Böcker utgivna av Cambria Press

Taiwan s historical and contemporary status as a nexus of Asian and Western cultural influences provides a rich canvas of research for the author who is uniquely trained in both Western critical and Taiwanese theatrical practices. This highly original book furnishes a creative interpretation of alternative, contemporary Taiwanese Theater by applying Feminism, Interculturalism and other western theories to three intercultural performances of four avant-garde female directors from 1993-2004. Although several important playwrights and directors have staged vital gender critiques of national and international practices, almost no critic has remarked upon them. The book s intersection of a gender critique, and, in part, a postcolonial one, with Taiwanese stage practices is, therefore, a unique and significant contribution.

Seductions in Narrative is a highly original, academic study which provides a critical discourse in which desire, narrative, and subjectivity are explored. Through the critical reading of two novels by contemporary English authors, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, the book cleverly assesses the ways in which desire allows the subject to imagine an alternative, utopian location where a narrative of the self, in all its multiplicity and ambiguity, can be effected. This book is unique as general studies on these issues tend to focus on the literature produced over the nineteenth century, but not on contemporary literature. The pieces which examine desire and narrative in contemporary novels tend to do so in the work of post-colonial authors. Specific works on the production of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson also tend to focus on a somewhat close reading of their novels, but do not make use of their fiction in order to debate specific, poststructuralist issues, as this book successfully undertakes.

The effects of the displacement of peoples--their forced migration, their deportation, their voluntary emigration, their movement to new lands where they made themselves masters over others, or became subjects of the masters of their new homes--reverberate down the years and are still felt today. The historical violence of the era of empire and colonies echoes in the literature of the descendants of those forcibly moved and the exiles that those processes have made. The voices of its victims are insistent in the literature that has come to be called post-colonial. Although the term post-colonial is insufficient to capture fully the depth and breadth of those writers that have been labeled by it (for it is itself something of a colonial instrument, ghettoizing writers in English who are still considered to be foreign ), there is a common bond among the works of those novelists who understand the process of exile and see themselves as exiles--both from their homes and from themselves. In this eloquently argued book with meticulous theoretical groundwork, Dr. Cristina Dascalu presents a most lucid and concise examination of exile. In addition to her negotiation of the term exile, what is most original and significant about Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile is the selection of authors. Reaching across national (in terms of country of exile) and ethnic (in terms of region/religion of birth) boundaries, Dr. Dascalu elegantly shows the persistent relevance of the experience and implications of exile to the writing of fiction in the world today. Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Naipaul are very distinct authors whose works are not often discussed together in this context. Using Benedict Anderson s notion of unimagined communities, among other critical lenses, she makes significant connections between the way exile functions as a theme and as a condition for their writing. Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile will be a critical addition for all collections in Comparative Literature as well as Ethnic and Immigrant Studies.

This study employs impression management as a template for understanding how "major Christian religions online" responded to public perceptions of "The Da Vinci Code." What were the characteristics of these messages? How did they compare to Church reaction toward negative popular fiction of the past, such as 1988s "The Last Temptation of Christ"> 172 pp. (Christian)

This book is concerned with the social processes of being and becoming emotional and of making music, and the ways in which these processes are intertwined in the context of an Australian police department that wields subtle forms of power by emotional and musical means. The book is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a metropolitan police (concert) band. Of primary analytic concern is the embodied and social basis of emotion, and its capacity to facilitate connections between persons in and through musical means. Police Beat moves away from a focus on the cognitive apparatus that produces experiences, and which thusly obscure the far more active and multisensual roles that musicians have in constituting and organizing their own sensual perceptions, to focus on embodied and social experiences of making music, and of making emotion. The book offers new insights into the means and modes of wielding subtle forms of policing power in the contemporary world, and points to the importance of music in organizing the social world.

