Books published by Cambria Press

This is a collection of seven contemporary American plays (six of them by gay playwrights) that depict the lives of gay men in the years before gay liberation and in our own time. All of these plays have been successfully produced by major American theaters and all have received critical acclaim. The first three works in the collection-Robert O' Hara's Antebellum, Joseph and David Zellnik's Yank!, and Jon Marans's The Temperamentals-demonstrate gay playwrights' impulse to share the history of oppression and liberation gay men have faced. The remaining four plays-Guillermo Reyes's Deporting the Divas, Stephen Karam's Sons of the Prophet, Neal Bell's Spatter Pattern and Jose Rivera's Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words-offer depictions of the ways in which gay men have and have not assimilated in the twenty-first century. These plays also deal with larger sociopolitical issues: racism, war, immigration, unemployment and same-sex marriage. They also dramatize experiences common to everyone: illness, grief, guilt, and familial and romantic love. As these seven plays dramatize a variety of personal and social issues, they also demonstrate a variety of dramatic styles, from realism to flamboyant gender-bending to musical theater. They offer a good introduction to the stylistic richness and variety of contemporary American theater. In addition to a general introduction, each play is preceded by a critical introduction. In most cases, the playwrights have also provided statements about their work. Gay Drama Now offers a sampling of the best of contemporary drama about the gay experience in America. Written by some of the most celebrated playwrights working today, from veteran playwrights like Jose Rivera and Neal Bell to younger writers like Stephen Karam and Robert O'Hara. It represents the work of African-American, Latino and white playwrights. This volume should appeal to readers interested in American drama, particularly drama of this century. It will also appeal to students of gay and lesbian studies.

While other studies have examined the history of cable television regulation, none has fully explained why the FCC struggled to develop regulations during its formative years. In this study, Michael Zarkin helps fill this gap by providing such an explanation through an application of organizational learning theory. Zarkin argues that in order for the FCC to formulate regulations for a brand-new communications medium, it first needed develop and effectively utilize the capacity to gather and analyze policy-relevant knowledge. By the 1970s, conditions were ripe for this to happen, and the FCC was able to more effectively revise its cable television policies. This book elaborates and applies an organizational learning framework that contributes to our understanding of how regulatory agencies operate. By employing a broad range of published and unpublished primary sources, the book also succeeds in providing a more detailed and penetrating study of cable television than previous endeavors. Rather than simply summarizing and critiquing policy decisions, the book paints a picture of the people, ideas, and politics that shaped cable television regulation during these formative years. The FCC and the Politics of Cable TV Regulation, 1952-1980 will be of interest to scholars who study regulatory agencies, the policy process, and communications law and policy.

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings from this conference. The BRC also publishes several journals to support pioneering research in business and education. In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. The BRC Board of Directors consists of one representative from each college or school that hosts the annual conference. For more information on the BRC, please visit its website at http://www.businessresearchconsortium.org

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings from this conference. The BRC also publishes five journals (including The BRC Journal of Advances in Education) to support pioneering research in business and education. In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. The BRC Board of Directors consists of one representative from each college or school that hosts the annual conference. For more information on the BRC, please visit its Web site at http://www.businessresearchconsortium.org (Online) ISSN 2152-873X (Print) ISSN 2152-8721

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings from this conference. The BRC also publishes five journals (including The BRC Journal of Advances in Education) to support pioneering research in business and education. In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. The BRC Board of Directors consists of one representative from each college or school that hosts the annual conference. For more information on the BRC, please visit its Web site at http: //www.businessresearchconsortium.org (Online) ISSN 2152-8780 (Print) ISSN 2152-875

