Cambridge Scholars Publishing
1956 and all that.
It was the end of the empire for England, at least for a while, and the beginning of television culture. It was the year of Hungary and the Suez. It was also the beginning of the curious era of the late twentieth century that has continued into the twenty-first, and the focus of the 21 papers here from the February 2006 conference sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research of the London Socialist Historians Group. Contributors recall the events of 1956 and their significance, including evidence of working class exploitation, the assertions of Communist Party historians and libertarians about Hungary, Italian communist responses to the Soviet's behavior, memories of the 1956-7 crisis in the British Communist Party, Alasdair Macintyre as a Marxist, the British New Left, post-colonial reality, responses in Britain to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and personal memories of a significant year. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Back to the future of the body.
A November 2005 seminar at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presented case studies representing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the literary and artistic treatment of the human body. From that gathering, 15 papers here look at the body in terms of property and the human genome, the person, gender, regulation and censorship, cyborgs, and the body politic. They are not indexed. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Battleground states; scholarship in contemporary America.
Scholars mostly from Bowling Green State University present the type of multi-cultural perspective on current events and conditions that make rabid right-wingers blather about communist barbarians. Among the topics are comics in response to 9/11, the local citizen in the global village, the power of the phallus in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and remaking the Gulf Coast after Katrina. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
"Black" British aesthetics today.
Arana (English, Howard U.) complies 24 critical and theoretical essays from a conference held at Howard University in April 2006, on current thinking about artistic, literary, and critical works being produced by "black" Britons. Sections include the Sankofa tradition, critical theories and aesthetic movements, embodied aesthetics, and activists in the vanguard of black British aesthetics; each section includes multiple essays, some by many of the novelists, poets, and artists themselves. Contributors attempt to contextualize contemporary "black" British aesthetics in relation to African, African American, and Postcolonial traditions; explore a variety of critical theories, trends, and current aesthetic movements; and assess embodied aesthetics in a range of specific works by "black" British artists in a variety of fields. The book contains a sectionalized bibliography but no index. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights; digital media and gender in a Nordic context.
Although intellectual communities are engaged in plenty of debate about cyberfeminism, and it is supposed to be a global phenomenon, most dialog is in an Anglo-American context. Elm (media and communication studies, Karlstad U.) and Sundén (media technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) explain what is unique about Nordic cyberfeminism, and argue for more inclusion in terms of geographical and cultural factors. They focus on the knowledge and experience of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as they and their contributors describe sexuality and bodies in online porn and "normality," describe identities in Internet communities and conducting digitize performances of gendered pasts, analyze gendered computing and computer use, especially in the young, examine culture appropriation of computers in the early years of the PC, describe surveillance technology in work and according to gender, and attempt to reason away the absence of female hackers. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Da Vinci Code in the academy.
The Da Vinci Code is everywhere. It has spawned numerous documentaries and hopeful imitators. Barry (English and foreign languages, Barry University) and some friends were chatting at a conference about why in the world this book has had such an impact. As a cultural phenomenon, they concluded, it deserved to be studied. The result is this group of essays. They do not address the factual truth of the book or its literary merit. Instead they search for what themes made it resonate with so many people. The quality of the essays is uneven, the most interesting dealing with The Da Vinci Code within the genre of detective novels and as a continuation of the tradition of Grail Quest sagas. A balanced comment on the reaction of Christians to the book is thought-provoking. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Giacomo Meyerbeer; a guide to research.
Letellier (early novel and European culture, Trinity College and the Institute for Continuing Education at Madingly Hall of Cambridge; U. of Salzburg; and the Maryville Institute of Birmingham, UK) and Pellegrini (Italian literature and history, Giulio Riva College) provide researchers a comprehensive list of primary and secondary works from Mayerbeer's correspondence and diaries to materials from the Meyerbeer and Scribe Archives,general studies of his life and work (including his fan club web site) and family materials on his ancestry and life as a German Jew. They include materials on Meyerbeer's works, including his operas in German, Italian and French, his lieder and miscellaneous works such as ballets, materials on his contemporaries, his intellectual background and social/historical contexts. They list his published works, arrangements, special studies, general arrangements of his works, and performance of his operas since 1945 and provide a discography and iconography. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The hydropolitics of Africa; a contemporary challenge.
This collection of 14 papers drawn from a 2006 meeting sponsored by Cornell U. offers a variety of approaches to the dynamics of hydropolitics in Africa, including technical methods, legal and political arrangements, and social policies. Topics include the geopolitics and geo-economics of water, the three-nation struggles on the Nile and a framework for management of the river, risk factors for transmission of diseases, a history of trans-boundary water law, sustainable rural water supply management, preventative diplomacy, water and sanitation for the poor, livestock and food security, post-dam rehabilitation, and small reservoir projects, along with reports from South Africa, the Volta Basin, and the West African riparian states. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Islam in contemporary Africa; on violence, terrorism and development.
Like fresh air, a book about terrorism by someone other than associates at shadowy Washington think tanks, and about development by people who do not work in the industry. African scholars in a range of social sciences and humanities investigate whether there is a link between Islam and the violence and terrorism on the continent, and if so, what the nature of that link is. The 13 papers are from a February 2006 conference at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Land and landscape in francographic literature; remapping uncertain territories.
Editors Compan (French, College of William and Mary) and Pieprzak (Francophone and comparative literature, Williams College) and their co-contributors consider landscape as an imaginary construct, a literary space, rather than a simple description of an external geographic reality. Through this perspective, this collection of essays on the French-writing world explores images of dispossession, resistance, and re-appropriation. Essay topics include an examination of the use of landscape in the reconfiguration of national or regional identity, and the politics of gender and sexuality. Others examine natural and urban landscapes in relation to migration, memory and war as mobile spaces of commemoration and imagination. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Legacies of slavery; comparative perspectives.