This book presents a reading of T. S. Eliot's poetry, prose, criticism, and drama, with particular reference to the nature of his response to the influence of Percy Shelley in his own work. Not just a book on literary criticism, this book is also an insightful study of Eliot's spiritual life. It focuses on Eliot's Christian faith and the role it played in molding his responses to the writers who shaped his early works. Previous studies have ascribed Eliot's subsequent repudiation of Romantic style and subject matter to a Bloomian 'anxiety of influence', and asserted that the highly classical style of his later work was a conscious renunciation of earlier models. This book, however, introduces Eliot's Christian faith as a means of approaching the issue. In doing so, Peter Lowe opens up a field of Eliot studies not previously explored to the depth it deserves. Christian Romanticism is a valuable contribution to the field of Eliot studies-it sheds light on a case of poetic influence that has been largely overlooked in previous criticism of arguably the foremost poet of the Twentieth Century.

The Conservative, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain, were prominent in Irish political affairs from the mid 1870s. Although on opposite sides of the House, they united in 1886 and again in 1893 to defeat the first and second Home Rule Bills. While ostensibly dissimilar in background, politics, and temperament, they were ultimately united in their common desire-to prevent an Irish Parliament in Dublin. The two sons, Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain, both entered Parliament with inherited Unionist views. However, changing political circumstances in Britain and Ireland led them to change their stance and adopt policies that would have been anathema to their fathers.In this thoroughly researched book, Ian Chambers weaves the rich history of this important political period, and vividly details how the actions of these four men influenced the course of British and Irish politics. "This book makes a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of British policy towards Ireland . There is originality in exploring the extent to which the opinions of the fathers were visited upon the sons, and there is abundant evidence of scholarship. The author has usefully consulted an impressively wide range of primary sources." - Professor Keith Jeffery (Ph.D., Cambridge University), University of Ulster at Jordanstown

In this study of identity in Doris Lessing's space fiction, David Waterman devotes a chapter to each of the five novels in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, as well as Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Memoirs of a Survivor and finally The Reason for It. This is an important addition to understanding the works of this prolific author.His major argument is that Lessing's space fiction identifies the universal problem - society's division into competitive and predatory groups - and places it outside the bounds of time and space, encouraging a social critique which takes into account our inherited blindness, our "degenerative disease" which must be addressed before genuine progress can be made. "Lessing's examination of the relationship between individual identity and group identity produces a productive tension that accounts for so much of interest in her work over many years. Nowhere is that tension more obvious or more interesting than in the "space fiction" that David Waterman so ably explores. Waterman writes convincingly of Lessing's desire "to cut through the performance, the received ideas, the habits and customs of our daily lives." Drawing on a wide range of sources, he provides an interdisciplinary reading of the "space fiction" and maps Lessing's brave exploration of the hierarchical landscapes that so often imprison us. Waterman offers a timely reading of Lessing for contemporary readers living in the landscape of globalization. - Professor Margaret Moan Rowe, Purdue University

The Internet is lowering barriers to information exchange and export to an unprecedented degree. This book is the first systematic investigation of how e-commerce impacts export marketing and performance in terms of product design, global promotion, and distribution. Not only does the work advance marketing theory, it also provides a rich dataset of results from a comprehensive survey of exporters. Marketing professors and exporters will find this book to be a valuable addition to their library.

Many scholars have documented and decried the "crisis" in American masculinity. There is a preponderance of evidence showing that males suffer from many physical, emotional, and social ills due to the gender scripts with which they were raised and which continue to govern men's lives. Throughout the millennia and across cultures, initiation rites of passage have been utilized as an effective means of transitioning young males into manhood. Modern culture suffers from a dearth of rites of passage leaving many boys stuck in puerile attitudes and behaviors and unable to make a wholesome transition into mature masculinity. Crossing into Manhood is a much needed guide on assisting late-adolescent boys' transition into manhood; it proposes a school-based curriculum and rite of passage paradigm to help young men make the difficult passage into manhood. Utilizing resources from diverse academic disciplines, this book surveys the psychoanalytic, the social constructionist, and the essentialist perspectives on masculine gender. As a result, a men's studies curriculum has been formulated-one that offers a balanced bio-psycho-social conceptualization of masculine identity."Dr. Chris Mason's deftly reasoned and inspiring book arrives at a propitious time for all those who care about boys and their education ... The intellectual harvest of a seasoned and experienced educator with a deep wisdom about boys and schools, Chris Mason's book is an important contribution to that growing body of thinking about practice. It deserves close reading." - Bradley Adams, Executive Director, International Boys' Schools Coalition

