This volume focuses on the publisher's series as a cultural formation - a material artifact and component of cultural hierarchies. Contributors engage with archival research, cultural theory, literary and bibliometric analysis (amongst a range of other approaches) to contextualize the publisher's series in terms of its cultural and economic work.

As the United Nations passes its fiftieth anniversary, it has undergone a sea change in its approach toward peacekeeping. Originally a stopgap measure to preserve a cease-fire, peacekeeping has, since the waning of the Cold War, become a means to implement an agreed political solution to conflict between antagonists. Placed inside war-torn states, UN peacekeepers have encountered manifold new challenges through oversight of elections, protection of human rights, and reconstructing of governmental administration. In this study, Steven R. Ratner offers a comprehensive framework for scholars, policy-makers, and all those seeking to understand this new peacekeeping. He sees the UN as an administrator, mediator, and guarantor of political settlements - roles that can conflict when peace accords unravel, as is all too common. He describes the numerous actors, inside and outside the UN, who are engaged in this process, often with competing interests. And in historical review, beginning with the League of Nations, he reveals many striking precedents long before the 1990s. In the central case-study, Ratner applies his thesis to the most ambitious UN operation completed, the Cambodia mission of 1991-93. After reconstructing the process leading to the massive UN role, he reviews and appraises its performance, offering a sophisticated critique demonstrating the dangers of quick 'success' or 'failure' verdicts. With the experiences of those operations in mind, he concludes with a set of compelling recommendations for the UN's members.

This is one of the first books to offer a rigorous analysis of the enormous changes in the musical theatre during the 1980s and 90s. In addition, it focuses on the contribution of well-known, serious theatre directors to the mainstream Musical Theatre and it is the first book to offer a dual Anglo-American perspective on this subject.

This book draws on a range of critical approaches, including cultural anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, political justice theory, and feminist theory, to consider the ways that strategies of death denial and their compensatory consolations offer insight into the ethical, gender, and religious questions raised by Hawthorne's novels.

This book tells the story of the bitter feud between the Duchess of Kingston and the actor, Samuel Foote, which resulted in a pair of scandalous trials in London in the revolutionary year of 1776. Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, the duchess's state trial for bigamy and Foote's criminal trial for attempted sodomy engrossed the attention of Londoners, including George III, Parliament, and the nobility. Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity offers specialists and general readers a meticulously researched and dramatic narrative that relates the fortunes and misfortunes of its protagonists and exposes the social and legal hypocrisies about love, sex, and marriage in the age of George III.

This book offers the first sustained examination of fatness in the early modern period. Using readings of such major figures as Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, this book considers alternative ways that fat was constructed before the introduction of the modern pathologized category of 'obesity'.

While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period's social, political and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms and audiences.

Rob White reconsiders Freud's controversial theory of inherited memory, referring it both to Anglo-American commentary and post-structuralist work on psychoanalysis. White proposes that this theory is evidence of an underlying haunted retrospection in Freudian theorizing, which time and again discovers that meaning has been lost.

The author demonstrates the significant role that some of the Edwardian philosophers played in the formation of Russell's work on the problem of the external world done at the tail-end of a controversy which raged between about 1900-1915.

Dutch Sailmaker and sailor Jan Struys' (c.1629-c.1694) account of his various overseas travels became a bestseller after its first publication in Amsterdam in 1676, and was later translated into English, French, German and Russian. This new book depicts the story of its author's life as well as the first singular analysis of the Struys text.

Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of topics relating Guattari's works to the current political conjuncture.

This new edition offers an extensive editor's introduction, a fully annotated text of the first edition of Vindiciae Gallicae and an appendix which includes the significant substantive revisions that Mackintosh made to Vindiciae Gallicae in the late summer of 1791.

The documentation of practice is one of the principle concerns of performance studies. Focusing on contemporary performance practice and with emphasis on the transformative impact of video, photography and writing, this book explores the ideological, practical, and representational implications of knowing performance through its documentations.

When human beings do horrifying things, are they evil? By exploring such popular literature as "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Dante's "Inferno," "The Turn of the Screw," and "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Koehn illustrates that the roots of human violence are not true evil but a symptom of our failure to really know who we are. It is this lack of understanding of our selves that can lead humans to perform horrifying deeds, rather than "evil" itself. This is a deep look into human nature, its beauty and its failings. "The Nature of Evi"l offers an insightful and engaging exploration at a time when we are all struggling to understand the roots of violence and suffering.

This book asks about the cultural and political meanings of spiritualism in the Nineteenth century United States. In order to re-assess both transatlantic spiritualism and the culture in which it emerged, Bennet locates spiritualism within a highly technologized transatlantic capitalist culture.

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

This is the first book to explore the broad political significance of Genet's performance practice by focusing on his radical experiments, polemical subjects and formal innovations in theatre, film and dance. Its new approach brings together the diverse aspects of Genet's work through essays by international scholars and interviews.

After forty years of feminism, views of the traditional Jewish family, religion, and gender roles have changed. In the process a new literature has been created, new paradigms born, and many Jewish women writers have been reevaluated, reclaimed, and renamed, with their Jewish heritage often overlooked or misinterpreted." Modern Jewish Women Writers in America "includes groundbreaking essays and interviews with scholars and authors who reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from being Jewish.

Advice books published by women were a popular genre in Seventeenth and early Eighteenth-century England and they were moral manuals with strong religious overtones. Here, Urban highlights a notable exception: Age Rectified, which counsels women to acquire a 'disposition of mind' in old age which allows them to be accepted by younger generations.

This study considers parallel issues in revenge tragedies of the early seventeenth-century and violent cinema of the last thirty years. It offers a series of provocative explorations of death, revenge and justice, and gender and violence. What happens when we connect The White Devil with Basic Instinct ? The Changeling or Titus Andronicus with Straw Dogs ? Doctor Faustus with Se7en ? Taxi Driver with The Spanish Tragedy ? Appealing to those with an interest in either drama or film, written in an engaging style, the book also reconsiders the high /popular culture divide, and reflects on the enduring significance of the revenge motif in Western culture over the past four hundred years, particularly in the post 9/11 context.

This book explores the ways in which Blake reacted to the subcultures of his day, as well as how he has inspired popular, modernist and postmodernist figures until the present day. Blake's influence on later generations of writers and artists is more important than ever, extending into film, psychology, children's literature and graphic novels.

There have been many voices in disciplines as various as philosophy, history, psychology, hermeneutics, literary theory, and theology that have claimed that narrative is fundamental to all that is human. Here is a book that, in an engaging and amusing way, presents a coherent thesis to that effect, connecting the Joke and the Story (with all that comedy and tragedy imply) not only with our sensing and perceiving of the world, but with our faith in each other, and what the character of that faith should be.

Deleuze's writing is permeated with references to literature. Despite asserting that he was not a literary critic, Deleuze provides exhilarating and original interactions with texts. This study offers in-depth encounters between Deleuze's thought and the writers who fascinated him, demonstrating the productivity of a Deleuzian frame of reference.

This collection explores popular culture in Ireland and Ireland in popular culture, from Fanfic to Orange Parades; from boybands to the Blessed Virgin Mary; from celebrity tourism to the Gaelic Athletic Association. The essays examine local and global Irishness, focusing on how gender, sexuality and race shape Irish 'postmodernity'.

This new study explores the history of cross-cultural performative encounters in the Pacific from the Eighteenth century to the present. It examines Western theatrical representations of Pacific cultures and investigates how Pacific Islanders used their own cultural performances to negotiate the colonial situation.