Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

This topical volume deals with the adoption of biblical language and narrative and the presentation of 'biblical' images and themes in popular literature, art and mass media. The chapters, all written by experts in cultural studies of the Bible, explore how ideologies are produced, in various ways, when biblical texts are brought into play with each other, with other texts, and with the inevitable and continual demands for cultural and historical "translation"-or "recycling"-of the scriptures. The volume contains some theoretical reflections, but focuses on specific examples of cultural translation, and is directed primarily at advanced (graduate) students and scholars in biblical studies, popular studies, media studies, literature, and the arts, although some articles will also be of value and interest to introductory students and the general public. The contributors to this volume are Fiona Black, Susan Lochrie Graham, Chris Heard, Helen Leneman, Phyllis Silverman Kramer, Tina Pippin, Caroline Vader Stichele, Lori Rowlett, Erin Runions, Jan William Tarlin and Richard Walsh.

Written by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field of ethnic relations, this volume examines the role of ethnicity in modern day society and the impact of government policy on ethnic relations. International in scope, the essays look at a number of different but interrelated issues--aging, identity, minority groups, and others--examining each from a multidisciplinary perspective. Coverage ranges from the problems of Asian Americans to integration issues in Israel and the relationship between ethnic diversity and patterns of retirement. The contributions include both theoretical and empirical works.

The first section of the study presents the primary issues and central concepts involved in the study of multiculturalism in modern day societies. Specific chapters address such issues as the vesting of ethnic interests in state institutions, state policies toward subordinate ethnics, and government efforts to address multiculturalism. Particularly valuable is a retrospective analysis of Canada's "Bilingual and Bicultural Report." The next section contains detailed case studies which identify specific ethnic groups and analyze their current societal roles. In the final chapters, the contributors present two projections of what ethnic relations will be like in the twenty-first century as North America becomes more multi-ethnic and multilingual. Taken together, the essays offer an illuminating overview of the nature of multiculturalism in widely diverse societies.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

"Smith has written a richly detailed, valuable study that clearly deserves a place on the shelves of scholars of southern politics and of religion and politics."
"--American Political Science Review"

""A fascinating and well-documented study of the transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) into the single largest religious force in modern American politics.""
"--Southeastern Political Review"

By championing the ideals of independence, evangelism, and conservism, the Southern Baptist Covention (SBC) has grown into the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The Convention's mass democratic form of church government, its influential anual meetings, and its sheer size have made it a barometer for Southern political and cultural shift. Its most recent shift has been starboard-toward fundementalism and Republicanism.

While the Convention once ofered a happy home to Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and church-state separationists, in the past two decades the SBC has become an uncomfortable institution for Democrats, progressive theologians, and other moderate voices. Current SBC member-heroes include Senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms. Despite this seeming marginalization, Southern Baptist politicians have grown from political obscurity to occupying the four highest positions in the constitutional order of succesion to the presidency. President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Senate President pro-tempore Strom Thurmond, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich are all Southern Baptists.

In its emerging Republicanism, the SBC has taken on characteristics of its more active fellow travelers in the Christian Right, forgingalliances with former enemies (African Americans amd Roman Catholics), playing presidential politics, establishing a Washington lobbying presence, working the political grassroots, and declaring war on Walt Disney. Each of these missions has been accomplished with calculating political precision.

The Rise of Baptist Republicanism traces the Republicanization of the SBC's Republicanism in the context of the rise of the Fundamentalist Right and the emergence of a Republican majority in the South. Describing the SBC's political roots, Oran P. Smith contrasts Baptist Republicans with the rest of the Christian Right while revealing the theological, cultural, and historical factors which have made Southern Baptists receptive to Republican/Fundamentalist Right influences. The book is a must read for anyone wishing to understand the intersection of religion and politics in America today.

The dramatic events of the twentieth century have often led to the mass migration of intellectuals, professionals, writers, and artists. One of the first of these migrations occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when more than a million Russians were forced into exile. With this book, Marc Raeff, one of the world's leading historians of Russia, offers the first comprehensive cultural history of the "Great Russian Emigration." He examines the social and institutional structure of the emigration and describes its rich cultural and intellectual life. He points out that what distinguishes this emigration from other such episodes in European history is the extent to which the emigres succeeded in reconstituting and preserving their cultural creativity in the West. The flourishing Russian communities of Paris, Berlin, Prague and Kharbin not only enriched Russian arts and letters, but also significantly influenced the culture of their Western hosts, and Raeff concludes with an assessment of their impact on the development of modern Western and Soviet culture.