This book questions the view of the current orthodoxy which argues that the Soviet Union and the United States were binary opposites in the 1930s. The Shaping of Popular Consent presents a comparative analysis of one specific facet of the USSR and the US, namely the manner in which their ruling elites sought to win popular consent. A key dimension in the analysis of any political order, this issue recommends itself precisely because the assumption that, in this the two were quite dissimilar, is the virtual point of departure for the current thinking. To sharpen the focus of the comparison, the book concentrates on the role of the visual arts and the manner and extent to which those in power employed them to attempt to win popular consent. Therefore, this book poses two questions. Firstly, to what extent did the ruling elites in both the USSR and the US believe they needed the people's faith/trust in the system? Secondly, different as the two societies were, to what extent might they have employed similar use of visual cultural media in their attempts to win "hearts and minds"? The study explores the interwar years, specifically 1929-1941. This was an era of great upheaval in both the USSR and the US and marks the beginning of the age of mass communication. The book examines if, how, and to what extent Soviet and American cultural producers, during the years 1929-1941, employed the visual arts, cinema in particular but also painting, the plastic arts, theatre and architecture, to promote, essentially, the establishments' rights and wrongs, heroes and villains. It does so exploring both the domestic and the international scene. It illustrates that, despite giant differences between the two countries, in the way the two establishments sought to win popular consent the binary view is simply inaccurate. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the need for a plethora of wide-ranging comparative studies of the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, through recognizing the importance of comparing and contrasting the USSR and the US, and by attempting to do just that, we might learn to better understand how, in what ways and for what purposes these two countries, so central to our understanding of the modern world, were organized. Thus, this work is genuinely comparative, inter-disciplinary and cultural. Indeed, the study is part of a vanguard movement. It is of significant value to scholars of both the USSR, Stalinism and Soviet art and the US, the New Deal and Hollywood. Finally, building on work by Noam Chomsky, Anotonio Gramsci and others such as Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities, the book will be of tremendous interests to many (both students and interested parties alike) who have an interest in how identities are constructed, how propaganda is manufactured and just how the (ostensibly) divergent philosophies of modern governments are represented in popular culture.

Race and the Assemblies of God Church chronicles the treatment of African Americans by the largest, predominantly white, Pentecostal denomination in the United States. The formation of the Assemblies of God in 1914, brought an end to the interracial focus of the Pentecostal movement that characterized the revival from its inception in Los Angeles, California, at an abandoned warehouse on Azusa Street in 1906. Dr. Newman utilizes the extensive archival holdings of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, housed in the international headquarters of the Assemblies of God in Springfield, Missouri, to support his contention that Assemblies of God leaders deliberately engaged in racist efforts to prevent African American participation in Assemblies of God activities because the denominational leaders feared the reaction of its ministers and congregations in the American South. In addition, a concerted effort to refer African Americans interested in the Assemblies of God to African American groups, such as the Church of God in Christ, was approved at the highest levels of Assemblies of God leadership. Ultimately, efforts to exclude African Americans from the denomination led to official decisions to refuse them ordination and approved resolutions to support the establishment of a separate, unrelated Pentecostal denomination specifically for African Americans. Assemblies of God attitudes regarding racial issues changed only as a result of the civil rights movement and its effect upon American society during the 1960s and 1970s. The treatment of race in church groups with European origins was compared to that of the Assemblies of God and the influence of African and slave religions upon the rise of the Pentecostal movement. Finally, the author provides an analysis of the 1994 event known as the Miracle of Memphis in which white Pentecostal denominations dissolved the racially segregated Pentecostal Fellowship of North America in favor of a new organization, the Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches of North America. The book concludes that although current Assemblies of God leaders have embraced the concept of an integrated church fellowship that no longer excludes African Americans, there is virtually no evidence of wide acceptance of this concept at the local church level in the denomination.

