Drawing a picture of the current situation of this new field, this volume both summarizes the past achievements and analyzes the present unsolved problems.

Over the last three decades many fundamental problems relating to the chemical reactions of polymers have arisen. In this book three distinguished authors present for the first time a comprehensive, theoretical and experimental analysis of macromolecular reactions, summarising advances in the field. Designed as a guide for academics and for polymer chemists and physicists in industry, this will also be an invaluable textbook for post-graduates and students as it details the peculiarities of macromolecular reactions, the quantitative investigation of reaction kinetics, product structure and processes of chemical modification. The authors are all widely regarded as worldwide experts in this field.

Drawing a picture of the current situation of this new field, this volume both summarizes the past achievements and analyzes the present unsolved problems.

to the American Edition We are pleased that our modest work, published some time ago in Russian in Moscow* and which attracted the attention of polymer specialists,t will now be available to the EngJish- speaking audience of scientists - chemists, physicists, and technologists engaged in creating new types of polymer materi- als for modern technology and working on the fundamental prob- lems of the solid-state physics and structure of polymer- due to the initiative of Plenum Press. In polymer science, the 1980s were marked by the birth of a new field and a new scientific trend related to the dis- covery and study of a previously unknown class of polymers thermotropic liquid-crystalline polymers - and the further development of the fundamental theoretical concepts of the liquid-crystalline (mesomorphic) state of macromolecular com- pounds. This state is a phase state in thermodynamic equi- librium characterized by the anisotropy of the structure and properties as a result of one-dimensional or two-dimensional ordering. Such systems have an ordered but simultaneously labile structure which can easily be altered by mechanical, electrical, or magnetic fields; the polymer system then acquires unique physical and optical properties. These prop- erties, which are acquired in the liquid-crvstalline state, are then fixed in the solid at the operating temperatures. *N. A. Plate and V. P. Shibaev. Comb-Shaped Polymers and Li- quid Crystals [in RussianJ. Khimiya, Moscow (1980). tSee the review of this book by H. Mark in J. Polym. Sci. Polym. Lett. Ed. , 20, 139 (L982).