This book offers a new approach by combining the disciplines of history, psychology, and religion to explain the suicidal element in both Western culture and the individual, and how to treat it. Ancient Greek society displays in its literature and the lives of its people an obsessive interest in suicide and death. Kaplan and Schwartz have explored the psychodynamic roots of this problem--in particular, the tragic confusion of the Greek heroic impulse and its commitment to unsatisfactory choices that are destructively rigid and harsh. The ancient Hebraic writings speak little of suicide and approach reality and freedom in vastly different terms: God is an involved parent, caring for his children. Therefore, heroism, in the Greek sense, is not needed nor is the individual compelled to choose between impossible alternatives.

In each of the first three sections, the authors discuss the issues of suicide from a comparative framework, whether in thought or myth, then the suicide-inducing effects of the Graeco-Roman world, and finally, the suicide-preventing effects of the Hebrew world. The final section draws on this material to present a suicide prevention therapy. Historical in scope, the book offers a new psychological model linking culture to the suicidal personality and suggests an antidote, especially with regard to the treatment of the suicidal individual.

This volume in Greenwood's American Popular Culture through History series recreates the many ways in which a new American culture took root during the Revolutionary period. Tavern culture and pamphlet literature played integral parts in debates surrounding the Revolution. Newspapers spread information while printing the first advertisements. Courtship and marriage rituals varied greatly among the rich and poor, and among city and country folk. Public performance art was a hotly debated component of the increased schism between secular and religious concerns, though many Americans enjoyed recreations of recent military battles. Foodways were distinctly regional, yet food rationing was a universal hardship among army personnel. Randall Huff's narrative essays, as well as many extra front- and back-matter resources, help describe citizen's lives in the newly formed United States of America as the nation fought to win its independence. American Popular Culture through Historyis the only reference series that presents a detailed, narrative discussion of United States popular culture. This volume is one of 17 in the series, each of which presents essays on Everyday America, The World of Youth, Advertising, Architecture, Fashion, Food, Leisure Activities, Literature, Music, Performing Arts, Travel, and Visual Arts.

Southeast Asia's recent economic dynamism has helped to stimulate renewed interest in the study of many aspects of this complex region. This collection of essays explores the evolution of various disciplinary approaches to Southeast Asia. Basing their approaches on anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, history, politics, international relations and on a consideration of literature, the authors examine many of the crucial debates and controversies of the past, and aim to provide a picture of the current scholarship in each discipline as it relates to the region.

The stories of six veteran U.S. teachers who have studied about, taught, and lived in Japan and China show that intensive international experience can profoundly affect a teacher's life and work. Reflections about culture shock, friendships across borders, fundamental transformation and school reform recommendations are integrated with wonderfully creative pedagogies.

Six U.S. teachers who lived and taught in Japan and China tell their stories with introspection and enthusiasm. Their experiences improved their teaching and contributed to their cultural awareness and empathy. How these teachers contribute to classroom practice abroad, how they develop personal friendships with their Chinese and Japanese hosts and colleagues, and how they begin to change their school environments upon returning to the U.S. clearly demonstrates the tremendous effects of their international experience.

Frank portrayals of some of their difficult living conditions and reactions to culture shock caution those who would try this life and teaching adventure without adequate preparation. The book concludes with specific recommendations on preparation for such an experience.

Migration is most concretely defined by the movement of human bodies, but it leaves indelible traces on everything from individual psychology to major social movements. Drawing on extensive field research, and with a special focus on Italy and the Netherlands, this interdisciplinary volume explores the interrelationship of migration and memory at scales both large and small, ranging across topics that include oral and visual forms of memory, archives, and artistic innovations. By engaging with the complex tensions between roots and routes, minds and bodies, The Mobility of Memory offers an incisive and empirically grounded perspective on a social phenomenon that continues to reshape both Europe and the world.

As violence and turmoil continue to define the former Yugoslavia, basic questions remain unanswered: What are the forces behind the Serbian expansionist drive that has brought death and destruction to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo? How did the Serbs rationalize, and rally support for, this genocidal activity?

Heavenly Serbia traces Serbia's nationalist and expansionist impulses to the legendary battle of Kosovo in 1389. Anzulovic shows how the myth of "Heavenly Serbia" developed to help the Serbs endure foreign domination, explaining their military defeat and the loss of their medieval state by emphasizing their own moral superiority over military victory. Heavenly Serbia shows how this myth resulted in an aggressive nationalist ideology which has triumphed in the late twentieth century and marginalized those Serbs who strive for the establishment of a civil society.

