practice; as such, it lays solid neurological foundations for film and media literacy, and provides several relevant practical applications from worldwide scholars. The book contains thirteen chapters three of which address a number of theoretical issues related to the camera and the brain while the remaining ten are practical illustrations of the extent to which film and video are used as pedagogical tools. In the book preface, Nikos Theodosakis, author of ‘The Director in the Classroom’, writes that the book contributors ‘have built a wonderful bridge for us to travel over’. In fact, the book chapters transcend age restrictions to include diverse age groups, children and young adults. The topics range from learning language and philosophy to learning about one’s self, one’s environment, and one’s cultural identity. Much more importantly, the book addresses the needs of regular and special needs learners. Arts in general, and films in particular, are shown to display salient and dynamic roles in appealing to a wide variety of regular and special needs learners. In short, the book is highly beneficial to educators and to education managers; it ‘will have the power to change teaching and the way the curriculum is perceived’ for several generations to come. ...Read more

Fine Arts
Enemy Images in War Propaganda
Marja Vuorinen, 978-1-4438-3641-8
In the post 9/11 world, the emotionally charged concepts of identity and ideology, enmity and political violence have once again become household words. Contrary to the serene assumptions of the early 1990s, history did not end. Civilisations are busy clashing against one another, and the self-proclaimed pacified humanity is once again showing its barbaric roots. Religion mixes with politics to produce governments that abuse even their own citizens, and victorious insurgents too often fail to carry out the promised reforms. Terrorists blow up unsuspecting pedestrians, and allegedly democratic nations threaten to bomb allegedly less democratic ones back to the Stone Age. Mass demonstrations materialise like flash mobs out of nowhere, prepared to hold their ground until the bitter end. Where does all this passionate intensity come from? To better understand how the ideological enmity of today is moulded, spread and managed, this book investigates the propaganda operations of the past. Its topics range from the ruthless portrayal of female enemy soldiers in an early-20th-century civil war setting to the multiple enemy images cherished by Adolf Hitler, and onwards, to the WWII Soviet Russians as a subtype of a more ancient notion of the Eastern Hordes. Of more recent events, the book covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the still ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. The closing chapter on cyber warfare introduces the reader to the invisible enemies of the future. ...Read more

How Far Can We Go? Pain, Excess and the Obscene
Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, 978-1-4438-3643-2
The public does not desire horror, yet enjoys it in art and suffers it in life. When we deal with the monstrous marriage of the abject and the sublime, the consequent thrill of enjoyment is never appeased, always problematic, often unresolved and finally borders on physiological if not pathological narcissism. The public is well acquainted with this ‘rhetoric of effects’; rhetoric of extreme effects, which transforms the spectator into voyeur or victim, into an apathetic torturer, whenever cruelty is shown without respite. A look of horror greets the enjoyment of extremes and enjoyment to the extreme as well; the Eighteenth Century teaches us that lesson. The century of good taste elaborates a sense of the limits, since representing horror means choosing not so much to domesticate it as to render it more enjoyable. It is a game of limits that are not limits anymore, as we can allude to an infinity that often shows the features of the sublime. ...Read more

French Studies
The Postmodern Mythology of Michel Tournier
Melissa Barchi Panek, 978-1-4438-3737-8
Michel Tournier defines the supreme mission of a writer to be the creation of a mythology which allows for interaction with his readers, who seem to be losing their critical faculties in our contemporary, postmodern world dominated by consumption and dizzying technological advances. Our contemporary society has changed due to the end of the modern era with its reigning ideologies. Collapsing after the atrocities of the Second World War, Modernity and the artistic and literary reactions referred to as modernism, have likewise been transformed. Myth continues to represent the collectivity of human existence, yet, in the short stories and novels of Michel Tournier, myth represents the collapse of the all-encompassing ideologies inherent to the Modern era. The grand narratives of Modernity such as Christianity and Man’s reason have been deconstructed in the postmodern era. The mythology of Michel Tournier expresses these trends towards the dissolution of Modernity and creates individual, mini narratives which emphasize the particularity of individual existence. Tournier takes established mythical models rooted in Christianity, fables and legends of Western Civilization and re-contextualizes them. Through a semiotic reworking of core binary pairs of a myth, Tournier creates a third-order level of representation which modifies the mythical model. The works of le Roi des Aulnes, Gilles et Jeanne, and Vendredi are illustrious of this third-order level of signification. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structural make-up of myth transforms established meanings according to the dominant cultural code. Barthes’ semiological study of myth reveals the levels of representation through which myth creates meaning. Myth builds upon the denotative first-order level of language and through a connotative process, creates a second-order level. This connotative process does not end on this second-order, for in the writings of Tournier, this semiological process is continued to a third-order which re-contextualizes the myth again. Tournier adapts myth to the unique traits of the postmodern era including deconstruction and playfulness by allowing the reader to provide the context of the story. As such we, the reader, take the place as author of our own individual mythology. ...Read more

General
Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists
Avigail Abarbanel, 978-1-4438-3796-5
There is an expectation in Jewish communities around the world that all Jews embrace Zionism and offer unquestioning support for Israel, ‘right or wrong’. Jewish identity and Zionism are commonly and deliberately blurred. Jews who criticise Israel or question Zionism are often excluded, vilified and threatened. If they express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, they risk being branded as traitors and accused of ‘supporting the enemies of Israel’. Beyond Tribal Loyalties is a unique collection of twenty-five personal stories of Jewish peace activists from Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. There is an age difference of more than fifty years between the oldest and the youngest contributor. The stories focus on the complex and intensely personal journey that Jewish activists go through to free themselves from the hold of Zionist ideology and its requirement to support all Israeli policies. Like many Jews, most of the contributors were once unquestioning supporters of Israel and Zionism. Something happened in the life of each of these extraordinary people that caused them to question and re-evaluate their understanding of the conflict and their relationship with Israel and the Palestinian people. In many cases this journey involved a reassessment of personal values, belief systems and identity. Beyond Tribal Loyalties seeks to discover what makes it possible for Jewish peace activists to follow through with this transformative journey and their activist work, despite fanatical and sometimes violent opposition. This is an inspiring book for anyone who is interested in the experience of being a peace activist. It offers a fresh and unusual angle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is a unique contribution in a field where political analysis is common, but where the personal angle is often lacking. Find Beyond Tribal Loyalties on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Beyond-Tribal-Loyalties-Personal-Stories-of-Jewish-Peace-Activists/116150431829716?sk=wall ...Read more

Transgression and Its Limits
Matt Foley, Neil McRobert and Aspasia Stephanou, 978-1-4438-3729-3
Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting’s (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection’s concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field. ...Read more

German Studies
Heinrich Böll and Ireland
Gisela Holfter, 978-1-4438-3801-6
Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Böll’s Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) which was first published in 1957, has been read by millions of German readers and has had an unsurpassed impact on the German image of Ireland. But there is much more to Heinrich Böll’s relationship with Ireland than the Irisches Tagebuch. In this new book, Böll scholar Gisela Holfter carefully charts Heinrich Böll’s personal and literary connections with Ireland and Irish literature from his reading Irish fairytales in early childhood, to establishing a second home on Achill Island and his and his wife Annemarie’s translations of numerous books by Irish authors such as Brendan Behan, J. M. Synge, G. B. Shaw, Flann O’Brien and Tomás O’Crohan. This book also examines the response in Ireland to Böll’s works, notably the controversy that ensued following the broadcast of his film Irland und seine Kinder (Children of Eire) in the 1960s. Heinrich Böll and Ireland offers new insights for students, academics and the general reader alike. ...Read more

Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project: Exiles’ Reflections on Cultural Differences
Carolina Rodríguez-López and José M. Faraldo, 978-1-4438-3649-4
This book explores an aspect of the complex cultural history of 20th-century exile: the influences of transnational experiences on the views of emigrants and exiles concerning their own academic, scientific and intellectual cultures. These essays focus on the reflections of people who left their countries during the period of 1933–1945. Many of them reconsidered their own past in the old country and compared it with their actual experiences in the adopted homeland. The individual cases presented here share a similar theoretical framework. The book is divided into two sections: the first one focuses on the German and Spanish lost project, and the second one deals with the East European projects – focused on Polish and Rumanian examples above all. From the perspective of transnational history, Merel Leeman analyzes the cases of two special exiles: George Mosse and Peter Gay. Spaniards’ American projects is the main topic of Carolina Rodríguez-López’s analysis of Spanish scholars in the US. Natacha Bolufer focuses on associations and newspapers like Liberación which paid special attention to Spanish leftists suffering from Franco’s political measures. José M. Faraldo looks at the cases of refugees from Eastern European countries – mainly from Romania and Poland – who escaped to Spain after the fall of the axis in 1945. Mihaela Albu describes the diversity and plurality of Romanian exiles in the Western world, in diverse countries of Europe and also in the US. This book aims to encourage the dialogue and comparison among diverse exiles. ...Read more