As the twentieth century dawned, artists and writers increasingly felt that realistic themes and realistic techniques were inadequate to address the human condition. Convinced that there was more to reality than physical appearance, they turned their gaze inward and adopted a number of unconventional approaches. Paradoxically, considering that they strove to give a more faithful impression of reality, their experiments were overwhelmingly anti-realistic. Some artists and writers, such as the cubist and the futurist poets, subverted traditional rhetorical devices. Others, like the cubist and the metaphysical artists, invented new spatio-temporal constructions. Some individuals, including the cubists and futurists, borrowed freely from other disciplines. Others, especially the dadaists and the surrealists, cultivated nonsense and illogicality. Focusing on basic principles and drawing on their personal experience, poets and painters writers began to explore subjective reality, which proved to be far more interesting than its objective counterpart. As they soon discovered, the quest for a new reality required the creation of a new language that could express that reality. Each goal was inextricably bound up with the other in a relationship that was fundamentally reciprocal. Artists and writers searched for a language that would express the complexity of the modern world while revolutionizing traditional aesthetics. Visual imagination demanded linguistic innovation and vice versa. Language and vision were entwined in a double helix like a strand of DNA. Rather than opposite sides of the same aesthetic coin, they represented complementary ways of processing experience. So important were vision and expression to the vanguard enterprise that this double quest soon became obligatory--an "avant-garde imperative." Eager to attract attention, artists and writers struggled to be on the cutting edge. Keen to impress publishers, dealers, and colleagues, they dressed original ideas in striking new clothes. The insights, impressions, and ideas generated by contemporary technological developments demanded to be expressed in a brand new language. As poets and painters strove to create such a language, however, they discovered that this activity also provided them with new insights, impressions, and ideas. By expanding the ability of language to express the tremendous complexity of modern life, they hoped to overcome this complexity by inventing new ways of thinking about the world and of interacting with it. To be sure, the search for an alternate means of expression assumed many different guises over the years. Each of the individuals examined in these pages struggled long and hard to discover a suitable vehicle for his or her voice. Each searched for a radical new art form that, in addition to expressing his or her personal vision, would transform the way we view things. Besides poets and painters, to be sure, the avant-garde included numerous people associated with other disciplines. Dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, film makers, theater directors, scenographers, art dealers, playwrights, actors, critics, and publishers all contributed to the heady mix. While freely acknowledging their important contributions, the present study concentrates on art and literature, which, as the volume demonstrates, evolved along parallel lines. Although writers and artists mostly worked in radically different media, which partially determined what they could accomplish, they shared the same goals. In their quest for new domains to explore, they developed anti-realistic strategies that would revolutionize modern aesthetics. The Avant-Garde Imperative is an important volume for anyone interested in modern aesthetics. It will appeal not only to scholars of twentieth-century literature but also to those working in the field of modern art.

In their research in the field of international education, the editors found that the university admission function of terminating school assessment has largely eclipsed the school-leaving-certification aspect in systems where the two go together. But it is not only students from education systems which have curriculum-based external examinations at the culmination of schooling who aspire to enter university. Once the privilege of the well-heeled classes, university education has become to today's middle-class youngster what a high school certificate was to preceding generations at the same stage of life. Be it the demands of the 'knowledge society' or merely credential inflation, a great many young people now regard tertiary education as the means by which to realise their ambitions. Schooling has become a stepping-stone to post-school education and training (e.g., university). This edited volume accordingly focuses on the transition from school to university. In broad terms, there are two kinds of university admission systems: first, those in which upper secondary school qualifications explicitly confer the right to enrol at university, and second, those in which they do not. Some systems exhibit an additional layer of testing between those leading to school certification and the attainment of university entrance status. Securing the general right to enter university may only be a first step. Individual universities may impose their own entrance requirements, particularly in the case of competitive-entry programmes. These may involve selection procedures not associated with examinations or tests. In some systems, a student may be able to enrol in selective faculties directly upon making the transition from school; in others, there may be a significant lapse of time separating general university admission and enrolment in a desired field via 'pre-' courses or even first degrees in other fields. This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and practitioners in the fields of strategic educational planning and high-stakes assessment and examinations, particularly those with a comparative focus.

