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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.

Shanghai, long known as mainland China’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, has recently re-emerged as a global capital. Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai offers the first in-depth examination of turn of the twenty-first century Shanghai-based art and design – from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. This book offers a counter-touristic view of one of the world’s fastest developing megacities that penetrates the contradictions and buried layers of specific locales and artifacts of visual culture. Informed by years of in-situ research including interviews with artists and designers, the book looks beyond contemporary art’s global hype to reveal persistent socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai’s explosive transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Analyses of exemplary design projects such as Xintiandi and Shanghai Tang, and artworks by Liu Jianhua, Yang Fudong, Gu Wenda and more reveal how Shanghai’s global aesthetics construct glamorizing artifices that mask historically-rooted cross-cultural conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity versus anti-colonialist nationalism, and the city’s repressed socialist past versus consumerist present. The book focuses on Shanghai-based art and design from the 1990s-2000s, the decades of the city’s most rapid post-socialist development, while also attending to pivotal Republican and Mao Era examples. Challenging the “East-meets-West” clichés that characterize discussions of urban Shanghai and contemporary Chinese art, this book illuminates critical issues facing today’s artists, architects, and designers, and provides an essential field guide for students of art, design, art history, urban studies, and Chinese culture.

This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.

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.

This book recounts the history of the Fulbright Program in Australia, locating academic exchange in the context of US cultural diplomacy and revealing a complex relationship between governments, publicly funded research and the integrity of academic independence. The study is the first in-depth analysis of the Fulbright exchange program in a single country. Drawing on previously unexplored archives and a new oral history, the authors investigate the educational, political and diplomatic challenges experienced by Australian and American scholars who won awards and those who managed the complex bi-national program. The book begins with the scheme’s origins, moves through its Australian establishment during the early Cold War, Vietnam War dilemmas, civil rights and gender parity struggles and the impacts of mid-to-late 20^th century belt-tightening. How the program’s goal of ‘mutual understanding’ was understood and enacted across six decades lies at the heart of the book, which weaves institutional and individual experiences together with broader geopolitical issues. Bringing a complex and nuanced analysis to the Australia-US relationship, the authors offer fresh insights into the global influence of the Fulbright Program. It is a compelling account of academic exchange as cultural diplomacy. It offers a critical appraisal of Fulbright achievements and limitations in avoiding political influence, integrating gender and racial diversity, absorbing conflict and dissent, and responding to economic fluctuations and social change

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 analyses how three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – worked with the visual dimensions of language in the 1960s and 1970s. These artists used text and images of writing to challenge female stereotypes, addressing viewers and asking them to participate in the project of imagining women beyond familiar words and images of subordination. The book explores this dimension of their work through the concept of ‘the other woman,’ a utopian wish to reach women and correspond with them across similarities and differences. To make the artwork’s aspirations more concrete, it places the artists in correspondence with three writers – Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey – who also addressed the limited range of images through which women are allowed to become visible.

Through contextual and textual analyses, Adjusting the contrast: British television and constructs of race explores a range of texts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of television’s relationship with ‘race’. The collection brings together media scholars from the UK and US, who focus on a range of issues, from television scheduling to historical questions of representation. The collection also seeks to examine how television represents Britishness through whiteness, and continued constructs of racialised normativity. Included are analyses of programmes such as Doctor Who, Shoot the Messenger, Desi DNA andTop Boy, which explore the broadcast policies and cultural production in the 'new age' of television. Other chapters examine the reframing of the 1950s on contemporary television though the example of Call the Midwife; the continuing myth of a multicultural England on Luther, and how sitcoms such as Till Death Us Do Part and Mind Your Language framed racial tensions through comedy. Through a critical analysis of literature and new empirical research, cultures of production are deconstructed, and public service remits examined.

What does China’s rise mean for transnational civil society? What happens when global activist networks engage a powerful and norm-resistant new hegemon? This book combines detailed ethnographic research with cross-case comparisons to identify key factors underpinning variation in the results and processes of advocacy on a range of issues affecting both China and the world, including global warming, intellectual property rights, HIV/AIDS treatment, the use of capital punishment, suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement, and Tibetan independence. Built on an innovative blend of comparative and international theory, it advances a theory of “advocacy drift”—a process whereby the objectives and principled beliefs of activists are transformed through interaction with the Chinese state. The book is a timely reassessment of transnational civil society in the era of an ascendant China, and is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of civil society organizations.

Aesthetics of contingency provides an important reconsideration of seventeenth-century literature in light of new understandings of the English past. Emphasising the contingency of the political in revolutionary England and its extended aftermath, Matthew Augustine challenges prevailing literary histories plotted according to structural conflicts and teleological narrative. In their place, he offers an innovative account of imaginative and polemical writing, in an effort to view later seventeenth-century literature on its own terms: without certainty about the future, or indeed the recent past. In hewing to this premise, the familiar outline of the period – with red lines drawn at 1642, 1660, or 1688 – becomes suggestively blurred. For all of Milton’s prophetic gestures, for all of Dryden’s presumption to speak for, to epitomise his Age, writing from the later decades of the seventeenth century remained supremely responsive to uncertainty, to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. A study of major writings from the Personal Rule to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, this book also re-examines the material conditions of literature in this age. By carefully deciphering the multi-layered forces at work in acts of writing and reception, and with due consideration for the forms in which texts were cast, this book explores the complex nature of making meaning in and making meaning out of later Stuart England.

This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.

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 book explores the evolving African security paradigm in light of the multitude of diverse threats facing the continent and the international community today and in the decades ahead. It challenges current thinking and traditional security constructs as woefully inadequate to meet the real security concerns and needs of African governments in a globalized world. The continent has becoming increasingly integrated into an international security architecture, whereby Africans are just as vulnerable to threats emanating from outside the continent as they are from home-grown ones. Thus, Africa and what happens there, matters more than ever. Through an in-depth examination and analysis of the continent’s most pressing traditional and non-traditional security challenges—from failing states and identity and resource conflict to terrorism, health, and the environment—it provides a solid intellectual foundation, as well as practical examples of the complexities of the modern African security environment. Not only does it assess current progress at the local, regional, and international level in meeting these challenges, it also explores new strategies and tools for more effectively engaging Africans and the global community through the human security approach.

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.

This study investigates internationalism through the prism of a small European country. It explores an age in which many groups and communities – from socialists to scientists – organised themselves across national borders. Belgium was a major hub for transnational movements. By taking this small and yet significant European country as a focal point, the book critically examines major historical issues, including nationalism, colonial expansion, political activism and international relations. A main aim is to reveal the multifarious and sometimes contradictory nature of internationalism. The Belgian case shows how within one particular country, different forms of internationalism sometimes clashed and sometimes converged. The book is organised around political movements and intellectual currents that had a strong presence in Belgium. Each of the main chapters is dedicated to a key theme in European history: nationhood, empire, the relationship between church and state, political and social equality, peace, and universalism. The timeframe ranges from the fin de siècle to the interwar years. It thus covers the rise of international associations before the First World War, the impact of the conflagration of 1914, and the emergence of new actors such as the League of Nations. With its discussion of campaigns and activities that ranged beyond the nation-state, this study is instructive for anyone interested in transnational approaches to history.