As online advertising expenditures continue to grow and surpass those dedicated to some traditional media, advertisers are still largely in the dark concerning the branding power of online media vehicles such as banner advertisements. Assuming that traditional media principles apply, advertisers attempt to increase the effectiveness of online vehicles such as banner ads by making them larger, more animated, or graphically arousing. In this pioneering investigation, Youngkuk Chung measures the extent to which banner ad characteristics such as animation and pictorial representation impact traditional ad response measures such as recall and recognition. In addition, Dr. Chung takes the additional important step of measuring the actual physiological response to variations in banner ad animation, content, and other characteristics in a rigorous scientific investigation. The findings of this study are very important. Not only do they challenge commonly held notions regarding online advertising, they also present clear managerial guidelines to increase branding power online. Managers and scholars will find much in this research to guide their advertising and research efforts. Processing Web Ads will be an important addition to any collection concerned with advertising, branding, communication, or Internet Studies.

In this unprecedented work, Juliann Cortese heightens our understanding of the learning process as it relates to information acquired through the Internet. Internet Learning and the Building of Knowledge shows us how design elements such as pop-up windows with augmented content and relational links influence knowledge structure as well as definitional and factual knowledge. The book also notes that personal factors such as motivation and expertise interact with web site design to influence learning outcomes. It also sheds light on how learning from a website can be primed based on the content presented before exposure. This book is a must for educators concerned with designing hypermedia environments for learning.

This pioneering book is the first English-language collection of academic articles on Jin Yong's works. It introduces an important dissenting voice in Chinese literature to the English-speaking audience. Jin Yong is hailed as the most influential martial arts novelist in twentieth-century Chinese literary history. His novels are regarded by readers and critics as "the common language of Chinese around the world" because of their international circulation and various adaptations (film, television serials, comic books, video games). Not only has the public affirmed the popularity and literary value of his novels, but the academic world has finally begun to notice his achievement as well. The significance of this book lies in its interpretation of Jin Yong's novels through the larger lens of twentieth-century Chinese literature. It considers the important theoretical issues arising from such terms as modernity, gender, nationalism, East/West conflict, and high literature versus low culture. The contributors of the articles are all eminent scholars, including famous exiled scholar, philosopher, and writer Liu Zaifu.

This is a valuable scholarly analysis of the ways that the practices of three members of the Basel Mission (Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft Basel)-Andreas Riis (1804-1854), Rosine Widmann (1828-1909), and Carl Christian Reindorf (1834-1917)-informed the nineteenth-century mission field of the Gold Coast between the years 1832-1895. This study is based upon the original handwritten documents of these three missionaries, which are housed in the Basel Mission Archive in Basel, Switzerland. The book is located within the larger discipline of postcolonial studies, and more particularly within the framework of Tzvetan Todorov's discussion of 'signs' in his 1984 work The Conquest of America. The study also is set against the backdrop of the important theories on missions in the writings of Schleiermacher, Fabri, and Warneck. A significant contribution made by this study is that it contains the first discussion of the female German missionary Rosine Widmann, who serves as a kind of example of the then current Missionsfrauen. This book leads to a better understanding of the Gold Coast, and makes important contributions to scholarship in the fields of mission studies, German historical theology, German studies, and African studies.