"Modern Serbian nationalism...and its contradictory connections...have been sources of considerable scholarly interest...Branimir Anzulovic's compendium is a good example of the genre, made all the more useful by Anzulovic's excellent command of the literature."
--Ivo Banac, "History of Religions"

Author interview with CNN: http: //www.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/branimir_chat.html

In this book the seventeenth century, heavy with significance for the future of Europe, is fully explored by Professor Bergin and six major authors as they address, in turn, economy, society, politics, war and international relations, science, thought and culture ('The Age of Curiosity'), and Europe in the wider world. In a set of chapters covering and contrasting the European experience across the full century and the full continent, the reader is offered a rich, lively, and provocative introduction to the period, and students a superbly authoritative context for more detailed work.

An intellectual history of contrasting ideas around the power of the arts to bring about personal and societal change - for better and worse. A fascinating account of the value and functions of the arts in society, in both the private sphere of individual emotions and self-development and public sphere of politics and social distinction.

Although journalism has always been an important vehicle of collective memory, it has been neglected in discussions about how memory works. This fascinating book aims to correct that disjuncture, by tracking the ways in which journalism and shared memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other. How is journalism's address to memory different from that of other institutions? What would the study of memory look like without journalism? And how would our understanding of journalism fall short without paying attention to memory? Bringing together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies, this collection makes explicit the longstanding and complicated role that journalism has played in keeping the past alive. From anniversary issues and media retrospectives to simple verbal and visual analogies connecting past and present, journalism incorporates an address to earlier times across the wide array of its conventions and practices. How it does so and which triumphs and problems ensue in our understanding of collective memory constitute the charter of this volume.

In this major new work, Thompson develops an original account of ideology and relates it to the analysis of culture and mass communication in modern Societies.

Thompson offers a concise and critical appraisal of major contributions to the theory of ideology, from Marx and Mannheim, to Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. He argues that these thinkers - and social and political theorists more generally - have failed to deal adequately with the nature of mass communication and its role in the modern world. In order to overcome this deficiency, Thompson undertakes a wide-ranging analysis of the development of mass communication, outlining a distinctive social theory of the mass media and their impact.

Ross McKibbin investigates the ways in which `class culture' characterized English society and intruded into every aspect of life, during the period from 1918 to the mid-1950s. He shows how this division into separate social classes manifested itself within the mini `cultures' which together help constitute society: families and family life, friends and neighbours, the workplace, schools and colleges, religion, sexuality, sport, music, film, radio, and examines the effects of increasing Americanization. This fascinating and original study is invaluable for an understanding of the fundamental structures and belief systems underpinning English society in the first half of the twentieth century.

This book provides insightful sociological analyses of Japanese demography and families, paying attention not only to national average data, but also to regional variations and community level analyses. In analyzing Japanese family issues such as demographic changes, courtship and marriage, international marriage, divorce, late-life divorce, and the elderly living alone, this book emphasizes the significance of two theoretical frameworks: the dual structure and regional variations of the community network in Japan. By emphasizing the extensive cultural diversity from one region to another, this book represents a paradigm shift from former studies of Japanese families, which relied mostly on national average data. The method of analysis adopted in the study is qualitative, with a historical perspective. The book is thus an invitation to more in-depth, qualitative dialogue in the field of family sociology in Japan. This book will be of great interest not only to Asian scholars, but also to other specialists in comparative family studies around the world.

The book provides a systematic review of research results on regional economic competitiveness, and constructs an evaluation index system based on nine key aspects: the development of a micro-economy; industrial development; enterprise strength; the sciences; education; innovation; environment governance and protection; financial development; and the degree of opening to the outside world. The book subsequently provides policy suggestions on how to enhance the economic and social development of the West of China based on a comprehensive evaluation and analysis. In addition to comparing the recent social development of the provinces in the West, the book also calls upon the central government to play the leading role, encourage mass participation and promote the opening up of the West of China.