Over the past forty years, from Americana to Point Omega, Don DeLillo has written some of America's most important novels. Although DeLillo scholarship has dealt extensively with critical theory, through themes such as systems, technology, consumerism, and terrorism, none has addressed the relation between his texts and the concept of the outside. This study argues for a new model of reading landscape in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American novel. The author takes as exemplary the novels of Don DeLillo-and in particular the main focus of this study, The Body Artist-which have constructed landscapes that exceed the limits of geography, time, and perception. In relation to a series of literary and philosophical texts, the author reads the force driving this exceedance as the Outside, and he seeks to reconceptualize "landscape of estrangement" primarily as a relation to the Outside that animates and confuses the difference between inside and outside. Thus, the project takes as a general guide the following question: What does it mean to read the emergence of a landscape that is of the Outside? The answer to this question will help contextualize this study, bringing into relief a set of texts not through the categories of "modern," "postmodern," or "romantic," but rather their relation to the Outside. Thinking of the book as an "assemblage with the outside" also means--within the particular context of this study--that the author's concept "landscape of estrangement" is not necessarily restricted to the site of literature and can emerge via visual or auditory landscapes. To extend this thought even further, a notion this study suggests, but one that would require a whole other project, is that America itself can be read as a landscape of estrangement. If one were inclined to read novels as representations of America, then one could argue that the landscapes found in those novels would be representations of America's landscapes of estrangement. For example, the landscapes found in DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis may refer simultaneously to New York City and America at large. This, however, is not what the author of this book has in mind. This study argues that to think of America as a landscape of estrangement would mean taking the novels produced within America as elements-not representations-of that landscape, and as such they would be available among other aspects, such as film, music, politics, photography, and architecture. Sites through which DeLillo's novels have been consistently read-the city, garbage, technology, film, terrorism-all contribute to the emergence of a landscape of estrangement within America. Perhaps literature and film-or what the author will call "fabulation"-provide the most profitable sites for reading this emergence given their potential for narrative, which as we shall see is particularly suffused with such landscapes. Taking its general philosophical, strategic, and methodological inspiration from the works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Blanchot, this study is an intervention into the growing field of DeLillo studies which reads landscapes that problematize the limits of geography, time, and perception. After developing the concept of landscape of estrangement in contrast to more traditional understandings of literary landscapes, the volume examines its production via the outsider, hospitality, mourning, and the uncanny-sites whose force comes from the outside. This book will be a welcome addition to collections in American literature, critical theory, and philosophy.

Hal Hartley was one of the leading lights of the independent American cinema boom of the late 1980s and 1990s. Although his work never achieved the kind of crossover commercial success that other indie directors experienced, his work exhibits one of the most distinctive voices in recent American cinema. Combining wry, aphoristic dialogue with stylized performances and a muted, minimalist palette, Hartley's films challenge cinematic conventions, especially in performance, and resist easy empathetic identification. His later work has carved out an even more specific niche, and, since 1999, his work has often explored extreme digital stylization. Winner of the best screenplay award at the Cannes film festival in 1998 for Henry Fool, Hartley is best known for his films in the early-mid 1990s, including The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992), and Amateur (1994). His subsequent work has become more challenging, often examining the cultural role of the artist and the role of the work of art in the information age, as in Flirt (1995) and Henry Fool. Hartley has also experimented with digital video in his more recent work, including The Book of Life (1999), The Girl from Monday (2005), and Fay Grim (2006). Furthermore, he is well known as a prolific short filmmaker, including Surviving Desire (1991), Ambition (1991), Theory of Achievement (1991), The New Math(s) (1999) and two collections of short works released under his Possible Films label (2006 & 2010). The short films are experimental, formally challenging, and highly self-reflexive, capturing Hartley's approach in its purest form. With this first critical study of Hal Hartley's work, Steven Rawle examines the physical and cultural performance practices at play in Hartley's work. Focusing on the critical emphasis on performance and the performer in Hartley's work, the book charts the development of this central facet of his films, from The Unbelievable Truth to the digital features. Identifying the main critical approaches to performance that illuminate this trend in his work, Rawle delves into the reasons why Hartley's work has never gained popular recognition and explores why critical reactions to his films have never fully grasped the complete significance of performance. Part of this reason, Rawle argues, is the lack of critical tools by which to explore film performance. This book contributes to a growing body of work on film performance, taking this formerly critically neglected figure as its central case study. This book will be an important book for fans of Hartley's work as well as scholars of independent American cinema and of film performance.