Winner of the 2007 Philip and Eugenia Cho Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Asian Studies!In this book, leading archaeologist Tianlong Jiao takes us on an archaeological investigation into the patterns and processes involved in the cultural changes on the coast of Southeast China during the Neolithic period. The Neolithic of Southeast China began with a full array of pottery, polished stone tools and bone tools around 6500 B.P., and ended with the appearance of bronzes around 3500 B.P. This book takes us through the three periods: early (ca, 6500-5000 B.P.), middle (ca. 5000-4300 B.P.), and late (ca. 4300-3500 B.P.), detailing the transformation of subsistence patterns and the development of regional interaction spheresThe Neolithic people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait were proto-Austronesians. They first expanded to Taiwan around 6500-5000 B.P., and maintained regular contacts with the mainland until 3500 B.P. Their expansions were possibly motivated by multiple factors such as trade and new immigrant pressure. Given the increasing international attention of the search for the homeland of Austronesian speakers, this book is especially timely since it addresses the implications of the Neolithic cultural changes of Southeast China and adds to our understanding of the early expansion of the proto-Austronesians.The foreword to this groundbreaking study is by world renowned archaeologist and scholar, Professor Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University.

This book provides a critical reconsideration of nineteenth-century women's writing by exploring the significance of antifeminist representations for literary developments in the century's second half. It seeks to draw new attention to still neglected authors and works, while suggesting that their reappraisal at once demands and helps to facilitate a more encompassing rethinking of a number of long neglected writers and their still underestimated contribution to Victorian literary culture. Their changing classification, their marginalisation within canon formation, and most importantly, their resistance to simplifications suggested by these shifting categorisations prompts us to break out of such ideological straightjackets ourselves. In analysing a range of material that testifies to the wide spectrum, versatility, and reflexive interchanges of popular Victorian fiction, the essays in this collection work together to interrogate the significance of these still neglected works for the development of the novel genre.This collection makes an important contribution to the study of Victorian literature and especially of recently rediscovered popular writers. It will be of interest to literary critics and students working on the formation of the novel genre in general as well as on nineteenth-century culture more specifically.

Psychotherapist and educator of counsellors, Avraham Cohen is noted for his whole-person and deeply democratic-community approach to classroom pedagogy. His academic and pedagogical expertise and innovation have been valorized by the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors that awarded him the 2007 2008 President s Award for Contribution to the Discipline. This award is given for distinguished contributions to the discipline of counselling through exemplary academic efforts. Cohen also received the Canadian Counselling Association 2008 Professional Article of the Year Award for his co-authored article, Suffering Loves and Needs Company: Daoist and Buddist Perspectives on the Counsellor as Companion. This book evolved from Avraham Cohen s doctoral dissertation, for which he received the 2006-2007 Ted Aoki Prize for the Outstanding Dissertation in Curriculum Studies from the University of British Columbia. Cohen, who has an extensive background as a humanistic-existential therapist and as a mindfulness meditator, believes that these two fields have much to offer in the field of education. His work in this book supplies a rich resource and shows that indeed the practice and philosophy of mindfulness and humanistic-existential practices is a gold mine waiting to be fully mined and applied in education. These ideas and practices come alive in his writings. This collection of provocative and evocative essays written for both educational theorists and classroom practitioners addresses very directly the much neglected human dimension and community development potential within classrooms. His groundbreaking work describes what most of us know intuitively to be important in classrooms, and which is rarely adequately addressed how to be authentically and fully human, and how this pedagogy of being human is central to becoming a great educator. He points towards the practical implementation of pedagogic practices that integrate the personal inner work of the educator, classroom practice, and curriculum learning. The philosophical underpinnings of his work are derived from Eastern and humanistic-existential philosophies. The combination of Eastern perennial Wisdom traditions and Western dynamism of individual existential freedom and developmental understanding is a formidable alliance for educational theory and practice. An interdisciplinary scholar, Cohen seamlessly weaves together his deep and fluent knowledge of the philosophy and practices of humanistic and holistic education, humanistic-existential psychotherapy, and Daoism and Zen. Cohen s classrooms are full of the heat of human interaction and connection along with the illuminating light of inner and personal reflection generated by the intense engagement amongst all the participants with their inner worlds and with each other, with personal inner work, and with curriculum material. His writing style has an immediacy that is hard to resist and the reader will feel themselves as in the experience. His students have described their experience as life changing. In the present volume, Cohen brings to life how such creative learning experience can unfold. For educators, this work provides a doorway into themselves, into their students, and into the integration of the personal, interpersonal, curriculum, the larger community, and the cosmos within which we all exist. Cohen writes, In my many years of work as a psychotherapist where I see and feel the open psychic wounds of those who seek refuge in my office, I have had the realization that the educational system has contributed significantly, even decisively, to the wounding experience of my clients. My clients speak of alienation, feelings of despair, and loneliness. My students and colleagues also speak of these experiences. My work as an educator of counselling students has been to look into the processes and structures that have contributed to these wounds and to provide an alternative and generative experience in an educational environment. Cohen s writings address these issues in a profound, clear, engaging, and wise way. This is an important book for those in education.