History
(Dis)Entangling Darwin: Cross-disciplinary Reflections on the Man and His Legacy
Sara Graça da Silva, Fátima Vieira and Jorge Bastos da Silva, 978-1-4438-3732-3
Charles Darwin’s curiosity had a remarkable childlike enthusiasm driven by an almost compulsive appetite for a constant process of discovery, which he never satiated despite his many voyages. He would puzzle about the smallest things, from the wonders of barnacles to the different shapes, colours and textures of the beetles which he obsessively collected, from flowers and stems to birds, music and language, and would dedicate years to understanding the potential significance of everything he saw. Darwin’s findings and theories relied heavily on that same curiosity, on seeking and answering questions, however long these would take to clarify. His son Francis Darwin often recalls how “he would ask himself ‘now what do you want to say’ and his answer written down would often disentangle the confusion”. In fact, “disentangling confusions” seems to have been the driving force behind Darwin’s scientific pursuits, as he was struck with bewilderment when contemplating the luxuriousness of life. It was also the impetus for this book. The true implications of Darwin’s legacy remain as controversial to the critics of our time as they were to his contemporaries. Darwin’s impact within and beyond the biological sciences is both daunting and exhilarating, and attests to the need for an interdisciplinary approach by remaining a challenge to many scholars in the most diverse fields. The recent revival of his theories has opened a Pandora’s box of different theoretical studies that are particularly receptive to exploring new and exciting angles of research. ...Read more

Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil
Stephen Hodkinson and Dick Geary, 978-1-4438-3736-1
Slaves have never been mere passive victims of slavery. Typically, they have responded with ingenuity to their violent separation from their native societies, using a variety of strategies to create new social networks and cultures. Religion has been a major arena for such slave cultural strategies. Through participation in religious and ritual activities, slaves have generated important elements of identity, shared humanity, and even resistance, within their lives. This volume presents papers from a conference of the University of Nottingham’s Institute for the Study of Slavery – the only UK centre studying its history from antiquity to the present. It breaks new ground by juxtaposing slave strategies within the diverse religious cultures of Graeco-Roman antiquity and modern Brazil. After a wide-ranging historiographical survey, eleven experts examine how in both societies slave religious activities involved both constraints and opportunities, shedding particular new light on the neglected religious strategies of Graeco-Roman slaves. ...Read more

The Balkans and Caucasus: Parallel Processes on the Opposite Sides of the Black Sea
Ivan Biliarsky, Ovidiu Cristea and Anca Oroveanu, 978-1-4438-3652-4
The overall character of the Black Sea region has been defined over time in various ways. For specialists in economy and trade, it has represented a region at the crossroads of the trade routes between Europe and Asia; for political scientists and historians, it has been a space of confrontation between the great terrestrial and naval powers; for the scholars attentive to its cultural dimensions, it has been a contact zone, a space of interaction between different peoples, religions and cultures. These attempts at a definition all revolve around an essential (and ambivalent) feature of the Black Sea as a factor of connection, a bridge, and at the same time a border, a dividing line between Europe and Asia, between the Baltic and the Mediterranean region. In this fluctuation between the two, the predominance of one over the other (“bridge” or “border”) has depended on a number of factors, first among them the distribution of power relations in the region. This volume, which originated in a symposium hosted by the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest, brings together contributions coming from scholars within the Black Sea region and outside it, in an attempt to look at the Balkans and Caucasus from a comparative and multi-disciplinary perspective, highlighting their differences, as well as their common features. The overarching question this volume and the papers included in it address – and leave open – is to what extent we are dealing with a coherent zone, whose past, present and future can legitimately be considered as being traversed by meaningful interrelations, suggesting a shared destiny. ...Read more

The Emergence of a Greek Identity (1700-1821)
Stratos Myrogiannis, 978-1-4438-3646-3
This book examines the role of Greek-speaking intellectuals in nation-formation processes during the Greek Enlightenment. The author explores how scholars invoked the concept of the ‘nation’ and issues closely related to it in order to enforce their demands either for educational reform or for national independence. To be more specific, he studies the construction of a Modern Greek identity in relation to the Greek and European Enlightenment from 1700 up to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. The theoretical framework the author deploys is twofold. On the one hand, he exploits the methodological tools provided by the ‘history of concepts’, as formulated by Koselleck, Pocock and Skinner. On the other hand, he deploys specific concepts from current approaches on nation-formation processes in history, drawn especially from the works of Anthony Smith, Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. He examines the discursive strategies but also the ideology of relevant works, mainly geographies, histories and political treatises. The corpus of works he studies includes both well-known texts (e.g. by Koraes, Katartzis and Rigas), but also much ignored and so far unexamined works (e.g. by Stanos and Alexandridis). Three arguments are intertwined in the present study. The first issue that this thesis claims to address is the exploration of the incorporation of Byzantium into a Greek historical schema. During the eighteenth century Greek intellectuals attempted to rewrite the history of the Greeks and their main problem was integrating in their narrative the Greek Middle Ages. This period was viewed by them as a historical gap. In their attempt to bridge this gap, the answer they gradually came up with was the invention of what Koraes first named, earlier than is previously thought, ‘Byzantine history’. Secondly, the present study clarifies the particularities of a transformation process regarding the self-image of the Greeks as a political community. This process is evident in the writings of Greek-speaking intellectuals. Influenced by modernity and the emergence of the new political paradigm of the ‘nation’ these scholars imagined Greek-speaking people in terms of a national community. The third argument this book aims to develop is the historical link between the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement and nationalism as an ideology. The author suggests a reinterpretation of the last stage of the Greek Enlightenment. He argues that Greek-speaking scholars transmuted enlightening doctrines into a nationalist ideology in order to satisfy the new political needs of the Greek nation for the creation of an independent state. This enlightened nationalism, however, was not related to the subsequent Romantic ideology, but it was based on the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment. All in all, this book aims to contribute to the study of the Greek Enlightenment by throwing further light on the complex issues of self-image and identity. ...Read more

Irish Studies
Heinrich Böll and Ireland
Gisela Holfter, 978-1-4438-3801-6
Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Böll’s Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) which was first published in 1957, has been read by millions of German readers and has had an unsurpassed impact on the German image of Ireland. But there is much more to Heinrich Böll’s relationship with Ireland than the Irisches Tagebuch. In this new book, Böll scholar Gisela Holfter carefully charts Heinrich Böll’s personal and literary connections with Ireland and Irish literature from his reading Irish fairytales in early childhood, to establishing a second home on Achill Island and his and his wife Annemarie’s translations of numerous books by Irish authors such as Brendan Behan, J. M. Synge, G. B. Shaw, Flann O’Brien and Tomás O’Crohan. This book also examines the response in Ireland to Böll’s works, notably the controversy that ensued following the broadcast of his film Irland und seine Kinder (Children of Eire) in the 1960s. Heinrich Böll and Ireland offers new insights for students, academics and the general reader alike. ...Read more

Marxist Perspectives on Irish Society
Micheal O’Flynn, Odette Clarke, Paul M. Hayes and Martin J. Power, 978-1-4438-3889-4
This book involves a conscious attempt to bridge progressive academic scholarship with activist groups and communities in Ireland and beyond. Taking Howard Zinn’s maxim “You can’t be neutral on a moving train” seriously, the book attempts to examine Irish society, as much as it is possible to do so, from the point of view of those who are actively fighting against ongoing attacks on the pay, conditions, rights and protections that were won by working people through the decades of the twentieth century. This effort comes at a time when the predatory nature of the capitalist system is being revealed on a daily basis, and its consequences exacerbated simultaneously across the globe. The chapters deal with the various impacts of world capitalism in Ireland, from the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century, to the current economic crash. The individual perspectives of contributing scholars and activists differ substantially; they would not usually be found within the same publication. Nonetheless, they collectively manage to highlight the capitalist character of Irish society, and provide an analysis of its features that is specifically Marxist. They demonstrate that there are alternative ways of looking at Irish history, Irish political economy and the issues currently impacting on the working population and various marginalised or vulnerable groups. They show that the class struggle continues unabated and that progressive social change, now more than ever, requires the development of an organised resistance. ...Read more

Language and Literature
Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics
Vladimir Polyakov and Valery Solovyev, 978-1-4438-3653-1
Created as intercultural and interdisciplinary, conferences of the series “Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics” have been successfully held since 1998. Over the years, CML has visited a number of countries, attracting more and more scientists from all over the world and thus broadening the scope of its topics. The conference has worked out its scientific character and now it has a constant core of participants; and the term “cognitive modeling” has become a popular topic of high profile conferences in linguistics and artificial intelligence, which affirms the CML’s direction of movement. The present volume gathers the most outstanding and interesting articles from participants of the XIIIth International Conference “Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics”, whose studies will no doubt be of interest to both scientists who have tied their lives with linguistics, as well as to those people who treat it as a hobby. For information about CML conferences, please visit www.cml.msisa.ru ...Read more

Comprehension of Wh-Dependencies in Broca’s Aphasia
Vanja Kljajevic, 978-1-4438-3666-1
This book investigates whether Croatian aphasics, in particular those diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia, have difficulty comprehending wh-dependencies. The tested structures include subject and object direct, embedded, long-distance and passivized who and which questions as well as relative clauses introduced by which. It is shown that differences in the deficit patterns between English- and Croatian-speaking Broca’s aphasics are due to structural as well as processing differences. The Croatian data are explained in terms of a case-cueing comprehension strategy and the competition model. ...Read more

Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration
N. H. Reeve, 978-1-4438-3656-2
Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) is increasingly being recognised as one of the leading English novelists and short story writers of the middle of the twentieth century. Successive generations of readers have delighted in her subtle and penetrating exposures of the vanities and self-delusions of everyday life, her special sensitivity to frustration and disappointment, and the marvellous freshness of her wit and humour. Now, to mark the centenary of her birth, Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration presents several new critical assessments of her work by leading academics, together with a sizeable number of Taylor’s uncollected or unpublished writings: short stories, including the first and the last she completed, essays on writers and writing, and a selection of letters to various correspondents, including Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. Opening many previously unexplored perspectives on Taylor’s work, this volume will be essential reading for her admirers and for the wider study of the literature of her time. ...Read more

English Dictionaries as Cultural Mines
Roberta Facchinetti, 978-1-4438-3647-0
Dictionaries are mines whose word-gems encapsulate centuries of language history and cultural traditions; they are store-houses of meanings and uses, ‘lamp genies’ to be set free at the very moment readers set their eyes on their entries. This book is an attempt to free such lamp genies, by discussing the role of dictionaries in the identification and expression of cultural aspects in language, with special reference to English. As such, its eleven chapters have been arranged to focus on general, genre-specific, monolingual and bilingual lexicography, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. The book will be of use to lexicographers and lexicologists, as well as to corpus linguists, historical and contemporary English scholars, students of English, and anybody interested in the juice of culture(s) that can be fruitfully extracted from dictionary entries. ...Read more

Language Arts in Asia: Literature and Drama in English, Putonghua and Cantonese
C. A. DeCoursey, 978-1-4438-3669-2
This volume is the first of a series contributing to the academic study of Language Arts, as an English-language teaching paradigm. Language Arts has been widely used in native English-speaking countries including Australia and New Zealand. Its recent adoption into the second-language teaching curriculum in Hong Kong, as well as similar initiatives within secondary and tertiary education in mainland China, enhances its interest to scholars studying second-language teaching and learning in Asian contexts. This book offers many papers and discussions of interest to teachers, language professionals, scholars and administrators. Its chapters explore current topics in Language Arts research including trends in the rapprochment of stylistics and linguistics, teaching approaches and learning outcomes. At the same time, they offer diverse theoretical and methodological aproaches, of interest to the practitioner and policy-maker as well as the researcher. The value of this volume lies particularly in strengthening the theoretical and methodological foundations of Language Arts. The use of literature and the arts in humanist education has a long history within Europe, being traditionally appreciated for its ability to transform leaders, instill finer sensibilities and question social ills. In its postcolonial incarnations, as the traditional subject areas were informed by critical and linguistic theories, language arts subject areas were less often used, as they were understood to offer opportunities to analyse their functions as apology for leaders, coopting the young, and pacifying dissent but less often used to teach second language skills. Language Arts curricula arising since the 1980s have increasingly embraced authentic voices, styles and genres. Contemporary Language Arts curricula use literature to teach reading-based and communication skills, in conjunction with critical and creative thinking. The movement of English-language education beyond native English shores has placed Language Arts into a World Englishes frame, and therefore its curricula have included the teaching ethics, civics and intercultural sensitivity. The explosion of media and digital communications of the 1990s led to the adoption of media literacy as a crucial Language Arts skill. As digital innovations continue to impact the teaching of English, Language Arts has adopted multiliteracies. These developments are represented in the papers included in this volume. ...Read more

Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living Together in the German-Speaking World
Yael Almog and Erik Born, 978-1-4438-3733-0
Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living Together in the German-Speaking World is a bilingual collection of nine essays on culture, film, language, literature, and theory. The essays in this collection address questions of community and cohesion in the modern German-speaking world, a complex sociolinguistic community that is no longer defined by territorial boundaries but that remains, in many respects, a neighborhood. How can neighborliness be possible for this world in an age of mass migration and increasing globalization? Given the fluidity of modern identity, what could make communities uniform, harmonious, or even cohesive, if they can be created and dissolved in an instant? To what extent do modern technology and mass communication facilitate and/or inhibit the ability to inhabit multiple cultures and multiple worlds? Examining the specific constitution of the modern German-speaking world, this volume contributes to recent scholarship in critical theory on the figure of the neighbor and the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The essays in this volume, proceeding in a roughly chronological order, expose how images of neighbors and neighborhoods have developed in the German-speaking world over the course of the twentieth century. The examination of these developments should enrich both the study of multiculturalism and (trans-)nationalism in German Studies and that of subjectivity and political theology in critical theory. Offering a wide range of approaches to one critical topic, the essays in this volume will be useful to students and scholars in the fields of German Studies, cultural studies, language and literature, and film and media, especially those with an interest in secularism and globalization. ...Read more

New Trends in Early Foreign Language Learning: The Age Factor, CLIL and Languages in Contact. Bridging Research and Good Practices
Maria González Davies and Annarita Taronna, 978-1-4438-3651-7
This volume is the result of the presentations and discussions carried out at the Conference on “Early Foreign Language Learning in Educational Contexts. Bridging Good Practices and Research” organized by the University Ramon Lull, the University of Bari and LEND (Lingua e Nuova Didattica) in March 2010. At the Conference, both teachers and researchers met to examine recent language teaching theories and practices from a transnational and intercultural perspective, on the one hand, and on the other, to fill the gap in the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in schools and to pave the way for a wider platform of discussion between School and University. Since these two institutions have often had little contact and, as there is excellent work carried out in both, our attempt was to build more solid bridges across their contexts, engaging school teachers in ongoing research and bringing everyday classroom practice nearer to university theoreticians in an open exchange forum so that the reflection on teaching and learning becomes relevant and rewarding for the participants involved in Early Foreign Language Learning in 21st century contexts. Drawing on the main topics presented throughout the Conference, this book has been structured around three main thematic areas: 1) the Age Factor, 2) CLIL and Content-based research and practices, and 3) developing intercultural competence: use of the L1 and translation as mediation skills. Each of these sections encompasses high quality contributions, all informed by salient and recent research, clear and justified theoretical standpoints and good practices which are appealing to an international audience and setting. The editors sincerely hope that this volume contributes to widen the field of foreign language teaching and learning to include studies on young learners’ perceptions and performance. At the same time, they would like to highlight the decisive new focus on language learning adopted in the 21st century: the inclusion of a wider vision of language acquisition, one that highlights the relevance of using languages not only to communicate but, more relevantly, to mediate between cultures, as a means to bring together the plurilingual and pluricultural citizens of our future. ...Read more

Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Intercultural Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and “the Orient”
Ignacio López-Calvo, 978-1-4438-3714-9
This volume is a collection of essays dealing with the critical dialogue between the cultural production of the Hispanic/Latino world and that of the so-called Orient or the Orient itself, including the Asian and Arab worlds. As we see in these essays, the Europeans’ cultural others (peripheral nations and former colonies) have established an intercultural and intercontinental dialogue among themselves, without feeling the need to resort to the center-metropolis’ mediation. These South-to-South dialogues tend not to be as asymmetric as the old dialogue between the (former) metropolis (the hegemonic, Eurocentric center) and the colonies. These essays about Hispanic and Latino cultural production (most of them dealing with literature, but some covering urban art, music, and film) provide vivid examples of de-colonizing impetus and cultural resistance. In some of them, we can find peripheral subjectivities’ perception of other peripheral, racialized, and (post)colonial subjects and their cultures. ...Read more

Romance: The History of a Genre
Dana Percec, 978-1-4438-3734-7
Romance: The History of a Genre is a collection of essays devoted to the highly popular and no less controversial genre of romance. A genre often disregarded for its stereotypical language, shallow characters, and predictable plots, dismissed as “women’s” fiction, accused of conventionalism, romance is a genre which, after ups and downs in its millennial history, is now holding a leading position on the international bookselling market. This achievement has also been possible with the endorsement of contemporary media and modern technology, cinema, television, the Internet, etc. Much has been written in both traditional and more recent literary theory about the origins and evolution of the early forms of romance, from the classical Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance and early modernity in Western Europe. A corpus, which is becoming more and more substantial today, is already available about the gendered status of contemporary romance, both in terms of the writing ethos and in terms of reader response, with theories coming from the combined areas of feminism, social sciences, and psychoanalysis. The aim of the present volume is that of noting the fluid character of the genre, with the great number of subcategories, mixed and hybrid, bringing evidence to the polymorphous nature of contemporary popular culture. This book proposes, in four parts and twelve chapters, a fascinating and multifaceted journey into the history, substance and geography of romance. From its origins to the latest developments, from its subgenres to its features, from print to film, from television to Facebook, romance comes in various shapes and colours, which the reader can fully explore. The journey in the world of romance takes the reader from familiar corners to less familiar ones: from North America, Great Britain, Romania, or Turkey, to India or South Africa. The numerous approaches to romance generate diverse data, varied analytical frameworks and interesting, fresh and solidly grounded findings. ...Read more