"This is the most comprehensive and insightful study on this topic in any language and the first written in English. In addition to its scholarly value, Professor Pan's book opens a window to a picturesque poetic world for Western readers who are interested in Chinese poetry and painting." - Zu-yan Chen, Professor of Chinese Literature, Binghamton University "In this book, Professor Pan provides a rare treat for the English-language reader with valuable information regarding this hitherto under-represented subject. He lucidly traces the development of this border-crossing genre from its prototype works to its maturity in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and the subsequent expansion in late imperial China. He illustrates the tihuashi poetics of the master bard Du Fu (712-770) and that of the virtuoso poet-artist-philosopher Su Shi (1037-1101). Most remarkable of his contribution is the generous number of faithfully translated poems, all with great clarity and elegance. This book will help the reader better understand the relationship between Chinese painting, calligraphy and poetry, the interartistic, intertextual, and interdisciplinary characteristics of tihuashi, the cultural milieu of its creation, and its intellectual significance to the Chinese literati community." - Madeline Chu, Professor of Chinese Language & Literature, Kalamazoo College "A special value I find in this book lies in its bilingual texts of Chinese tihuashi poems, which will not only benefit scholars and students of classical Chinese poetry but also exemplify Professor Pan's insights on classical Chinese poetic language and the art of translating this language into contemporary English." - John S. Rohsenow, Professor Emeritus, The University of Illinois at Chicago

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of WesternNew York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts anannual conference and publishes the proceedings fromthis conference. The BRC also publishes fi ve journalsto support pioneering research in business and education.In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers seriesto encourage collaboration in research across membercolleges and schools of business. The BRC Board ofDirectors consists of one representative from eachcollege or school that hosts the annual conference. Formore information on the BRC, please visit its Web siteat http: //www.businessresearchconsortium.org

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings from this conference. The BRC also publishes five journals (including The BRC Journal of Advances in Education) to support pioneering research in business and education. In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. The BRC Board of Directors consists of one representative from each college or school that hosts the annual conference. For more information on the BRC, please visit its Web site at http: //www.businessresearchconsortium.org (Online) ISSN 2152-8780 (Print) ISSN 2152-875

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings from this conference. The BRC also publishes five journals (including The BRC Journal of Advances in Education) to support pioneering research in business and education. In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. The BRC Board of Directors consists of one representative from each college or school that hosts the annual conference. For more information on the BRC, please visit its Web site at http: //www.businessresearchconsortium.org (Online) ISSN 2152-8667 (Print) ISSN 2152-861

The Business Research Consortium (BRC) of Western New York was founded in 2006. The BRC hosts an annual conference and publishes the proceedings from this conference. The BRC also publishes five journals (including The BRC Journal of Advances in Education) to support pioneering research in business and education. In addition, the BRC hosts a working papers series to encourage collaboration in research across member colleges and schools of business. The BRC Board of Directors consists of one representative from each college or school that hosts the annual conference. For more information on the BRC, please visit its Web site at http: //www.businessresearchconsortium.org (Online) ISSN 2152-8829 (Print) ISSN 2152-881

