The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolano. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

This is a fascinating study of Beckett's legacy for contemporary writers, which is part of the growing interest in Beckett studies in the question of Beckett's reception and influence. Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as 'the last modernist', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy.So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge. Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett's writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.

Strategy and Human Resource Management is concerned with examining how HR strategy impacts on an organisation's chances of survival and its relative success, and with understanding how it varies across important organisational, industry and societal contexts. It takes an analytical approach, which examines and explains what managers do and why they do it before offering any sort of prescription for what the authors think they should do. This approach is grounded in research but is brought to life with examples, cases and vignettes to offer a practice-orientated analysis of the subject. As well as explaining important general principles in strategic HRM, critical features of the different contexts in which they are applied are examined. For this fifth edition, there is increased coverage of contemporary topics, including capital markets and increasing financialisation, Industry 4.0, the shaping of employee voice under different varieties of capitalism and the effects of austerity. Strategy and Human Resource Management retains, however, the classic sources that are fundamental to the subject while also including important theoretical advances and the best new studies of strategies in the world of work and people.

Beckett and nothing invites its readership to understand the complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes almost invisible ways in which 'little nothings' pervade the Beckett canon. The volume has two main functions: on the one hand, it looks at 'nothing' not only as a content but also a set of rhetorical strategies to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and presence. On the other, it focuses on 'nothing' in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music and television. The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in the classroom. It will prove of interest to advanced students and scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies. -- .

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time. Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo's ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.

HRM is central to management teaching and research, and has emerged in the last decade as a significant field from its earlier roots in Personnel Management, Industrial Relations, and Industrial Psychology. People Management and High Performance teams have become key functions and goals for manager at all levels in organizations.
The Oxford Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world - and from a range of disciplines - to provide an authoritative account of current trends and developments. The Handbook is divided into four parts:
* Foundations and Frameworks,
* Core Processes and Functions,
* Patterns and Dynamics,
* Measurement and Outcomes.
Overall it will provide an essential resource for anybody who wants to get to grips with current thinking, research, and development on HRM.

DeLillo's writing has been concerned, from its inception, with thinking about how fiction has developed from the end of the Second World War. This book reads the whole of Don DeLillo's oeuvre to date - from Americana to Cosmopolis - and asks how far his writing can be thought of as an enactment of the possibilities of literary fiction in contemporary global culture.
DeLillo's work offers an analysis of the ways in which the globalization of capital, the end of the modernist avant-garde, and the expansion of the US military and economic power have transformed the production of fiction. The writer as a social critic, as a figure who helps us to 'think and see', is under threat, in DeLillo's writing from new forms of mass communication, and ever more advanced modes of surveillance and control. But if his writing charts the disappearance of critical fiction, then it also develops new forms in which fiction might persist under new global conditions.
This is the first book to offer a reading of DeLillo's complete oeuvre in the light of 9/11, and of the new global power relations that have come about in the wake of the attacks. DeLillo's writing offers one of the most subtle and powerful ways of thinking about globalization and global terrorism. Don DeLillo suggest ways in which his writing might help us to think about the possibilities of fiction in the post 9/11 global context.

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of 'thinking' that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather, all the essays suggest that poetry itself thinks, in ways that other forms of expression cannot, thus making new intellectual, political and cultural formulations possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements and tendencies. This volume offers the fullest and most nuanced account available of the last eight decades of British prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel and the reader. The collection is made up of thirty-four chapters by leading scholars in the field who detail the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender and different periods of women's writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children's novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

Strategy and Human Resource Management is concerned with examining how HR strategy impacts on an organisation's chances of survival and its relative success, and with understanding how it varies across important organisational, industry and societal contexts. It takes an analytical approach, which examines and explains what managers do and why they do it before offering any sort of prescription for what the authors think they should do. This approach is grounded in research but is brought to life with examples, cases and vignettes to offer a practice-orientated analysis of the subject. As well as explaining important general principles in strategic HRM, critical features of the different contexts in which they are applied are examined. For this fifth edition, there is increased coverage of contemporary topics, including capital markets and increasing financialisation, Industry 4.0, the shaping of employee voice under different varieties of capitalism and the effects of austerity. Strategy and Human Resource Management retains, however, the classic sources that are fundamental to the subject while also including important theoretical advances and the best new studies of strategies in the world of work and people.

From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.

Peter Boxall's The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the ethical, political and literary value of the novel as a genre at turning point in the history both of literature and of criticism. As the dominant critical concerns of the twentieth century faded, and new cultural and technological environments emerged, Boxall argues that we lost our collective sense of the purpose of the novel. This book responds to this predicament by demonstrating why and how the novel matters to us today. Ranging from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith, Boxall shows how the formal properties of the novel allow us to imagine the worlds in which we live. This is a vibrant, compelling and richly informed critical perspective that asks us to see anew how central fiction is to our idea of the world, and how richly the novel informs our attempts to understand our present and our future.