The Forbidden
Benito Pérez Galdós, 978-1-4438-3800-9
Benito Pérez Galdós, considered Spain’s most important novelist after Cervantes, wrote 77 novels, several works of theater and a number of other tomes during his lifetime (1843–1920). His works have been translated into all major languages of the world, and many of his most highly regarded novels, those of the contemporary period, have been translated into English two, three and even four times over. Of the few “contemporary novels” of Galdós that until now have not come to light in English, The Forbidden is certainly among the most noteworthy. The story line concerns a wealthy philanderer, José María Bueno de Guzmán, who attempts to buy the favors of his three beautiful married cousins. He is successful with the first, Eloísa, a grasping materialist who falls deeply in love with him. Then he rejects her in order to attempt to seduce the youngest, Camila. Meanwhile, the third, the pseudo-intellectual María Juana, jealous, seduces José María. But it is Camila, healthy, impetuous and wild, who resists his temptations and holds our attention. The novelist and critic Leopoldo Alas, Galdós’s contemporary, calls her “the most feminine, graceful, lively female character that any modern novelist has painted.” As a naturalistic study, in the manner of Balzac in particular, principal characters of Galdós’s other novels (El doctor Centeno, La de Bringas, La familia de León Roch) become fleetingly visible in The Forbidden. In addition, the entire Bueno de Guzmán family gives evidence of the naturalistic emphasis on heredity: they all display certain physical or mental disorders. Eloísa has a morbid fear of feathers, María Juana often feels that she has a tiny piece of cloth caught in her teeth, José María suffers bouts of depression, an uncle is a kleptomaniac, one of the relatives writes letters to himself, etc. At the same time, this novel shows the foibles of Spanish society where status is determined by one’s associates, by the wearing of finery, and by living on borrowed money. In their history of Spanish literature, Chandler and Schwartz call Galdós “the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century and the only one who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with great novelists like Balzac, Dickens and Dostoievsky.” The Forbidden, written at the height of the author’s creative powers, is a major work and its publication for an English-speaking audience is long overdue. ...Read more

The Future of Post-Human Semantics: A Preface to a New Theory of Internality and Externality
Peter Baofu, 978-1-4438-3648-7
Is semantics really so indeterminate that, as W. V. Quine (1960) once argued in Word and Object, in the example about a previously undocumented, primitive tribe, “it is impossible in principle to be absolutely certain of the meaning or reference that a speaker of the primitive tribe’s language attaches to an utterance”? (WK 2011) This thought-provoking stand in semantics can be contrasted with an opposing view like “literal translation” (or “metaphrase,” in contrast with “paraphrase”), in that, as John Dryden put it, “when [words] appear . . . literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed.” (WK 2011a; C. Kasparek 1983) Contrary to these opposing ideas (and other views as will be discussed in the book), semantics, in relation to internality and externality, is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Surely, the challenge to these opposing ideas in semantics does not mean that semantics is useless, or that those fields of study related to semantics like philosophy of language, linguistics, psychology, communication studies, hermeneutics, logic, computer science, semiotics, pragmaticism, and so on should be rejected too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of semantics, especially in the dialectic context of internality and externality—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the interactive theory of semantics) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about semantics, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate. ...Read more

The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri
Stephanie Laggini Fiore, 978-1-4438-3660-9
The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri fills a void in critical inquiry on the works of eighteenth-century tragedian Vittorio Alfieri – perhaps the most important figure of the Italian Enlightenment – by exploring in depth the often neglected female characters and their function within the tragic structure. In this re-reading of the Alfierian tragedies, the author redefines the role of the heroine, and challenges traditional analyses that marginalize the female character and orient her to an abstract ideal characterized by fragility and tragic victimization. The author argues persuasively that, in Alfieri’s search for psychological realism, he undermines traditional assumptions of gender roles by his modern portrayal of the tragic characters. The heroine’s different orientation towards reality endows her with intuitive and intelligent reasoning that contradicts eighteenth-century views of women as catalysts of anarchy and disorder. Alfieri’s tragic heroines are represented also as surprisingly independent and powerful. The resultant image of determined, active, and intelligent women refutes the traditional critical view. In exploring Vittorio Alfieri’s pre-modern sensibilities in the representation of his tragic heroines, this book is an important contribution to the growing body of critical works that study the representation of gender in post-Renaissance and pre-modern Italian literature. This book will be of particular interest to: scholars of Italian literature, especially the Enlightenment and Romantic periods; scholars of 18th-century European, American and other literatures; scholars of 18th-century history and sociology; and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies scholars. ...Read more

The Postmodern Mythology of Michel Tournier
Melissa Barchi Panek, 978-1-4438-3737-8
Michel Tournier defines the supreme mission of a writer to be the creation of a mythology which allows for interaction with his readers, who seem to be losing their critical faculties in our contemporary, postmodern world dominated by consumption and dizzying technological advances. Our contemporary society has changed due to the end of the modern era with its reigning ideologies. Collapsing after the atrocities of the Second World War, Modernity and the artistic and literary reactions referred to as modernism, have likewise been transformed. Myth continues to represent the collectivity of human existence, yet, in the short stories and novels of Michel Tournier, myth represents the collapse of the all-encompassing ideologies inherent to the Modern era. The grand narratives of Modernity such as Christianity and Man’s reason have been deconstructed in the postmodern era. The mythology of Michel Tournier expresses these trends towards the dissolution of Modernity and creates individual, mini narratives which emphasize the particularity of individual existence. Tournier takes established mythical models rooted in Christianity, fables and legends of Western Civilization and re-contextualizes them. Through a semiotic reworking of core binary pairs of a myth, Tournier creates a third-order level of representation which modifies the mythical model. The works of le Roi des Aulnes, Gilles et Jeanne, and Vendredi are illustrious of this third-order level of signification. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structural make-up of myth transforms established meanings according to the dominant cultural code. Barthes’ semiological study of myth reveals the levels of representation through which myth creates meaning. Myth builds upon the denotative first-order level of language and through a connotative process, creates a second-order level. This connotative process does not end on this second-order, for in the writings of Tournier, this semiological process is continued to a third-order which re-contextualizes the myth again. Tournier adapts myth to the unique traits of the postmodern era including deconstruction and playfulness by allowing the reader to provide the context of the story. As such we, the reader, take the place as author of our own individual mythology. ...Read more

Transgressing Women: Space and The Body in Contemporary Noir Thrillers
Jamaluddin Aziz, 978-1-4438-3662-3
Transgressing Women focuses on the literary and cinematic representation of female characters in contemporary noir thrillers. The book argues that as the genre has grown, expanded and been subverted since its initial conception, along with the changing definition of gender, the representation of a female character has also inevitably gone through some dramatic changes. So, the book asks some important questions: What links the female characters in canonical noir to their contemporary counterparts? Is gender division still relevant in a text that transgresses gender boundaries? What happens when it is the human body itself that betrays the traditional definition or constitution of a human being? While many have written about the male protagonists and the femmes fatales in the noir genre, little attention has been given to the ‘other’ female characters who inhabit the noir world and are transgressors themselves. The main concern of the book is to trace the transgressive female characters in contemporary noir thrillers – both novels and films – by engaging itself with some of the most topical debates within both (post)feminist and postmodernist theories. The book is structured around two key concepts – space and the body. These temporal and spatial indicators are central in contemporary cultural theories such as postmodernism and post-feminism, along with other theorizations of gender and the noir genre. This means that the analysis is drawn from the classical noir examples and will then arrive at the neo-noir sub-genre, and then will move on to the most recent phenomenon in the genre, ‘future noir’. ...Read more

Translating Identities on Stage and Screen: Pragmatic Perspectives and Discoursal Tendencies
Maria Sidiropoulou, 978-1-4438-3717-0
This book takes a pragmatic/semiotic approach to real-life translating for the stage and screen, with a view to showing the potential of systematic linguistic analysis to reveal aspects of meaning-making. Functionalist, interpretive and critical perspectives merge to describe shifting aspects of phenomena in acculturating Pinter, Shakespeare, Wilde, Leonard, Shaw, Austen, etc., in the second half of the 20th century, for the Greek stage and/or screen. More specifically, the book tackles rendition of politeness in staging Pinter, implementation of narrative perspectives in stage and screen versions of Hamlet, rendition of semantic oppositions for humour generation across versions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rendition of subcultural linguistic variety in Shaw’s Pygmalion on stage and screen, target identity inscription in versions of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Leonard’s Da, rendition of phenomena in subtitling and dubbing The Hunchback of Notre Dame animation film for the young, and the similarities between translation and cinematic adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Hislop’s The Island. Awareness of specificities in the treatment of linguistic phenomena is expected to inform the agenda of what is to be further explored in Translation Studies. ...Read more