Along with socioeconomic development, the traditional lifestyle of the Chinese people is changing rapidly and becoming more Westernized. This is especially the case in urban areas. At the same time, prevalence of obesity and diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate. It is interesting to note that overweight and obesity issues were rare in China as recently as 1982. This monograph describes a series of studies examining the prevalence and characteristics of obesity and its related metabolic diseases in China, where urbanization and socioeconomic development are occurring at a dramatic pace. It is important to understand health implications of these changes and identify efficient markers to estimate these health consequences. This will be a valuable addition to collections in Health and Human Services as well as Asian Studies.

According to the author, an extra measure of loyalty and patriotism was required of Italian immigrants because the country of their birth was a declared enemy of their adopted country. This is the story of their quest for acceptance.

This study provides heretofore unavailable information to be considered by policy makers when making these difficult decisions. The study reveals that what actually goes on in the classroom and the media center can be quite different from what school administrators think is going on. The voices of students, teachers and librarians may be heard in rich detail as they speak for themselves. This book is a required reference for all involved in education, particularly intellectual freedom.

While previous theorists have described how the oedipal complex may unfold for boys who grow up to be gay, as well as separately discuss the impact of shaming experiences on the development of one s identity, this book links up the two to show how they contribute for the gay men in this study to a re-enactment in adulthood of childhood and adolescent traumas and rejections. This book shows how growing up in a heterosexist or homophobic environment re-stimulates the unconscious trauma experienced much earlier when these boys felt rejected by their primary oedipal objects their fathers. In other words, there is a direct link for these boys between early traumatic oedipal rejection, subsequent adolescent alienation / fear of rejection, and adult attempts at relationship intimacy that are thwarted, over and over. In addition, by making use of the work of another theorist who speculated about the healing power for gay adolescent males of having platonic love affairs with straight male peers, the author speculates about a possible normative developmental path for boys who grow up to be gay one that allows for generative, not traumatic, experiences during childhood and adolescent, thus making relationship intimacy in adulthood easier to achieve. This book will be a valuable addition for those in psychology, men s studies, and sociology.

The Internet creates a very unique environment where numerous individuals and widely distributed organizations can communicate and even collaborate for common interests. Virtual communities, shared information databases, and online forums are visible examples of the self-organizing social collectivities, which emerge from the many-to-many interactions among voluntary participants. Online social communities exemplified by blogs and social networking sites are getting more and more attention nowadays from the business sector, and companies are eager to find ways to use them for business opportunities. Despite the mushrooming hype regarding the unlimited potentials of virtual community, little is known about its complex nature how virtual communities are born, sustained, and under what circumstances they collapse. A virtual community is an aggregate of voluntary participants, in which individual behaviors are in conjunction with the behaviors of others. People decide to contribute or free-ride in response to the contributing or free-riding behaviors of others. If many people already are contributing to the community, for example, one may be strongly tempted to free-ride, while this may not be the case if there are very few contributors. Understanding this social interdependence is the key to grasping the collective dynamics underlying virtual communities. This book illuminates the implications of the collective social dynamics in a computer-mediated environment on advertising, business, and communication in general. Along with conceptual discussions, this book shows some experimental findings related to the psychological and social-structural factors affecting individuals communicative motivations.

