Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350–1560
Author: Mairi Cowan This book examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation: what the living did to influence the dead and vice versa; considers both continuities and changes, highlighting the Catholic Reform movement that reached Scottish towns before the Protestant Reformation took hold.
Author: Michael S. Collins
Understanding Etheridge Knight introduces readers to a majorbut understudiedAmerican poet. Etheridge Knight (19311991) survived a shrapnel wound suffered during military service in Korea, as well as a drug addiction that led to an eight-year prison sentence, to publish five volumes of poetry and a small cache of powerful prose. His status in the front ranks of American poets and thinkers on poetry was acknowledged in 1984, when he won the Shelley Memorial Award, which had previously gone, as an acknowledgement of genius and need, to E. E. Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin. In this first book-length study of Knight and his complete body of work, Michael Collins examines the poetry of a complex literary figure who, following imprisonment, transformed his life to establish himself as a charismatic voice in American poetry and an accomplished teacher at institutions such as the University of Hartford, Lincoln University, and his own Free Peoples Poetry Workshops. Beginning with a concise biography of Knight, Collins explores Knight's volumes of poetry including Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison, Born of a Woman, and The Essential Etheridge Knight. Understanding Etheridge Knight brings attention to a crucial era in African American and American poetry and to the literature of the incarcerated while reflecting on the life and work of an original voice in American poetry.
Author: Francisco E. Gonz
Latin Americas region-wide 1982 economic collapse had a drastic effect on governments throughout Central and South America, leading many to the verge of failure and pushing several of the most stridently authoritarianArgentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguayover the brink. Surprisingly though, Chiles repressive military dictatorship and Mexicos hegemonic civilian regime endured amid the economic chaos that rocked the region. Dual Transitions from Authoritarian Rule explains why the regimes in these two nations survived the financial upheaval of the early 1980s and how each progressed toward a more open, democratic, market-driven system in later years. Using an in-depth comparative analysis of Chile and Mexico, Francisco Gonzalez explains that the two governmentsthough quite different ideologicallypossessed a common type of institutionalized authoritarian rule that not only served to maintain the political status quo but, paradoxically, also aided proponents of political and economic liberalization. Featuring a discussion of parallel phenomena in Brazil, Hungary, Taiwan, and South Korea, Dual Transitions from Authoritarian Rule presents a cogent challenge to the received wisdom that sociopolitical and economic change within authoritarian nations must be approached separately. This book will interest scholars of Latin American politics, democratization studies, market reform, and comparative politics and international relations.
Author: Caroline Zilboorg
Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She received a degree in English from St. Hugh's College in Oxford in 1928, but she chose not to pursue an academic career. Instead, she decided to attend the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she trained to be a nurse. With the outbreak of the Second World War, she was assigned to the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and briefly worked with Dunkirk evacuees. She went on to work in the Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward and was there until 1945. It was during her nurse's training that Renault met Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong companion. This important lesbian relationship both resolved and posed many problems for Renault, not the least of which was how she was to write about issues at once intensely personal and socially challenging. In 1939, Renault published her first novel under a pseudonym in order to mask her identity. It was a time when she was struggling not only with her vocation (nursing and writing), but also with her sexual identity in the social and moral context of English life during the war. In 1948, Renault left England with Mullard for South Africa and never returned. It was in South Africa that she made the shift from her early contemporary novels of manners to the mature historical novels of Hellenic life. The classical settings allowed Renault to mask material too explosive to deal with directly while simultaneously giving her an academic freedom to write about subjects vital to heramong them war, peace, career, women's roles, female and male homosexuality, and bisexuality. Renault's reception complicates an understanding of her achievement, for she has a special status within the academic community, where she is both widely read and little written about. Her interest in sexuality and specifically in homosexuality and bisexuality, in fluid gender roles and identities, warrants a rereading and reevaluation of her work. Eloquently written and extensively researched, The Masks of Mary Renault will be of special value to anyone interested in women's studies or English literature.
Author: Marc Garcelon
Revolutionary Passage is a cultural, social, and political history of Russia during its critical period of transformation at the end of the twentieth century. Marc Garcelon traces the history of perestroika and the rise of Vladimir Putin, arguing that the pressure Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms put on the Soviet system gave birth to movements for democratic change. He also shows that the very political arrangements that prompted the fall of Communism also killed hopes for subsequent reform. At the turning point of this political revolution stood Democratic Russia, or DemRossiia, the principal organization of the Russian democratic movement that helped to dismantle the Soviet system and force the Soviet leadership to change course. However, as post-Soviet Russia committed itself to globalization and U.S.-style economic reforms, the country directed itself away from the Democratic reforms called for by organizations like DemRossiia, and such groups collapsed. Revolutionary Passage provides a close examination of the DemRossiia. Garcelon deftly illuminates the rise and decline of this organization, and how the processes of revolutionary change impacted both Russia and the world.