Linguistics
Automatic Processing of Various Levels of Linguistic Phenomena: Selected Papers from the NooJ 2011 International Conference
Kristina Vučković, Božo Bekavac and Max Silberztein, 978-1-4438-3711-8
Every year since 2002, the linguistic development environment NooJ has been enhanced with new online features that allow social scientists to develop new applications and explore new domains. The 2011 conference was no exception and the arrival of v3.0 has brought many more features and a new range of applications, from the analysis of ancient Arabic and old English texts to the analysis of conversations held by the Mars500 mission’s astronauts. At the 2011 conference, members of the European Meta-Net CESAR project announced that NooJ will soon be available Open Source and will become the de-facto standard tool for Corpus processing in European research in Social Science. Today, NooJ is used as a research tool in over 30 academic and research centers in the world and there are NooJ modules available for over 20 languages. The international NooJ conference is organized every year; 50 participants present their work in the domains of Linguistic formalization, Corpus processing and Natural Language Processing applications. The present volume contains a selection of papers from the NooJ 2011 International Conference which was held from 13–15 June 2011 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This volume presents problems dealing with machine translation, information extraction, processing of multi-word units, automatic disambiguation, semantic analysis, and psychological and literature analysis of various corpora. ...Read more

Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics
Vladimir Polyakov and Valery Solovyev, 978-1-4438-3653-1
Created as intercultural and interdisciplinary, conferences of the series “Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics” have been successfully held since 1998. Over the years, CML has visited a number of countries, attracting more and more scientists from all over the world and thus broadening the scope of its topics. The conference has worked out its scientific character and now it has a constant core of participants; and the term “cognitive modeling” has become a popular topic of high profile conferences in linguistics and artificial intelligence, which affirms the CML’s direction of movement. The present volume gathers the most outstanding and interesting articles from participants of the XIIIth International Conference “Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics”, whose studies will no doubt be of interest to both scientists who have tied their lives with linguistics, as well as to those people who treat it as a hobby. For information about CML conferences, please visit www.cml.msisa.ru ...Read more

Comprehension of Wh-Dependencies in Broca’s Aphasia
Vanja Kljajevic, 978-1-4438-3666-1
This book investigates whether Croatian aphasics, in particular those diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia, have difficulty comprehending wh-dependencies. The tested structures include subject and object direct, embedded, long-distance and passivized who and which questions as well as relative clauses introduced by which. It is shown that differences in the deficit patterns between English- and Croatian-speaking Broca’s aphasics are due to structural as well as processing differences. The Croatian data are explained in terms of a case-cueing comprehension strategy and the competition model. ...Read more

HateSpeak in Contemporary Arabic Discourse
Bahaa-eddin M. Mazid, 978-1-4438-3650-0
HateSpeak in Contemporary Arabic Discourse fills in an obvious gap in discourse studies on Arabic. After a detailed semantic and metaphorical account of hate in English and its equivalents in Arabic and an exploration of the causes of hate, the book illustrates major cases of hate and HateSpeak in contemporary Arabic discourse – Arabs vs. Israel, Sunnis vs. Shi’ites, Ahly vs. Zamalek, Egypt vs. Algeria, Men vs. Women, Rebel vs. Mainstream, and Sa’idi vs. Cairene. There is a separate section on HateSpeak in Arabic in the context of the revolutions in many Arab countries – the Arab Spring – with a focus on Egypt. The book contains a number of apt and interesting digressions on hate in general and hate in Arabic in particular, and a discussion of the issues involved in translating HateSpeak in Arabic. The ultimate goal is not to celebrate hate and HateSpeak, not to side with any party at the expense of another, but to provide a diagnosis followed by a number of remedies that may help convert HateSpeak into HeartSpeak. ...Read more

Multiple Perspectives in Linguistic Research on Baltic Languages
Aurelija Usonienė, Nicole Nau and Ineta Dabašinskienė, 978-1-4438-3645-6
The ten contributions to this volume present original research on grammar and discourse in modern Lithuanian and Latvian. They reflect the diversity of approaches in linguistic research on Baltic languages that has developed in recent years, after a period where these languages were studied almost exclusively from the perspective of historical-comparative linguistics. Current research perspectives include, among others, perspectives from discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language acquisition research, corpus linguistics, contrastive studies, and linguistic typology. The studies in this volume explore new ways of describing the system and use of Latvian or Lithuanian from a synchronic, non-normative point of view. They focus on grammatical categories and constructions (modality, evidentiality, case, existential clauses), grammatical characteristics of lexical classes (reflexive verbs, numerals), the characteristics of certain forms of discourse (academic discourse, food discourse), and the effects of an ideology of “correct language” on language users. ...Read more

The Future of Post-Human Semantics: A Preface to a New Theory of Internality and Externality
Peter Baofu, 978-1-4438-3648-7
Is semantics really so indeterminate that, as W. V. Quine (1960) once argued in Word and Object, in the example about a previously undocumented, primitive tribe, “it is impossible in principle to be absolutely certain of the meaning or reference that a speaker of the primitive tribe’s language attaches to an utterance”? (WK 2011) This thought-provoking stand in semantics can be contrasted with an opposing view like “literal translation” (or “metaphrase,” in contrast with “paraphrase”), in that, as John Dryden put it, “when [words] appear . . . literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed.” (WK 2011a; C. Kasparek 1983) Contrary to these opposing ideas (and other views as will be discussed in the book), semantics, in relation to internality and externality, is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Surely, the challenge to these opposing ideas in semantics does not mean that semantics is useless, or that those fields of study related to semantics like philosophy of language, linguistics, psychology, communication studies, hermeneutics, logic, computer science, semiotics, pragmaticism, and so on should be rejected too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of semantics, especially in the dialectic context of internality and externality—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the interactive theory of semantics) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about semantics, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate. ...Read more

Translating Identities on Stage and Screen: Pragmatic Perspectives and Discoursal Tendencies
Maria Sidiropoulou, 978-1-4438-3717-0
This book takes a pragmatic/semiotic approach to real-life translating for the stage and screen, with a view to showing the potential of systematic linguistic analysis to reveal aspects of meaning-making. Functionalist, interpretive and critical perspectives merge to describe shifting aspects of phenomena in acculturating Pinter, Shakespeare, Wilde, Leonard, Shaw, Austen, etc., in the second half of the 20th century, for the Greek stage and/or screen. More specifically, the book tackles rendition of politeness in staging Pinter, implementation of narrative perspectives in stage and screen versions of Hamlet, rendition of semantic oppositions for humour generation across versions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rendition of subcultural linguistic variety in Shaw’s Pygmalion on stage and screen, target identity inscription in versions of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Leonard’s Da, rendition of phenomena in subtitling and dubbing The Hunchback of Notre Dame animation film for the young, and the similarities between translation and cinematic adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Hislop’s The Island. Awareness of specificities in the treatment of linguistic phenomena is expected to inform the agenda of what is to be further explored in Translation Studies. ...Read more

Music
Cesare Pugni: DOCH’ FARAONA La Fille du Pharaon/Pharaoh’s Daughter
Edited and Introduced by Robert Ignatius Letellier, 978-1-4438-3728-6
Cesare Pugni (1802–1870) made his debut as a composer at La Scala in 1826 with the opera Elerz e Zulmida, later becoming director of the Paganini Institute in Paris where he met the great choreogrpahers of the time. He began working closely with Jules Perrot, first in Paris, then in London. He also worked with Arthur Saint-Léon, Paolo Taglioni, Marius Petipa, and some of the greatest dancers of the century. His time in Paris with Perrot was marked by an extraordinarily intense activity, which accelerated when he reached Her Majesty’s Theatre in London where he presented some of the most renowned ballets of the 19th century, such as Esmeralda (1844) and the Pas de Quatre (1845), which still find their place in some modern repertories. Pugni later followed Perrot to St Petersburg and became official composer of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg. His most famous collaboration, with Marius Petipa, now followed, which lasted until Pugni’s death. Some of his ballets already well-known in Europe were transferred to St Petersburg, although he also composed new ballets in Russia. Pugni is known above all for his enormous output of musical works, including more than 300 ballets, a dozen operas, over 40 masses, other polyphonic works, and a few symphonies, among which was a Sinfonia a canone, highly praised by Meyerbeer. This extremely prolific composer was very popular with the public, as all his ballets are easy to to listen to and to understand. He also found no diffculty in adapting his music to suit all sorts of choreographic needs, and many different performers. Doch’ Faraona, or La Fille du Pharaon is a ballet in 3 acts and 9 scenes with prologue and epilogue. The scenario was devised by Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Marius Petipa, with choreography by Petipa. It was first performed on 30 January 1862, in St Petersburg at the Bolshoi Theatre. The principal dancers were Carolina Rosati, Nicholas Golts, Marius Petipa, and Lev Ivanov. The ballet was inspired by Théophile Gautier’s Le Roman de la Momie, and narrates the adventures of the English Lord Wilson and his servant John Bull,who seek shelter from a storm in an Ancient Egyptian tomb. They smoke opium and in their dreams are taken back to the times of the characters buried there: Lord Wilson meets the Pharaoh’s daughter Aspicia during a lion hunt, helps her to escape from the invidious attentions of the King of Nubia, and undergoes various adventures with her in the Egyptian countryside (including a visit to the watery underworld of the King of the Nile where all the great rivers of the world are represented in national dance). He is eventually saved from sacrifice and united with her in marriage, before waking to the cold light of reality. The ballet was a resounding success. The spectacle lasted over 4 hours and featured a cast of 400, 80 of them dancers. The spectacle was prepared in only 6 weeks for Carolina Rosati’s farewell performance. This success secured Marius Petipa’s appointment as maître de ballet (assistant ballet master) in St Petersburg. It marked the last of Rosati’s appearances in Russia, but thereafter tempted other great ballerinas, including Marie Petipa, Yekaterina Vazem, Virginia Zucchi, Mathilda Kschessinskaya and Anna Pavlova, each of them contributing her own interpretation of the heroine’s part. Marius Ivanovich Petipa (1818 -1910) was a hugely influential French balletmaster, teacher and choreographer who became Premier Maître de Ballet of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres from 1871 until 1903. Petipa created over fifty ballets, some of which have survived in versions either faithful to, inspired by, or reconstructed from the original, including Pharaoh's Daughter (1862); Don Quixote (1869); La Bayadère (1877); Le Talisman (1889); and Sleeping Beauty (1890) among others. Petipa also revived a substantial number of works created by other ballet masters. His productions became the definitive versions from which nearly all subsequent revivals would be based — Le Corsaire, Giselle, Coppélia, La Fille mal gardée (with Lev Ivanov), The Little Humpbacked Horse and Swan Lake (with Lev Ivanov). There are various dances from Petipa's original works and revivals that have survived in an independent form in versions either based on the original or choreographed anew by others. ...Read more