In The Online Customer, Yinghui Yang details how data mining and marketing approaches can be used to study marketing problems. The book uses a vast dataset of web transactions from the largest internet retailers, including Amazon.com.In particular, she deftly shows how to integrate and compare statistical methods from marketing and data mining research. The book comprises two parts. The first part focuses on using behavior patterns for customer segmentation. It advances data mining theory by presenting a novel pattern-based clustering approach to customer segmentation and valuation.The second part of the book explores how free shipping impacts purchase behavior online. It illuminates the importance of shipping policies in a competitive setting. With complete documentation and methodology, this book is a valuable reference that business and Internet Studies scholars can build upon.

In 2007, the Pontine Marshes, are very much part of the Italian national landscape. A traveller who takes a Eurostar train from Rome to Naples will pass through the marshes, which are a marshland only in name (Agro Pontino in Italian). It is hard to see the landscape of the Pontine Marshes and to simultaneously cast a historical eye back eighty years to when the area was avoided by people.It is hard to realize, today, that the Pontine Marshes were the focus for an extraordinary national land reclamation and urbanization project during Mussolini's fascist regime. Between 1930 and 1939, the marshes became the target of massive national investment, internal migration (often non-voluntary) and engineering work. In the 1930s, the Pontine Marshes became key protagonists in national culture: featured in newsreels, newspapers and propaganda, they became a metaphor for the regime's modernizing drive and ambition to create a new Italy where one had not been able to exist before. In particular, the regime's planners clamored to create New Towns in the reclaimed marshes; these were to be planned along fascist lines, and populated with selected colonists from the north. Written by an Oxford University professor Federico Caprotti, this book is about the Pontine Marshes project and brings together cohesive strands of research which have not appeared alongside one another before. For example, the book explores the architectural and urban planning aspects of the totalitarian minds which devised and built the New Towns; the lived experience of the 'colonists' who were forced to populate the new cities; the technological aspects which made the project possible, such as the fight against malaria, seen by fascism to be a 'non-totalitarian' disease; and finally, the promotion of the Pontine Marshes project through the press and film. Mussolini Cities will be a welcome addition for collections in Geography and Italian Studies.

Reinaldo Arenas Fuentes (1943-1990) was a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and short story writer considered by many as one of the most eloquent and daring literary figures of his generation. Some of his most known works include the five novel series known as the Pentagony (Pentagonía): Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, Otra vez el mar, El color del verano o el jardín de las delicias, and El as alto. Other literary works by Arenas include El central, Voluntad de vivir manifestándose, La vieja Rosa, Arturo, la estrella más brillante, El mundo alucinante, Adios a mamá, Antes que anochezca: una autobiografía and his one act plays Persecución: cinco piezas de teatro experimental. The themes he explored in his writing ran counter to what Fidel Castro and the revolutionary regime expected from its intellectual citizens. While Castro wanted everyone that wished to be published on the island to succumb to the ideals of the revolution, to promote them in their works, Arenas refused because he believed in the artistic freedom of expression. While he began his adolescence in support of the rebels that were fighting against Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship, he began attacking the revolution when the institutionalized persecution of homosexuals began in Cuba. The research that has been done on Reinaldo Arenas has often focused on his sexuality and his opposition to the revolution. Hundreds of articles have dealt with either specific literary works or themes present in his writing, either using Queer Theory or more traditional literary analysis. However, none have focused on the idea that Arenas could be considered a postcolonial writer since there is a question as to whether that particular theoretical approach can be applied to that region. A study of the relationship between a writer such as Arenas, who refused to conform to the idea that the individual had to become part of a larger collective, and the iconic image of Caliban as he has been appropriated by many Latin American scholars and activists, is necessary to understand the conditions under which many marginalized groups lived whether we are referring to Cuba or any other Latin American country. This is the first critical study of Reinaldo Arenas from a postcolonial venue. It seeks to find the commonalities that exist between Arenas and the image of Caliban which first appeared in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. The focus is to show how the appropriation of this seventeenth-century image of the New World native can be used to understand the goals of Arenas' writing: to counter attack the regime's goals and false promises which fueled his desire to create a literary counter-discourse that promoted freedom of expression and assertion of an identity separate from that expected by Cuban revolutionary society. Arenas' characters represent imperialistic influences in Cuba that opposed the regime's demands upon expected literary support of their agenda: not only because his characters could be interpreted as a form of mimesis of the treatment various individuals endured on the island, but also because Arenas' messages opposed the ideals of the Revolution. As homosexuality became marginalized and discrimination of homosexuals became institutionalized, Arenas' writing transgressed the expected silence by graphically describing his life, and particularly his sexual adventures and voracity. At the same time, his writings reflect a search for his identity and authorial voice. The arguments in this book focus on a discussion of Reinaldo Arenas' struggle against censorship focused precisely on reestablishing the individual the regime hopes to reeducate. The author's motivations for interpolating his writing at the root of the very society that denies him an existence can be equated to postcolonial discourse. This book is of interest to areas such as Latin American studies and postcolonial studies.