This book offers an account of the social production of (ill) health. The author theorizes how health and ill-health can be produced via the interaction of individual-level discourses of contingent work and broader socio-political contexts. One of the most important changes affecting work and workers in (non)industrialized countries over the last two decades is the spread of contingent forms of work. Contingent employment is a mode of work organization characterized by transitory employment relationships, such as short- or fixed-term contracts, part-time, casual/on-call, self-employment, seasonal, and temporary help agency work. It emerged as a significant form of employment in the context of the global capitalism-- globalization of trade, investment, production, intensified economic competition, and associated corporate responses such as organizational restructuring, downsizing, and outsourcing. In Canada, contingent work accounts for 13% of total employment, up from 9.7% in 1998. In the United States, upwards of 30% of workers are engaged in some form of contingent work. Similar labor market shifts are apparent in European countries. The increasing prevalence of contingent work has prompted concerns about its health implications for people who do these types of work. Nonetheless, the relationship between contingent work and health is poorly understood because existing research findings are inconsistent or inconclusive. The research reported in this book casts light on these discrepant health-related findings by examining contingent work from the perspective of workers, through an exploration of how they experience and understand this form of work and how these experiences and understandings might affect health. The study revealed a strong discursive aspect to workers' experience, and these discourses are the focus of this book. A theoretical premise of this study is that experience is inseparable from discourse. In other words, the language in which workers articulate their experience both constitutes and reflects that experience--how they experience their work is embodied in their discursive practices for talking about it. Thus, their experience can be understood, at least in part, through an analysis of the discourses of which they avail themselves. Informed by a constructionist theoretical perspective, the book describes and discusses the different kinds of discourses workers use to portray their experience of contingent work and how these discourses are related to evaluations of contingent work as inferior or stigmatized work and to broader socio-political and economic contexts. Another assumption of this study is that discourses are inseparable from the broader socio-political contexts in which they are constructed; indeed they exist in a recursive relationship with these social contexts. The findings reveal how individual-level discourses about contingent work shape, and are shaped by, neoliberal rationalities. That is, how individuals talk about and experience their work is formed in important ways by broader societal conceptions of work and citizenship. In turn, their individual discourses constitute and reinforce these existing societal notions. With arguments premised on the theoretical assumption that discourse is a form of social action, the book argues that the discourses of contingent work constitute a form of management of stigmatised work and that they cast workers as different kinds of citizens. It concludes with a discussion of the health implications of these neoliberal-inspired discourses. This book will be an important addition to collections in public health and public policy.

In trying to detect and analyze this female gaze on the male empire, this volume delves into memsahibs' literature. After all, besides their service to the empire, women's literature in/about the Empire, though often neglected, is considerably large. In India's case, women writers like Flora Annie Steel, Maud Diver, and Bithia Mary Croker narrate fictional tales colored by their firsthand experience of Indian life and life in India. They use their creative imagination to present India as they see and also as they want to see India. The female gaze has thus for a long time contributed to and shaped imperial discourse and knowledge of the East. Through their letters, diaries, memoirs, stories, novels, poems, paintings, and travel writings, women have often provided invaluable information about the empire and added to the fascination of the West with the specters and picturesqueness of the East. Their writings recurrently serve as the tool of their propaganda, the vehicle of their message, the inscription of their gaze and the blueprint of their politics of representation. This book argues that although the memsahib's female gaze has been spoken of, it has not been adequately emphasized and examined. In comparison, white female sexuality, the figure of Raj Woman, and the idea of "recasting women" or portrayal of the memsahib have received far more attention. Particularly, memsahibs' writings have been widely anthologized but these have not critically evaluated to a sufficient extent. Aiming at filling that gap by uncovering the world of British India as seen and shown by white women in colonial as well as postcolonial literatures, this compilation brings together scholarly essays on memsahibs' literature and Raj writings, including men's writings about memsahibs, spanning from before India's independence (like works of Alice Perrin and Rudyard Kipling) to the post-independence period (like works of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Ruskin Bond). This volume looks at the significant multidimensional defiant "female gaze"--be it of the authors or of the characters in their works, regardless of whether their writings were critical or supportive of the empire. Subverting the structure of male looking/female to be looked at, this collection of essays explores the "female gaze" on the Empire (i.e., female looking/ male to be looked at). This book reiterates that the "female" element in the process cannot and should not be disregarded. Therefore, taking into consideration (real or fictional) memsahibs, this volume reminds us of the presence and role of white women in British India and the consequent intricate matrix of gender, class, race, and sexuality issues. In addition to offering critical analysis and in-depth study of memsahibs' writings, this book digresses from the well-trodden track of how memsahibs are portrayed to the near-virgin arena of how they are shown to see the Raj world. This volume asserts that the female gaze that looks upon the male empire is not merely a space constructed for the female but one fashioned by women themselves. This is an important book for South Asian literary studies, women's studies, as well as colonial and postcolonial studies on British India.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Senate majority leadership--it covers the office and its occupants from the first incumbent, John W Kern in 1913, through the term of William H. Frist in 2006. Data are both qualitative and quantitative. They include materials from archives of several majority leaders-Lyndon Johnson, Mike Mansfield, Howard Baker, and George Mitchell. Also available are statistics of roll call votes, which reveal continuing patterns of legislative behavior, e.g., leaders seem to be drawn from among senators who are "middle-men" in political ideology but who drift toward more extreme positions depending on the size of their partisan majority. This partisanship, however, is tempered by commitments to institutional loyalty. Research further highlights the continuity of majority leadership in the Senate by noting a path dependent relationship between majority leaders and presidents, who depend on leaders to shepherd their proposals. In their relationship to their states, leaders also are found to be attentive to demands for distributive benefits. All told, these multiple constituencies-state, party, Senate, and president-constrain majority leadership in the Senate. The task of the leader is to balance constraints. In this unprecedented work, Andrea Hatcher examines Senate majority leadership in terms of the constituencies, both electoral and functional, of the Senate majority leader. These constituencies-state, party, Senate, and president-are found to represent constraints on the Senate majority leader as their demands often compete, and the ways in which Senate majority leaders balance them form the contours of Senate majority leadership. It might seem obvious for there to be much variance as Senate majority leaders and their constituents change over time, and, to be sure, differences in leadership styles emerge. However, what is more striking is not the change but the continuity that guides the institutional development of Senate majority leadership. The path dependence is one of constrained Senate majority leadership, not for the conventional wisdom that the majority leader operates in a supermajoritarian institution, but for the broader reason that these plethora of intra-, inter-, and extra-institutional forces pull at the leader. The scope of inquiry is comprehensive, beginning with an identification of trends in the selection of senators to become majority leader. It, then, traces the voting behavior of Senate majority leaders, analyzing by way of statistical findings how the leader represents his party constituency by roll call voting. One key, but often overlooked, variable that this study examines is size of a leader's majority.