Cesare Pugni: Music from Five Ballets Ondine Esmeralda Pas de Quatre Catarina, ou La Fille du bandit Théolinda, ou Le Lutin de la vallée
Edited and Introduced by Robert Ignatius Letellier, 978-1-4438-3710-1
Cesare Pugni (1802–70) made his debut as a composer at La Scala in 1826 with the opera Elerz e Zulmida. In the 1840s he worked closely with the choreographer Jules Perrot (1810–92) in Paris and in London, creating some of the most renowned ballets of the 19th century, a number of which still find their place in some modern repertories. Pugni later followed Perrot to St Petersburg, and became official composer of the Imperial Russian theatres. Some of his earlier ballets were transferred to St Petersburg, and he also composed many new works for that city. Along with Perrot, Pugni also worked with Arthur Saint-Léon (1821–70), Paolo Taglioni (1808–84), Marius Petipa (1818–1910), and some of the greatest dancers of the century. His most famous collaboration, with Marius Petipa, lasted until the composer’s death on 26 January 1870. Pugni was extremely prolific, composing more than 300 ballets, a dozen operas, over 40 masses, other polyphonic works and a few symphonies. He was very popular with the public, who were delighted by his direct uncomplicated style, with its attractive melodies and infectious rhythms. Ondine, choreographed and danced by Perrot and Fanny Cerrito, was premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1845. It is a variant on the famous water nymph story Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. The ballet became famous for the conception of the generic scene type of the Pas de l’Ombre, where the nymph sees her own shadow in the moonlight for the first time and tries to catch it. The ballet was praised for its magnificent décor and for Pugni’s score: “. . . the musical accompaniment which describes the rise and fall of the waves is eminently characteristic and beautiful: the very ripple of the flow, and the rushing sound of the ebb over the pebbly strand, are heard and fully satisfy the ear”. Esmeralda, choreographed by Perrot and premiered with Perrot, Carlotta Grisi and Saint-Léon in the principal roles, was first performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in 1844. The ballet is based on the story of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. It was reasonably successful, and Grisi was pronounced the perfect personification of the gypsy girl Esmeralda. The ballet later became immensely popular in Russia; Fanny Elssler enjoyed one of her biggest triumphs in the title role. Pugni’s music successfully evokes an atmosphere of Medieval Paris, the changing moods of the story, and the delicate vulnerability of the heroine. For Petipa’s production of 1888, Riccardo Drigo was asked to compose several new numbers, including the Esmeralda Pas de Deux and the Diana and Acteon Pas de Deux, which became very popular in their own right. The Pas de quatre was a divertissement choreographed by Perrot for four of the leading ballerinas of the time, and premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1845. Created by Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito and Lucile Grahn, this plotless ballet epitomizes the Romantic cult of the ballerina. Pugni’s variations were exquisitely tailored to the character and particular skills of each of the illustrious protagonists. There were four performances of the Pas de quatre with the original dancers, and there have been many revivals, starting in 1847 (when the part created by Grahn was given to Carolina Rosati), and continuing through to later reconstructions in the 20th century. Catarina, ou La Fille du bandit was choreographed by Perrot, with the principal roles created by Lucile Grahn, Perrot and Louis Gosselin. It was first performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1846. The plot revolves around the love of the painter Salvator Rosa for Catarina, a bandit chief. The ballet grew in popularity due to the fascination and humanity of the unconventional characters from an original story based on the artist’s life, and the incomparable elegance of its mass movements. Founded on the contrast between feminine grace and military precision, this work was one of the greatest triumphs of both Lucile Grahn and Fanny Elssler. Théolinda, ou Le Lutin de la vallée, an opera-ballet in 2 acts and 3 scenes, with choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon, and music by Eugène Gautier, was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1853. Later Saint-Léon reworked the piece as Théolinda l’Orpheline for the Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow in 1862, with the score arranged by Pugni. Saint-Léon chose the new young star Marfa Muravieva to create the title role. The work was revived in 1865 with Praskovia Lebedeva, again with Lebedeva in 1866, and once more, in 1870, this time with Ekaterina Vazem. Pugni’s adaptation of the music became popular in Russia, and was published in Saint-Petersburg by Stellowsky. ...Read more

Future Prospects for Music Education: Corroborating Informal Learning Pedagogy
Sidsel Karlsen and Lauri Väkevä, 978-1-4438-3658-6
Informal learning pedagogy has become a major topic within the international field of music education, due in no small part to Lucy Green’s groundbreaking research on popular musicians’ learning, as well as her subsequent efforts to turn her research findings into a pedagogy that can be implemented in comprehensive school music education. This has generated massive interest and attention among music education practitioners and scholars worldwide. With experience of studying and working within higher music education in the Nordic countries, the editors of this anthology, Sidsel Karlsen and Lauri Väkevä, are well acquainted with popular music-related informal learning pedagogies, which have formed an important aspect of comprehensive school music education in the Nordic countries for more than two decades. With this familiarity also comes a wish to contribute to the critical examination and further development of existing practices, by corroborating informal learning pedagogy in popular music from different angles. The introduction of this book explores different theoretical starting points for investigations of the formal-informal nexus. The following chapters, written by an international community of experienced music education scholars and practitioners, afford critical examinations of informal learning pedagogies from various perspectives, either theoretical or research-based. In the last chapter, Lucy Green paves the way for moving informal and aural learning into the traditional instrumental music lesson. Altogether, the anthology aims to explore some of the future prospects for music education with informal learning pedagogy as the focal point. ...Read more

Naval Science
To be a Sailor's Wife
Hanna Hagmark-Cooper, 978-1-4438-3642-5
The duality of maritime family life, the relationship between reconstruction and discourse and the symbolic status of the seafarer’s wife are at the core of this book, which brings maritime women’s experiences to the fore, widening the perspective of maritime history. Based on the collected life stories of seafarers’ wives from the Åland Islands in Baltic Sea, Hanna Hagmark-Cooper draws attention to the cyclical nature of maritime family life and to the seafarers’ wives’ perception of leading two parallel lives: one when they are on their own and one with their husbands at home. The author considers how discourses change over time and colour narratives, and she investigates the women’s attitudes to the myths surrounding the image of the seafarer’s wife. ...Read more

Political Science
Enemy Images in War Propaganda
Marja Vuorinen, 978-1-4438-3641-8
In the post 9/11 world, the emotionally charged concepts of identity and ideology, enmity and political violence have once again become household words. Contrary to the serene assumptions of the early 1990s, history did not end. Civilisations are busy clashing against one another, and the self-proclaimed pacified humanity is once again showing its barbaric roots. Religion mixes with politics to produce governments that abuse even their own citizens, and victorious insurgents too often fail to carry out the promised reforms. Terrorists blow up unsuspecting pedestrians, and allegedly democratic nations threaten to bomb allegedly less democratic ones back to the Stone Age. Mass demonstrations materialise like flash mobs out of nowhere, prepared to hold their ground until the bitter end. Where does all this passionate intensity come from? To better understand how the ideological enmity of today is moulded, spread and managed, this book investigates the propaganda operations of the past. Its topics range from the ruthless portrayal of female enemy soldiers in an early-20th-century civil war setting to the multiple enemy images cherished by Adolf Hitler, and onwards, to the WWII Soviet Russians as a subtype of a more ancient notion of the Eastern Hordes. Of more recent events, the book covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the still ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. The closing chapter on cyber warfare introduces the reader to the invisible enemies of the future. ...Read more

