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This comprehensive study of A. S. Byatt's work spans virtually her entire career and offers readings of all of her works of fiction up to and including her Man-Booker-shortlisted novel The Children's Book (2009). The chapters combine an overview of Byatt's œuvre to date with close critical analysis of all her major works. The book also considers Byatt's critical writings and journalism, situating her beyond the immediate context of her fiction. The chapters argue that Byatt is not only important as a storyteller, but also as an eminent critic and public intellectual. Advancing the concept of ‘critical storytelling’ as a hallmark of Byatt's project as a writer, the chapters retrace Byatt's wide-ranging engagement with both literary and critical traditions. This results in positioning Byatt in the wider literary landscape.

Drawing on more than 150 interviews with former IRA, INLA, UVF and UFF prisoners, this book is a major analysis of why Northern Ireland has seen a transition from war to peace. Most accounts of the peace process are ‘top-down’, relying upon the views of political elites. This book is ‘bottom-up’, analysing the voices of those who actually ‘fought the war’. What made them fight, why did they stop and what are the lessons for other conflict zones? Using unrivalled access to members of the armed groups, the book offers a critical appraisal of one-dimensional accounts of the onset of peace, grounded in ‘mutually hurting stalemate’ and ‘ripeness’, which downgrade the political and economic aspects of conflict. Military stalemate had been evident since the early 1970s and offers little in explaining the timing of the peace process. Moreover, republicans and loyalists based their ceasefires upon very different perceptions of transformation or victory. Based on a Leverhulme Trust project, the book offers an analysis based on subtle interplays of military, political, economic and personal changes and experiences. Combined, these allowed combatants to move from violence to peace whilst retaining core ideological beliefs and maintaining long-term constitutional visions. Former prisoners now act as ambassadors for peace in Northern Ireland. Knowledge of why and how combatants switched to peaceful methodologies amid widespread skepticism over prospects for peace is essential to our understanding of the management of global peace processes.

The rich variety of essays in Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture demonstrate that abjection as a concept continues to hold great value as an aid to cultural understanding and a prompt to critical reflection. They communicate the enduring power and relevance of the abject by explaining how it conveys ideas about aesthetic, social and moral conventions with regards to representation and viewing. Theories of the abject are key to understanding the contemporary. This is because abject art and literature are not bound to a particular period or geographical location. They adapt to reflect changing times and contexts. The essays in this volume cumulatively demonstrate that abjection is not singular but plural and multiform. In their chosen themes and artists, the contributors draw on the ideas of Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, and others such as Judith Butler, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, as part of their approach to extending current ways of conceiving abjection. The majority of the essays focus on the visual arts although there are also considerations of how attending to the abject can inform readings of film, theatre and literature, a fact which attests to its interdisciplinary relevance.

The absurdity of bureaucracy offers an ethnographic portrayal of an attempt to make and implement evidence-based policy set in the Danish labour market system in 2009. It departs from the author’s puzzlement that the civil servants she met during her research would maintain a double stance towards their work; they were convinced they were in the process of constantly improving the welfare system while at the same time they found the outcome of their decisions and the system they constructed in the process deeply absurd. The main protagonist of the book is the randomized controlled trial Active – Back Sooner which was a central component of the Danish Government’s Action Plan on Sickness Benefit meant to reduce to the cost of sickness benefit and to secure the ‘active labour force’. It is the continuous planning and disintegration of this effort and the myriad of decisions made in relation to it that is the primary object of empirical portraiture and theoretical discussion. Based on 12 months of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing in the Danish Ministry of Employment and one of the implementing municipalities the book documents how rejected reasons and alleyways of action return to haunt the decision-makers (be they caseworkers, the government administration, or politicians) creating an absurd world of contradictions and dilemmas. The book documents how ‘going wrong’ is built into the very nature of decision-making and suggests that the analysis of absurdity is central to any understanding of how policy develops and how implementation works.

Geoffrey Hill has said that some great poetry ‘recognises that words fail us’. This book explores his struggle over fifty years with the recalcitrance of language. It seeks to show how all Hill's work is marked by the quest for the right pitch of utterance whether it is sorrowing, angry, satiric or erotic. The book shows how Hill's words are never lightly ‘acceptable’ but an ethical act, how he seeks out words he can stand by—words that are ‘getting it right’. It is a comprehensive critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form.

This book illuminates the links between the currently dominant transnational discourse on what constitutes ‘modern’ social policy and contemporary concepts and practices of citizenship. Throughout Europe, we are witnessing a large-scale reshuffling of welfare economies based on the guiding principles of ‘activation’ and an ‘activating welfare state’. Moreover, the European Union has become a major driving force behind this transformation. What are the consequences of this fundamental reorientation for citizenship? How does it relate to patterns of exclusion and inequality inherent in each historical citizenship formation? What exactly is the EU’s role in this context? The book examines how such a powerful conceptual debate intervenes in the conditions of political membership in terms of rights and duties, participation, and access to societal resources. The detailed qualitative study focuses on the European Employment Strategy (EES) – and in particular its gender equality dimension – as a central process where the activation agenda is constructed and equipped with meanings. It traces how this European debate has unfolded, how it has been received and translated into shifting practices of citizenship in three EU member states – Germany, the UK, and Hungary. The book provides instructive insights in how the activation discourse reshapes the conceptual foundations of citizenship. Despite their indirect and intellectual nature, these changes significantly intervene in the contested development and the exclusionary elements of citizenship.

This book considers the ways that representations of Africa have contributed to the changing nature of British national identity. It does so by developing the concept of the African presence: the ways that references to Africa have become part of discussions within British political culture about the place of Britain in the world. Using interviews, photo archives, media coverage, advertisements, and web material, the book focuses on major Africa campaigns: the abolition of slavery, anti-apartheid, drop the debt, and Make Poverty History. Using a hybrid theoretical framework based mainly around framing, the book argues that the representation of Africa has been mainly about imagining virtuous Britishness rather than generating detailed understandings of Africa. The book develops this argument through a historical review of 200 years of Africa campaigning. It also looks more closely at recent and contemporary campaigning, opening up new issues and possibilities for campaigning: the increasing use of consumer identities, electronic media, and aspects of globalization. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in postcolonial politics, relations between Britain and Africa, and development studies.

This monograph takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, Lease argues, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease suggests that a radical democratic pluralism is only tenable through the destabilization of attempts to essentialize Polish national identity, focusing on the development of new theatre practices that interrogate the rise of nationalism, alternative sexual identities and forms of kinship, gender equality, contested histories of antisemitism, and postcolonial encounters. Lease elaborates a new theory of political theatre as part of the public sphere. The main contention is that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.

‘The 10th of June, 1854, promises to be a day scarcely less memorable in the social history of the present age than was the 1st of May, 1851’ boasted the Chronicleon 10 June 1854, comparing the opening of the Crystal Palace, newly installed on the crown of Sydenham Hill, to that of the Great Exhibition. Many contemporary commentators deemed the Sydenham Palace’s contents superior, the building more spectacular and its educative potential much greater than its predecessor. Yet their predictions proved to be a little wide of the mark, and for a long time, studies of the Great Exhibition of 1851 have marginalised the Sydenham Palace. This collection of essays will look beyond the chronological confines of 1851 and address the significance of the Crystal Palace as a cultural site, image and structure well into the twentieth century, even after it was destroyed by fire in 1936.