Different cultures and the specific culture manifested within them are intrinsically linked to addiction in a complex fashion which has a long history. For important thinkers, such as Nietzsche, addiction actually embodies human culture, rendering addiction and culture inseparable. This is clearly seen within the Western world's addiction to the consumption of material goods and the damage that results. Utopia has often become dystopia. Not only is an understanding of addiction key to understanding culture but to an understanding of the very act thinking itself and the way of being in the world. Addiction raises key philosophical questions, such as: do people really have a choice in their behavior, and what governs them; is it free will or predetermination? Is it biology or environment is it the external world or the internal that drives addiction, or a complex combination of both? In a contemporary context the media frenzy around celebrity addiction continually fuels public debate in this area, and this book deepens the understanding of addiction within this contentious context. This book addresses a key concern over how addiction became the norm, and it seeks to understand its dominance comprehensively. How did it come to pass that not being an addict was a transgressive act and way of being? While there has been a great deal of debate about addiction utilizing the discourse of individual and often competing disciplines such as biology and psychology, little attention has been paid to the cultural aspects of addiction. The innovative approach taken by this book is to offer insights into this complex area through a contemporary methodology that covers diverse interrelated areas. Drawing on different disciplines, offering deeper insights, from the analysis of music lyrics to empirical social science and anthropological work in AA groups in Mexico and the portrayal of the "addiction' to therapy in film and television, amongst other areas, this book addresses the need for a more comprehensive approach. Academic analysis is also given to the discourse on celebrity culture and addiction. A contemporary fusion of the humanities and the social sciences is the best way forward to tackle this subject and move the debate on. The focus of this study is an innovative interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to addiction, from the social sciences to the humanities, including cultural studies, film and media studies, and literary studies. Areas that have been overlooked, such as lost women's writings, are examined, in addition to comics, popular film and television, and the work of AA groups. This edited collection is the first study to provide such a comprehensive analysis of the cultures of addiction. Traversing cultures across the globe, including Asia, Central America, as well as Europe and America, this book opens up the debate in addiction studies and cultural studies. The important insights the book delivers helps to answer questions such as: In what way can Deleuze further the understanding of addiction through the analysis of rock lyrics? How does anthropology improve the understanding of AA groups? How can cultural studies deepen knowledge on the "addiction" to therapy? These are just some of the vast array of areas this book covers. Other areas include the condemnation of "addiction" to comic reading through an historical examination, violence in popular culture, and lost women's writing on addiction. No other book has such depth and contemporary breadth. Cultures of Addiction is an important book for those taking cultural studies courses across a range of interrelated disciplines, including English and literary studies, history, American studies, and film and media studies. This will be invaluable to library collections in these fields and beyond in the social sciences, and specifically in addiction studies and psychology.