Based on roundtable discussions by a variety of scholars over a two-year period, these essays explore the complex and often contradictory matrix of sentiments, feelings, and beliefs that frame America's contemporary social doctrine of wealth. The seven Boston College faculty members whose writings comprise this volume are professors of classics, economics, ethics, history, literature, scripture, and sociology. Each scholar reviews a a range of writings and narratives that enunciate definite theses about the genesis and prospects as well as the uses and abuses of wealth. Today, as the discussion of wealth creation and distribution become framed less frequently under the rubrics of capitalism and socialism, it is propitious to examine other pieces of the debate that come to us from our Western classical, biblical, literary, and ethical traditions. The talk for and against wealth, so well articulated by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, is only one axis on which this important Western motif turns. Schervish and his contributors enable us to consult several other texts that can guide our repositioning on the controversies surrounding the moral status of wealth and the wealthy.

Speed is the essence of the modern era, but our faster, more frenetic lives often trouble us and leave us wondering how we are meant to live in today's world. Slow Living explores the philosophy and politics of 'slowness' as it investigates the growth of Slow Food into a worldwide, 'eco-gastronomic' movement. Originating in Italy, Slow Food is not only committed to the preservation of traditional cuisines and sustainable agriculture but also the pleasures of the table and a slower approach to life in general. Craig and Parkins argue that slow living is a complex response to processes of globalization. It connects ethics and pleasure, the global and the local, as part of a new emphasis on everyday life in contemporary culture and politics. The 'global everyday' is not a simple tale of speed and geographical dislocation. Instead, we all negotiate different times and spaces that make our quality of life and an 'ethics of living' more pressing concerns. This innovative book shows how slow living is about the challenges of living a more mindful and pleasurable life.

In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was closely related to the climate of the Cold War, in which the demonization of socialism contributed to a dismissal of all alternatives to capitalism. This book studies how American novels and films of the long 1950s reflect the loss of the utopian imagination and mirror the growing concern that capitalism brought routinization, alienation, and other dehumanizing consequences. The volume relates the decline of the utopian vision to the rise of late capitalism, with its expanding globalization and consumerism, and to the beginnings of postmodernism.

In addition to well-known literary novels, such as NabokoV's "Lolita, " Booker explores a large body of leftist fiction, popular novels, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney. The book argues that while the canonical novels of the period employ a utopian aesthetic, that aesthetic tends to be very weak and is not reinforced by content. The leftist novels, on the other hand, employ a realist aesthetic but are utopian in their exploration of alternatives to capitalism. The study concludes that the utopian energies in cultural productions of the long 1950s are very weak, and that these works tend to dismiss utopian thinking as na DEGREESDive or even sinister. The weak utopianism in these works tends to be reflected in characteristics associated with postmodernism.

What are the interactions between transnational communication and national cultures? This work attempts to answer this critical question in the study of culture and communication. It takes as its vehicle of study the music industry and music making in 13 different cultures, presenting an insider's view of a global cultural experience. Of interest to musicologists and sociologists alike, plus anyone fascinated by distant cultures and how they are affected by external as well as internal communication systems.

The chapters are a collection of research findings produced for the International Communications and Youth Cultures Consortium (ICYC), an informal group of international scholars in many disciplines who are committed to understanding the economic and social factors that influence cultures and youth. Their point of view in this work is their individual country and the tensions that arise from the development of international communication systems. Each view is from inside the country; external influences are not subjects of study in themselves but are viewed as part of a complex scene along with other variables operating in various national situations.

How do individuals perceive the increasingly open-ended nature of mediated surveillance? In what ways are mediated surveillance practices interwoven with identity processes, political struggles, expression of dissent and the production of social space? One of the most significant issues in contemporary society is the complex forms and conflicting meanings surveillance takes. Media, Surveillance and Identity addresses the need for contextualized social perspectives within the study of mediated surveillance. The volume takes account of dominant power structures (such as state surveillance and commercial surveillance) and social reproduction as well as political economic considerations, counter-privacy discourses, and class and gender hegemonies. Some chapters analyse particular media types, formats or platforms (such as loyalty cards or location based services), while others account for the composite dynamics of media ensembles within particular spaces of surveillance or identity creation (such as consumerism or the domestic sphere). Through empirically grounded research, the volume seeks to advance a complex framework of research for future scrutiny as well as rethinking the very concept of surveillance. In doing so, it offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates on the social implications of mediated practices and surveillance cultures.

Digital Broadcasting presents an introduction to how the classic notion of 'broadcasting' has evolved and is being reinterpreted in an age of digitization and convergence. The book argues that 'digital broadcasting' is not a contradiction in terms, but-on the contrary-both terms presuppose and need each other. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary and international field of research and theory, it looks at current developments in television and radio broadcasting on the level of regulation and policy, industries and economics, production and content, and audience and consumption practices.