Widening the view beyond Africa and the Atlantic trade, mostly historians, but also anthropologists and other scholars reconsider slavery as a global institution that has co-existed with other socio-political, economic, legal, and cultural institutions over the centuries. Their topics include the survival of slavery in Australia in the 20th century, legal and historical perspectives on slavery in Goa, historical representation and recording of child slaves on the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, and whether Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is an abolitionist or sympathist text. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
"A noble unrest"; contemporary essays on the work of George MacDonald.
Known mainly for his fairy tales intended primarily for children, MacDonald became a chief constructor of the concept of the imperialist hero as well as an able commentator and practitioner of the art of relating reality to the world of the imagination. He was also a social commentator and activist who was strongly compelled by his Christian beliefs. This collection of 11 essays mirror his diverse interests and accomplishments, with topics including a review of MacDonald's social issues, his use of fantasy as commentary, his narratives and genre, the differences and similarities between Little Daylight and The Light Princess, his natural history of heaven, his relation to Pullman, his use of voice and gender as in fairy tales, his similarities to Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Lilith, his use of psychoanalytical themes, his purposes in the creative writing classroom, and his current influence on child readers. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Recovering memory; Irish representations of past and present.
Scholars of English literature, most from continental Europe, look at the variety of Irish representations of the past and present in relation to history, autobiography, place, identity, and contemporary writer John Banville. There is no index. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Reflecting transformation in post-socialist rural areas.
Those of a certain age have seen rural socialism come and go, but all rural people who live in post-socialist conditions must cope with significant change over an extended period with unanticipated consequences. Early romantic notions that family farmers would become a rural middle class turned out to be a fantasy; agriculture systems were completely decapitalized and production collapsed. This collection of 13 papers, based on those presented at the November 2005 Aleksanteri Conference in Helsinki, describes changes in the Russian food-related agricultural sector, institutional factors of Russian agricultural development, structures of agricultural land use in central Europe, and the European Union model of agriculture and rural development and its impact on new member states. Six case studies describe community movements in Lithuania, debate in Russia on the northern landscapes, the status of youth on Karelia's rural labor market, and the concept and practice of industrialized villages in post-soviet countries. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Tools versus cores; alternative approaches to stone tool analysis.
To cradle these artifacts in your hand is to hold a spark of connection with a past long dark. But is that artifact a tool, used in work and war, or is a core, an object used to make such a tool? These papers address this most basic of questions of archeology, which most admit should have been answered by now. Contributors include evidence from sites in such topics as the situational behavior of the British Lower Paleolithic, truncated and faceted pieces from Jerf al-Ajla, cores-on-flakes from the Levantine Mousterian, the subtleties found in truncated and faceted pieces, carinated tools and cores and their relation to mobility, lithic barbs from Portugal's Upper Paleolithic, core-tool technologies of the early Holocene and tardiglacial periods, stone assemblages of arid Australia, materials approaches in classification, behavioral causes and archeological effects of lithic recycling, alternative typologies, and the cores, tools and priorities of lithic analysis. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Wilkie Collins; interdisciplinary essays.
Collins is probably best known for his leadership in the Sensation Genre (The Woman in White) and detective fiction (The Moonstone), but he was also a significant force in art, theater, medicine and the law. Drawn from those presented at a 2005 conference held at the U. of Sheffield, these papers comment on both the life and the work through a variety of approaches and disciplines, covering generic indeterminacy (The Fallen Leaves), the celebration of bachelorhood by both Collins and his close friend Dickens, the link between Collins's Sensationalism and his spirituality, the influences of the market in his content and illustration, the faces of his adversary, his political and psychological conflicts, and his approaches to physiognomy and the heroine, moral inheritance, mental physiology and asylum abuse, vivisection's threat to women, the Scots law, international copyright, family transgression, and his continuing influence on theater and film. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Writing on the body?; thinking through gendered embodiment and marked flesh.
They speak earnestly of the work of art they maintain is their body. However, those around them say they committing para-suicide, conducting self-injury or self-mutilation, performing body modification or, in a slightly more generic term, practicing body marking. Inckle (sociology, Trinity College, Dublin) takes on the distinctions and moves us into a world beyond the medical model. She uses a feminist approach, which includes a sharp consideration of the linkage between womanhood and the body, to describe the subjects of her research and the methods they employ, marks the borders of sexual difference through a consideration of gendered embodiment, considers the edges of normative femininity in terms of social control and body marking, moves beyond binaries of agency and mutilation in body marking, and analyzes the relationships among blood, pain and gender. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Zoom in, zoom out; crossing borders in contemporary European cinema.
The darling of American highbrows as well as its own truest love interest, the European film community has learned to consider itself a work in progress, if only to keep the interest of its suitors and itself. One way to keep the fires burning is to comment on the borders of Europe's intellectual scene as well its geopolitics, and this collection of nine essays imagines new borders and the resulting renegotiated identities as well. Films, issues and practitioners evaluated here include the chaotic borders of Klaposch (Pot Luck and The Russian Dolls), borders and bridges in the work of Fatih Akin, Notre Musique and its permeable borders, the ambiguous borders of the Balkan road movie, commercialism and common culture in Spanish co-productions, database cinema and national histories, immigration, Irish cinema revisiting its borders, and the new dominance of German-language cinema. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