Author: Edited by Susan M. Wachter and Marvin M. Smith
Successful home ownership requires the availability of appropriate mortgage products. In the years leading up to the collapse of the housing market, home buyers frequently accepted mortgages that were not only wrong for them but catastrophic for the economy as a whole. When the housing market bubble burst, so did a cornerstone of the American dream for many families. Restoring the promise of this dream requires an unflinching inspection of lending institutions and the right tools to repair the structures that support solid home purchases. The American Mortgage System: Crisis and Reform focuses on the causes of the housing market collapse and proposes solutions to prevent another rash of foreclosures.Edited by two leaders in the field of real estate and finance, Susan M. Wachter and Marvin M. Smith, The American Mortgage System examines key elements of the mortgage meltdown. The volume's contributors address the influence of the Community Reinvestment Act, which is often blamed for the crisis. They uncover how the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac invested outside the housing market with disastrous results. They present surprising information about low-income borrowers and the strengths of local banks. This collection of thoughtful studies includes extensive analysis of loan practices and the creation of unstable mortgage securities, presenting data largely unavailable until now. More than a critique, The American Mortgage System offers solutions to the problems facing the future of American home ownership, including identifying asset price bubbles, calculating risk, and preventing discrimination in lending.Measured yet timely and by turns provocative, The American Mortgage System provides a careful assessment of a troubled but indispensable part of the economic and social structure of the United States. This book is a sound investment for economists, urban planners, and all who shape public policy.
Author: Richard Feist, Chantal Beauvais and Rajesh Shukla
A philosophical examination of technologys growing influence. This pioneering collection explores the relationship between technology and free will. Rejecting the notion of technology as a neutral addition to our lives, the contributors examine the type and degree of our societys technological dependence. Technology is revealed as something from which we have, and will continue to have, difficulty separating ourselves, both as individuals and as a society. Without articulating a purely deterministic perspective, this collection illuminates the powerful influence technology has on our world and our perception of it.
Author: By Kirin Narayan
Swamiji, a Hindu holy man, is the central character of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels. He reclines in a deck chair in his modern apartment in western India, telling subtle and entertaining fold narratives to his assorted gatherings. Among the listeners is Kirin Narayan, who knew Swamiji when she was a child in India and who has returned from America as an anthropologist. In her book Narayan builds on Swamiji's tales and his audiences' interpretations to ask why religious teachings the world over are so often couched in stories.For centuries, religious teachers from many traditions have used stories to instruct their followers. When Swamiji tells a story, the local barber rocks I helpless laughter, and a sari-wearing French nurse looks on enrapt. Farmers make decisions based on the tales, and American psychotherapists take notes that link the storytelling to their own practices. Narayan herself is a key character in this ethnography. As both a local woman and a foreign academic, she is somewhere between participant and observer, reacting to the nuances of fieldwork with a sensitivity that only such a position can bring.Each story s reproduced in its evocative performance setting. Narayan supplements eight folk narratives with discussions of audience participation and response as well as relevant Hindu themes. All these stories focus on the complex figure of the Hindu ascetic and so sharpen our understanding of renunciation and gurus in South Asia.While Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels raises provocative theoretical issues, it is also a moving human document. Swamiji, with his doll characterizations, inventive mind, and generous spirit, is a memorable character. The book contributes to a growing interdisciplinary literature on narrative. It will be particularly valuable to students and scholars of anthropology, folklore, performance studies, religions, and South Asian studies.
Author: HOWARD WIARDA
American foreign policy is in severe crisis. The system and process are not working as they should. On one side we are beset by a seemingly uninformed policy, on the other by paralysis and gridlock. The sense is widespread that the American system of government is broken. It is tempting to attribute our present foreign policy malaise to a single cause, such as Congress, the president, or the Iraq War. All of these bear some responsibility, but Howard J. Wiarda argues that the crisis goes far deeper. The problem derives from the kind of society we have become over a forty-year period: more divided, fragmented, and dysfunctional. It is a social, economic, and cultural divide as well as a political one. What are the causes of these deep divisions and of the policymaking paralysis that they produce? Wiarda seeks answers by exploring the fragmentation of American political culture, foreign policy differences between the two major political parties, relations among the large foreign policy bureaucracies, and executive-legislative interactions. He also emphasizes the medias role in polarizing the debate, the foreign policy role of Washingtons think tanks, and how social life in the nations capital both reflects and reinforces preexisting divisions. This book will appeal to students and scholars of foreign policy, political science, and international affairs, as well as anyone interested in improving the American government.