The Middle East and the Cold War: Between Security and Development
Massimiliano Trentin in collaboration with Matteo Gerlini, 978-1-4438-3715-6
There have been quite a lot of attempts to find out exactly what the impact of the Cold War on the Middle East was, and this from different disciplinary perspectives. This volumes tries to integrate the historical debate with new fresh insights thanks to the works of young scholars who are currently engaged in archival and field research. Algeria, Sudan, Jordan as well as Syria, Israel and Iran during the embattled 1950s and 1960s are the objects of this volume, which draws a much more complicated picture than one might expect. As a matter of fact, both the Cold War superpowers and their European allies proved constrained in their interventions to shape the political and economic dynamics of the region according to their own plans: on the contrary, Middle Eastern rulers enjoyed remarkable autonomy to achieve their goals, and fully exploited, in rhetorics and practice, the competition and rivalry which divided the industrial countries during the Cold War. The process of decolonization and the related construction of new patterns of national sovereignty and development were major issues at stake for both the Cold War camps and their postcolonial partners in the Middle East. Though peculiar, the region proved to be no exception to global trends. The so called “liberal” Fifties as well as the “radical” Sixties of the XXth century were times of great conflict and change, setting much of the institutions and patterns of development which lasted for three decades, at least, but also providing fresh opportunities for new social and politics groups to emerge and consolidate in power. In light of the current events in North Africa and the Middle East at large, this volume is a highly valuable contribution to the deeper and wider understanding of the region in itself as well as the patterns of its integration within the wider, global world ...Read more

Psychology
Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society
David Henderson, 978-1-4438-3731-6
This collection embraces a range of lively and informed discussions of important themes in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. The chapters grow out of presentations at “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society,” a conference organised by the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, for post-graduate students and research fellows. The essays demonstrate that the future of psychoanalytic studies is full of promise. ...Read more

Religion
Parallel Discourses: Religious Identity and HIV Prevention in Botswana
Kipton E. Jensen, 978-1-4438-3718-7
Animated by the belief that public health programs in Botswana, or other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, would be more effective if those who designed and implemented them possessed a better understanding of existing ethno-medical as well as religious beliefs and cultural practices, Parallel Discourses provides a revised topology of religious identity in Botswana and then shows why it is important to disaggregate or otherwise distinguish between diverse faith-based communities – from traditional African religions and African Independent Churches to mainline Christian denominations and Muslim communities – when designing or implementing faith-based HIV prevention programs. It also describes the identity politics at work within various faith communities as well as between the faith sector and public health officials. And while it may be true that there have existed parallel if not competing discourses on HIV and AIDS in Botswana, between the public health sector and the faith sector or between traditional healers and allopathic physicians, each with their own paradigms of authority and evidence, these strands of discourse are, as suggested throughout this book, amenable to a dialogical rapprochement. Interweaving parallel discourses on HIV and AIDS is itself instrumental to the implementation of increasingly effective HIV prevention programs, enhanced HIV diagnostic capacities and better care for PLWHA (People Living with HIV and AIDS). Though these essays focus on the many obstacles to collaboration between faith communities and the public health sector in Botswana, they also suggest common ground for increasingly collaborative and effective faith-based HIV prevention interventions. ...Read more

Science
(Dis)Entangling Darwin: Cross-disciplinary Reflections on the Man and His Legacy
Sara Graça da Silva, Fátima Vieira and Jorge Bastos da Silva, 978-1-4438-3732-3
Charles Darwin’s curiosity had a remarkable childlike enthusiasm driven by an almost compulsive appetite for a constant process of discovery, which he never satiated despite his many voyages. He would puzzle about the smallest things, from the wonders of barnacles to the different shapes, colours and textures of the beetles which he obsessively collected, from flowers and stems to birds, music and language, and would dedicate years to understanding the potential significance of everything he saw. Darwin’s findings and theories relied heavily on that same curiosity, on seeking and answering questions, however long these would take to clarify. His son Francis Darwin often recalls how “he would ask himself ‘now what do you want to say’ and his answer written down would often disentangle the confusion”. In fact, “disentangling confusions” seems to have been the driving force behind Darwin’s scientific pursuits, as he was struck with bewilderment when contemplating the luxuriousness of life. It was also the impetus for this book. The true implications of Darwin’s legacy remain as controversial to the critics of our time as they were to his contemporaries. Darwin’s impact within and beyond the biological sciences is both daunting and exhilarating, and attests to the need for an interdisciplinary approach by remaining a challenge to many scholars in the most diverse fields. The recent revival of his theories has opened a Pandora’s box of different theoretical studies that are particularly receptive to exploring new and exciting angles of research. ...Read more

Social Sciences
HateSpeak in Contemporary Arabic Discourse
Bahaa-eddin M. Mazid, 978-1-4438-3650-0
HateSpeak in Contemporary Arabic Discourse fills in an obvious gap in discourse studies on Arabic. After a detailed semantic and metaphorical account of hate in English and its equivalents in Arabic and an exploration of the causes of hate, the book illustrates major cases of hate and HateSpeak in contemporary Arabic discourse – Arabs vs. Israel, Sunnis vs. Shi’ites, Ahly vs. Zamalek, Egypt vs. Algeria, Men vs. Women, Rebel vs. Mainstream, and Sa’idi vs. Cairene. There is a separate section on HateSpeak in Arabic in the context of the revolutions in many Arab countries – the Arab Spring – with a focus on Egypt. The book contains a number of apt and interesting digressions on hate in general and hate in Arabic in particular, and a discussion of the issues involved in translating HateSpeak in Arabic. The ultimate goal is not to celebrate hate and HateSpeak, not to side with any party at the expense of another, but to provide a diagnosis followed by a number of remedies that may help convert HateSpeak into HeartSpeak. ...Read more

Local Agri-food Systems in a Global World: Market, Social and Environmental Challenges
Filippo Arfini, Maria Cecilia Mancini and Michele Donati, 978-1-4438-3664-7
Local Agri-food Systems in a Global World: Market, Social and Environmental Challenges is an important new collection of essays making a landmark contribution to the ongoing debate on local agri-food systems, local development in rural areas and new patterns of agri-food systems. There is a new awareness of the links between local and global strategies of food production and processing, and these have become an increasingly important topic of research worldwide. Effective analysis of the spatial dynamics of agri-food systems requires an interdisciplinary approach involving economics, geography, sociology, demographics and agronomy. Chapters cover areas such as: current spatial dynamics in agri-food systems; the socio-environmental impact of agri-food systems on rural development; the role of local resources in agri-food systems; the governance and public policies of local agri-food systems; and, last but not least, new methodological approaches to spatial dynamics of agri-food systems. The book provides an essential tool for researchers and academics in rural economics, sociology, geography and social sciences as well as policy makers. ...Read more

Outsourcing and Service Work in the New Economy: The Case of Call Centres in Mexico City
José-Luis Álvarez-Galván, 978-1-4438-3738-5
This book examines the impact of outsourcing on workers and their employment conditions in the new economy. To do so, the call centre industry in Mexico City is analysed through a large number of in-depth interviews with workers and managers, available statistics and visits to leading firms in the sector. The case of call centres is paradigmatic as it is often seen as a flag-ship industry of the new economy, rapidly growing and subject to high pressures for costs reduction. The Mexican experience is crucially relevant to understand employment conditions in a weak institutional setting where labour protection is low and business competition intense. Overall, outsourcing has gained popularity as a mechanism to deal with the uncertainty of increasingly challenging business environments. Nonetheless, the practice of outsourcing also raises important concerns. This book identifies those managerial practices which have a substantial impact on workers and their employment conditions such as: job designs; customer segmentation; non-standard contracts; intensified supervision; union avoidance; limited career opportunities; and strict social divisions in the workplace. These findings also suggest that a number of practices that were common in the ‘old’ economy are still dominant in the organisation of work in the twenty-first century. The book is a useful reference for scholars and students concerned with employment and labour studies, economic development, and globalisation. ...Read more

Parallel Discourses: Religious Identity and HIV Prevention in Botswana
Kipton E. Jensen, 978-1-4438-3718-7
Animated by the belief that public health programs in Botswana, or other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, would be more effective if those who designed and implemented them possessed a better understanding of existing ethno-medical as well as religious beliefs and cultural practices, Parallel Discourses provides a revised topology of religious identity in Botswana and then shows why it is important to disaggregate or otherwise distinguish between diverse faith-based communities – from traditional African religions and African Independent Churches to mainline Christian denominations and Muslim communities – when designing or implementing faith-based HIV prevention programs. It also describes the identity politics at work within various faith communities as well as between the faith sector and public health officials. And while it may be true that there have existed parallel if not competing discourses on HIV and AIDS in Botswana, between the public health sector and the faith sector or between traditional healers and allopathic physicians, each with their own paradigms of authority and evidence, these strands of discourse are, as suggested throughout this book, amenable to a dialogical rapprochement. Interweaving parallel discourses on HIV and AIDS is itself instrumental to the implementation of increasingly effective HIV prevention programs, enhanced HIV diagnostic capacities and better care for PLWHA (People Living with HIV and AIDS). Though these essays focus on the many obstacles to collaboration between faith communities and the public health sector in Botswana, they also suggest common ground for increasingly collaborative and effective faith-based HIV prevention interventions. ...Read more

