Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe
Author: By Emily C. Bartels Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 1994Bartels focuses on Marlowe's preoccupation with strangers and strange lands, and his useand subversionof Elizabethan stereotypes. Setting Marlovian drama in the context of England's nascent imperialism, Bartels probes the significance of the alien as the vital presence on the Renaissance stage and within Renaissance society.
Author: Catharine McClellan
Long out-of-print, My Old People Say has remained a primary resource for students of the history and culture of northwestern North America. Catherine McClellans three decades of collaboration with the Inland Tlingit, Tagish and Southern Tutchone resulted in two splendid, scholarly volumes that document rich and detailed memories of late nineteenth century social organization, subsistence strategies and resource allocation, as well as aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual traditions.
Author: Daniel Weinbren
This historical perspective on The Open University, founded in 1969, frames its ethos (to be open to people, places, methods and ideas) within the traditions of correspondence courses, commercial television, adult education, the post-war social democratic settlement and the Cold War. A critical assessment of its engagement with teaching, assessment and support for adult learners offers an understanding as to how it came to dominate the market for part-time studies. It also indicates how, as the funding and status of higher education shifted, it became a loved brand and a model for universities around the world. Drawing on previously ignored or unavailable records, personal testimony and recently digitised broadcast teaching materials, it recognises the importance of students to the maintenance of the university and places the development of learning and the uses of technology for education over the course of half a century within a wider social and economic perspective.
Author: Karin Arts
It is increasingly recognised that EU development cooperation policy has failed to meet its stated aims. In this book, available for the first time in paperback, Arts and Dickson ask the obvious and important question: if the policy doesnt work, why bother with it? The authors assess why EU development policy has become largely ineffective, citing among the external causal factors the liberalisation of trade, and the growing influence of US and international actors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund upon EU policy. It also considers contributing factors within the EU such as the enlargement of its membership and the resulting shifts in priorities. It is this analysis of internal and external factors affecting the decline of EU development policy that makes this study both innovative and unique. It brings together an impressive range of contributors from different disciplines resulting in a thorough and intelligent assessment of the debate. This study will appeal to advanced level undergraduates and academics of European politics in general, EU integration, development studies, and International Relations.
Author: Jerry Lewis Kasparek
This study seeks to demonstrate an influential relationship between Moliere's classical reading and his character, Tartuffe. The work is divided into five sections: Introduction, The Satiric Element in Tartuffe, Moliere's Tartuffe, An Interpretation Based on Significant Parallels with the Traditions in Roman Satiric Literature, and Conclusion.
Author: Kathleen S. Sullivan
While the United States was founded on abstract principles of certain unalienable rights, its legal traditions are based in British common law, a fact long decried by progressive reformers. Common law, the complaint goes, ignores abstract rights principles in favor of tradition, effectively denying equality to large segments of the population. The nineteenth-century womens rights movement embraced this argument, claiming that common law rules of property and married womens status were at odds with the nation's commitment to equality. Conventional wisdom suggests that this tactic helped pave the way for voting rights and better jobs. In Constitutional Context, Kathleen S. Sullivan presents a fresh perspective. In revisiting the eras congressional debates, state legislation, judicial opinions, news accounts, and work of political activists, Sullivan finds that the argument for universal, abstract rights was not the only, or best, path available for social change. Rather than erecting a new paradigm of absolute rights, she argues, womens rights activists unwittingly undermined common laws ability to redress grievances, contributing heavily to the social, cultural, and political stagnation that characterizes the place of women and the movement today. A challenging and thoughtful study of what is commonly thought of as an era of progress, Constitutional Context provides the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding and interpretation of constitutional law.
Author: Laurie Anne Freeman
How is the relationship between the Japanese state and Japanese society mediated by the press? Does the pervasive system of press clubs, and the regulations underlying them, alter or even censor the way news is reported in Japan? Who benefits from the press club system? And who loses? Here Laurie Anne Freeman examines the subtle, highly interconnected relationship between journalists and news sources in Japan. Beginning with a historical overview of the relationship between the press, politics, and the public, she describes how Japanese press clubs act as information cartels, limiting competition among news organizations and rigidly structuring relations through strict rules and sanctions. She also shows how the web of interrelations extends into, and is reinforced by, media industry associations and business groups (keiretsu). Political news and information are conveyed to the public in Japan, but because of institutional constraints, they are conveyed in a highly delimited fashion that narrows the range of societal inquiry into the political process. Closing the Shop shows us how the press system in Japan serves as neither a watchdog nor a lapdog. Nor does the state directly control the press in ways Westerners might think of as censorship. The level of interconnectedness, through both official and unofficial channels, helps set the agenda and terms of political debate in Japan's mass media to an extent that is unimaginable to many in the United States and other advanced industrial democracies. This fascinating look at Japan's information cartels provides a critical but often overlooked explanation for the overall power and autonomy enjoyed by the Japanese state.
Author: Helen A. Berger
Solitary Pagans is the first book to explore the growing phenomenon of contemporary Pagans who practice alone. Although the majority of Pagans in the United States have abandoned the tradition of practicing in groups, little is known about these individuals or their way of practice. Helen A. Berger fills that gap by building on a massive survey of contemporary practitioners. By examining the data, Berger describes solitary practitioners demographically and explores their spiritual practices, level of social engagement, and political activities. Contrasting the solitary Pagans with those who practice in groups and more generally with other non-Pagan Americans, she also compares contemporary U.S. Pagans with those in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Berger brings to light the new face of contemporary paganism by analyzing those who learn about the religion from books or the Internet and conduct rituals alone in their gardens, the woods, or their homes. Some observers believe this social isolation and political withdrawal has resulted in an increase in narcissism and a decline in morality, while others argue to the contrary that it has produced a new form of social integration and political activity. Berger posits the implications of her findings to reveal a better understanding of other metaphysical religions and those who shun traditional religious organizations.
Author: Laura Tisdall
A Progressive Education? argues that ideas about both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh schools after WWII. Covering the period 1918 to 1979, this book shows that by putting childhood at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. It has been suggested that the dominance of progressive education after 1945 led to a backlash against permissive attitudes to pupils in both Western Europe and the United States. But British child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, actually shaped a more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood. Drawing on an extensive range of sources that illuminate teaching practice, from school logbooks to oral histories, this book will be crucial not only for historians and sociologists of modern Britain, but for education professionals and policy-makers.
Author: Jörg C. Lemm
Ask a traditional mathematician the likely outcome of a coin-toss, and he will reply that no evidence exists on which to base such a prediction. Ask a Bayesian, and he will examine the coin, conclude that it was probably not tampered with, and predict five hundred heads in a thousand tosses; a subsequent experiment would then be used to refine this prediction. The Bayesian approach, in other words, permits the use of prior knowledge when testing a hypothesis. Long the province of mathematicians and statisticians, Bayesian methods are applied in this ground-breaking book to problems in cutting-edge physics. Joerg Lemm offers practical examples of Bayesian analysis for the physicist working in such areas as neural networks, artificial intelligence, and inverse problems in quantum theory. The book also includes nonparametric density estimation problems, including, as special cases, nonparametric regression and pattern recognition. Thought-provoking and sure to be controversial, Bayesian Field Theory will be of interest to physicists as well as to other specialists in the rapidly growing number of fields that make use of Bayesian methods.