James Kelman is one of the most important Scottish writers now living. His fiction is widely acclaimed, and widely caricatured. His art declares war on stereotypes, but is saddled with plenty of its own. This book attempts to disentangle Kelman's writing from his reputation, clarifying his literary influences and illuminating his political commitments. It is the first book to cover the full range and depth of Kelman's work, explaining his position within genres such as the short story and the polemical essay, and tracing his interest in anti-colonial politics and existential thought. Essays by leading experts combine lucid accounts of the heated debates surrounding Kelman's writing, with a sharp focus on the effects and innovations of that writing itself. Kelman's own reception by reviewers and journalists is examined as a shaping factor in the development of his career. Chapters situate Kelman's work in critical contexts ranging from masculinity to vernacular language, cover influences from Chomsky to Kafka, and pursue the implications of Kelman's rhetoric from Glasgow localism to 'World English'. Key Features: * The first major collection of essays on Kelman's work * Considers the full spectrum of Kelman's writing, from novels to polemics to plays * Explores a comprehensive range of Kelman's literary influences and critical contexts * Highlights the interplay of Kelman's political, linguistic and artistic agendas

From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.

Peter Boxall's The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the ethical, political and literary value of the novel as a genre at turning point in the history both of literature and of criticism. As the dominant critical concerns of the twentieth century faded, and new cultural and technological environments emerged, Boxall argues that we lost our collective sense of the purpose of the novel. This book responds to this predicament by demonstrating why and how the novel matters to us today. Ranging from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith, Boxall shows how the formal properties of the novel allow us to imagine the worlds in which we live. This is a vibrant, compelling and richly informed critical perspective that asks us to see anew how central fiction is to our idea of the world, and how richly the novel informs our attempts to understand our present and our future.

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald, and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman, and Roberto Bolano. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students, and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century."

HRM is central to management teaching and research, and has emerged in the last decade as a significant field from its earlier roots in Personnel Management, Industrial Relations, and Industrial Psychology. People Management and High Performance teams have become key functions and goals for manager at all levels in organizations.
The Oxford Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world - and from a range of disciplines - to provide an authoritative account of current trends and developments. The Handbook is divided into four parts:
* Foundations and Frameworks,
* Core Processes and Functions,
* Patterns and Dynamics,
* Measurement and Outcomes.
Overall it will provide an essential resource for anybody who wants to get to grips with current thinking, research, and development on HRM.

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as 'the last modernist', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy. So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge. Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett's writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.

This book brings together research in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to answer a series of key questions: * What opportunities do employees in Anglo-American workplaces have to voice their concerns and what do they seek? * To what extent, and in what contexts, do workers want greater union representation? * How do workers feel about employer-initiated channels of influence? What styles of engagement do they want with employers?* What institutional models are more successful in giving workers the voice they seek at workplaces? * What can unions, employers, and public policy makers learn from these studies of representation and influence? The research is based largely on surveys that were conducted as a follow-up to the influential Worker Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS) reported in What Workers Want, coauthored by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers in 1999 and updated in 2006. Taken together, these studies authoritatively outline workers' attitudes toward, and opportunities for, representation and influence in the Anglo-American workplace. They also enhance industrial relations theory and suggest strategies for unions, employers, and public policy

This book brings together research in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to answer a series of key questions: * What opportunities do employees in Anglo-American workplaces have to voice their concerns and what do they seek? * To what extent, and in what contexts, do workers want greater union representation? * How do workers feel about employer-initiated channels of influence? What styles of engagement do they want with employers?* What institutional models are more successful in giving workers the voice they seek at workplaces? * What can unions, employers, and public policy makers learn from these studies of representation and influence? The research is based largely on surveys that were conducted as a follow-up to the influential Worker Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS) reported in What Workers Want, coauthored by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers in 1999 and updated in 2006. Taken together, these studies authoritatively outline workers' attitudes toward, and opportunities for, representation and influence in the Anglo-American workplace. They also enhance industrial relations theory and suggest strategies for unions, employers, and public policy

James Kelman is one of the most important Scottish writers now living. His fiction is widely acclaimed, and widely caricatured. His art declares war on stereotypes, but is saddled with plenty of its own. This book attempts to disentangle Kelman's writing from his reputation, clarifying his literary influences and illuminating his political commitments. It is the first book to cover the full range and depth of Kelman's work, explaining his position within genres such as the short story and the polemical essay, and tracing his interest in anti-colonial politics and existential thought. Essays by leading experts combine lucid accounts of the heated debates surrounding Kelman's writing, with a sharp focus on the effects and innovations of that writing itself. Kelman's own reception by reviewers and journalists is examined as a shaping factor in the development of his career. Chapters situate Kelman's work in critical contexts ranging from masculinity to vernacular language, cover influences from Chomsky to Kafka, and pursue the implications of Kelman's rhetoric from Glasgow localism to 'World English'. Key Features: * The first major collection of essays on Kelman's work * Considers the full spectrum of Kelman's writing, from novels to polemics to plays * Explores a comprehensive range of Kelman's literary influences and critical contexts * Highlights the interplay of Kelman's political, linguistic and artistic agendas