This is an original interdisciplinary study of Chinese law, its language, and political institution. Evolving within a complex literary framework over thousands of years, Chinese language has lost its conceptual distinctiveness to its multilevel and overlapping meanings and connotations. Chinese law has become inflated with contrary rulings and exceptions. This mass of rules requires an extra-lingual (legal) authority to redefine boundaries and specify applications. Interdependent upon the voice of a higher authority, China has inherited a legal tradition that is inseparable from and interwoven with state politics. As a tool of emperors and modern politicians alike, Chinese law has never functioned as a detached mechanism through which social negotiation, mediation, and distribution are carried and regulated. The personal preferences of politicians have always dominated legislation, which has in turn fostered a highly unregulated and authoritarian power. This system, lacking a legal protocol to amend itself, relies upon a constant element of military intervention to initiate and secure Chinese social and political change. Both Chiang Kai-shek s and Mao Zedong s regimes took power with armed forces and maintained order with ruthless social repression and terrorism. This political monopoly of the law made modern China into a society that operates not within levels of the law but rather around the law. Two extra levels of society in China float around the law: the above law and the under (out) law. The former refers to people who have sufficient influence to redefine the meaning of law and distribute individual shares of rights as they please without referring to any constitutional, legal, or moral principles. Chinese legal administration has a historic tendency to override legislation. In China, politics is law, and politicians are the legislator, jury, and judge. Chinese under laws refer to people who are neglected or left out of the protection provided by law. In most cases, they are repressed and stripped of all civil rights because someone who is more powerful wants to acquire a larger share. Without an opportunity to make their voice heard, the only way that they can participate in social change is through armed resistance and revolution. For thousands of years, almost every new dynasty in China has emerged through some sort of revolution. As the revolutionary outlaws crowned themselves as the new above laws, the cycle was completed and once again prepared itself to repeat. Mao Zedong came from this kind of revolution. He was the only Chinese leader who had the vision to recognise that his once revolutionary syndicate had become a privileged class (above law). Although he risked everything when he launched another revolution to amend the system, he failed to pull China away from its imbedded corruptive practice. Although he completely rewrote the law and reorganised the army to stand by it, he instantly lost control of the connotations, intended meanings, and implications of his own words within a language that has been used and abused for thousands of years. This book follows and continues Gu s book, The Boundaries of Meaning and the Formation of Law, by illustrating how language shapes the formation, application, and administration of law in various cultural environments. Law and Politics in Modern China is an important book for those interested in Chinese history, culture, law, and politics. It also provides refreshing insights about the way that law continues to function after its language matures and creates contradictions and loopholes within its system of rules one of the most important issues facing Western legal administration in the immediate future.