Signs of Hope: Deafhearing Family Life
Donna West, 978-1-4438-3654-8
Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Signs of Hope tells the story of a narrative inquiry with three deafhearing families. For many of us, deafness represents loss and silence. For others, being deaf is a genetic quirk; an opportunity for learning, spiritual adventure and reward. For yet others, it is the most natural thing in the world; a connection to a genealogical layer of signing ancestors and the continuation of a culture. Amid the noise of mainstream, medical and educational discourses of deafness, here are family voices demanding to be heard – whether spoken or signed – that challenge audiological and surgical intervention, that call for scrutiny and critique of ‘inclusive’ deaf-related pedagogical practices, that rail against marginalisation of members of minority cultures. Over four years, Donna West has recorded the stories of three families who wish to counter and resist what they see as damaging misconceptions and discriminatory constructions of deafness and deafhearing family life. Here, spaces are created that respect and acknowledge human beings – adults, children, deaf, hearing – as storytellers. The poetic and performative narratives at the heart of this book reveal not only the ways in which hurtful definitions of, and discrimination towards, deaf people and signing deafhearing families is destabilised, but also the ways in which celebration of deaf culture and sign language are affirming and vital for healthy family life. ...Read more

Teaching and Learning English through Bilingual Education
Juan de Dios Martínez Agudo, 978-1-4438-3713-2
These days, numerous studies document and advocate the potential effectiveness of the CLIL approach, which is viewed as a real revolution in second language pedagogy. European bilingual education models are currently exemplified by CLIL – Content and Language Integrated Learning – a new generic and/or umbrella term for bilingual education, which has been rapidly spreading throughout Europe since the mid-nineties. Over the last decade there has been an explosion of interest in CLIL pedagogy in Europe and beyond. However, CLIL pedagogy also involves complex challenges concerning its implementation and the professional development of teachers. This publication provides readers with a collection of original papers covering essential aspects of CLIL pedagogy. This collection of papers serves as a good indication that valuable research is being conducted throughout Europe and that CLIL research is establishing itself as an important area of applied linguistics. This book is mainly addressed to those in-service teachers who teach in bilingual classrooms anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, and who wish to know more about CLIL pedagogy. It can also be used as a helpful handbook for EFL student teachers. The book is also for teacher trainers running both pre-service and in-service courses. ...Read more

The Balkans and Caucasus: Parallel Processes on the Opposite Sides of the Black Sea
Ivan Biliarsky, Ovidiu Cristea and Anca Oroveanu, 978-1-4438-3652-4
The overall character of the Black Sea region has been defined over time in various ways. For specialists in economy and trade, it has represented a region at the crossroads of the trade routes between Europe and Asia; for political scientists and historians, it has been a space of confrontation between the great terrestrial and naval powers; for the scholars attentive to its cultural dimensions, it has been a contact zone, a space of interaction between different peoples, religions and cultures. These attempts at a definition all revolve around an essential (and ambivalent) feature of the Black Sea as a factor of connection, a bridge, and at the same time a border, a dividing line between Europe and Asia, between the Baltic and the Mediterranean region. In this fluctuation between the two, the predominance of one over the other (“bridge” or “border”) has depended on a number of factors, first among them the distribution of power relations in the region. This volume, which originated in a symposium hosted by the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest, brings together contributions coming from scholars within the Black Sea region and outside it, in an attempt to look at the Balkans and Caucasus from a comparative and multi-disciplinary perspective, highlighting their differences, as well as their common features. The overarching question this volume and the papers included in it address – and leave open – is to what extent we are dealing with a coherent zone, whose past, present and future can legitimately be considered as being traversed by meaningful interrelations, suggesting a shared destiny. ...Read more

The City and the Ocean: Journeys, Memory, Imagination
Jonathan White and I-Chun Wang, 978-1-4438-3719-4
Throughout history cities have been locations of human encounter. Equally they have been contexts for the trade of goods and services, for the evolution of various forms of urban space, and for the production, development, and enrichment of culture and technology. Many cities grew up along shorelines, which themselves constitute some of the globe’s most important cultural boundaries. For above all else, it is water that has separated but also connected different communities, races, religions and nations, down through recorded time. With the rapid advance in technologies of communication, encounters between cultures have multiplied at a rate that no individual can follow or control. The present book constitutes a space of “memory” in its own right, one of its chief raisons d’être being that a group of diverse scholars herein maps certain key encounters between peoples, past as well as present, and the urgent issues generated in consequence. No one person could have traced such diversity and made sense of it, whereas a scholarly grouping of persons reporting on phenomena from around the world, such as is provided here, offers its readers a vision of global change and development. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of mega-cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centres. This expanded landscape is here interpreted with special attention, as already mentioned, to cities located at coastlines, hence (generally speaking) more exposed to globalizing trends. Migrants, exiles and refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, as well as alternative or countercultural groupings continue to complicate the ways in which cities articulate their now pluralized identities, in terms of (and by means of) literature, history, architecture, social events, and other forms of artistic and cultural production. The international scholars whose work is assembled in these pages are well placed to engage with the intersecting themes and issues of the volume. Contributors have mapped different examples from Homeric narrative, through Renaissance drama and its representation of crossways of culture such as Rhodes and Malta, to an earlier time in the development of a New World city such as Boston: others look at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ complexity of great world cities and of oceanic migration or trade between them. Shanghai, Singapore, London, Detroit, Shantou, Macau, and Saigon are some that are dealt with in detail. Emphasis falls on both the historical reality of those contexts as well as how they have been culturally represented. ...Read more

Women's Studies
The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri
Stephanie Laggini Fiore, 978-1-4438-3660-9
The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri fills a void in critical inquiry on the works of eighteenth-century tragedian Vittorio Alfieri – perhaps the most important figure of the Italian Enlightenment – by exploring in depth the often neglected female characters and their function within the tragic structure. In this re-reading of the Alfierian tragedies, the author redefines the role of the heroine, and challenges traditional analyses that marginalize the female character and orient her to an abstract ideal characterized by fragility and tragic victimization. The author argues persuasively that, in Alfieri’s search for psychological realism, he undermines traditional assumptions of gender roles by his modern portrayal of the tragic characters. The heroine’s different orientation towards reality endows her with intuitive and intelligent reasoning that contradicts eighteenth-century views of women as catalysts of anarchy and disorder. Alfieri’s tragic heroines are represented also as surprisingly independent and powerful. The resultant image of determined, active, and intelligent women refutes the traditional critical view. In exploring Vittorio Alfieri’s pre-modern sensibilities in the representation of his tragic heroines, this book is an important contribution to the growing body of critical works that study the representation of gender in post-Renaissance and pre-modern Italian literature. This book will be of particular interest to: scholars of Italian literature, especially the Enlightenment and Romantic periods; scholars of 18th-century European, American and other literatures; scholars of 18th-century history and sociology; and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies scholars. ...Read more

To be a Sailor's Wife
Hanna Hagmark-Cooper, 978-1-4438-3642-5
The duality of maritime family life, the relationship between reconstruction and discourse and the symbolic status of the seafarer’s wife are at the core of this book, which brings maritime women’s experiences to the fore, widening the perspective of maritime history. Based on the collected life stories of seafarers’ wives from the Åland Islands in Baltic Sea, Hanna Hagmark-Cooper draws attention to the cyclical nature of maritime family life and to the seafarers’ wives’ perception of leading two parallel lives: one when they are on their own and one with their husbands at home. The author considers how discourses change over time and colour narratives, and she investigates the women’s attitudes to the myths surrounding the image of the seafarer’s wife. ...Read more

Transgressing Women: Space and The Body in Contemporary Noir Thrillers
Jamaluddin Aziz, 978-1-4438-3662-3
Transgressing Women focuses on the literary and cinematic representation of female characters in contemporary noir thrillers. The book argues that as the genre has grown, expanded and been subverted since its initial conception, along with the changing definition of gender, the representation of a female character has also inevitably gone through some dramatic changes. So, the book asks some important questions: What links the female characters in canonical noir to their contemporary counterparts? Is gender division still relevant in a text that transgresses gender boundaries? What happens when it is the human body itself that betrays the traditional definition or constitution of a human being? While many have written about the male protagonists and the femmes fatales in the noir genre, little attention has been given to the ‘other’ female characters who inhabit the noir world and are transgressors themselves. The main concern of the book is to trace the transgressive female characters in contemporary noir thrillers – both novels and films – by engaging itself with some of the most topical debates within both (post)feminist and postmodernist theories. The book is structured around two key concepts – space and the body. These temporal and spatial indicators are central in contemporary cultural theories such as postmodernism and post-feminism, along with other theorizations of gender and the noir genre. This means that the analysis is drawn from the classical noir examples and will then arrive at the neo-noir sub-genre, and then will move on to the most recent phenomenon in the genre, ‘future noir’. ...Read more