This study seeks to reunite American drama with more of the mainstream of American literature using contemporary literary theories of feminism, Derrida, Lacan, as well as the nature of language. It also focuses on the theatrical ways that plays work through performance and staging. This reveals how contemporary playwrights see themselves not as authors, but as parts of a team of designers, actors, and directors. Stage directions are largely omitted, but knowledge of original productions--both as seen live and recorded on tapes archived at Lincoln Center--reveal aspects of fragmentation of scenery, minimalist acting, emphasis on the "unsayable", which makes these plays far more postmodern than they might seem merely as read. More importantly, the final chapter reveals how these techniques culminate in 1990s play' ability to extend beyond the real in a myriad of ways, all united by a new, postmodern view of the divine as interpenetrating reality. In one sense, this seems to be juggling quite a few different items-poststructural theory, modernist realists, as well postmodern deconstructive realists and theatrical practice. All fit together neatly, however, in each chapter through a focus on performance, staging is seen as central to the dramatic experience, with reviews, photographs, and archival videotapes of productions used to verify and explore the plays' meanings. The plays, taken as a whole, reflect the key issues of American society from reactions to the Vietnam War, through issues of sexual preference, race, and feminism and its backlash, through issues of wealth and poverty to arrive at a new vision of a forgiving divine which accepts without judgment all the issues of diversity. American Drama and the Postmodern is an important book for collections in American literature, drama and theatre, as well as for literary theory.

There is extensive research found both in books and articles on the various topics of Afro Latinism/Afro Hispanism that is directed mainly at the non-native. Nonetheless, one still notices either cultural confusion or political reluctance to accept the identity of Blackness that the Latin American native lives with--for himself or for others- -on a daily basis. For the average Cuban, Venezuelan, Peruvian, and so forth, along with their Latin counterparts, Blackness in racial terms surfaces as a matter of degrees of African-relatedness that is then counterbalanced by degrees of European and/or Amerindian genomic components. It is only in non-native cultures that one encounters such disparate comparisons as "statistics for Hispanics versus statistics for Blacks." But is it not possible to find persons that are ethnoracially Black included in the demographics for Hispanics? The overarching aim of this book, then, is to determine whether it is possible to perceive a constituency within the Latin American whole who is also an integral part of the African Diaspora. It examines the concept of African-relatedness within the totality of the Latin American sphere--not just in one isolated country or region--through a careful process of literary analysis. By exploring the works of Latin American novelists, poets, and lyricists, this study shows how they creatively expose their most intimate feelings on ethnic Blackness through a semiotic reliance on the inner voice. At the same time, the reader becomes a witness to the writers' associations with a sense of Africanness as it artistically affects them and their communities in their formulations of self-identity. Unique to this volume is the scholarly presentation of the presence of a group of people in Ghana, West Africa, who owe their raisond'être as a clan to their ancestral origins in Brazil. Having been accepted and received by an endemic tribe of what was called the Gold Coast at an historical moment in the nineteenth century, a community of escaped slaves and deported ex-slaves from Brazilian bondage regrouped as an ethnic whole. The reality of their existence gives new meaning to the term African Diaspora. To this day, their descendants identify themselves as displaced Latin Americans in Africa. Undoubtedly, both this surprising feature of Latin Americans returning to the African continent and the book as a whole will stimulate further discussion on the issue of who is Black and who is Hispanic as well as generate continued, in-depth research on the relationship between two continents and their shared genotypology. The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora is an important acquisition for collections in Latin American studies, literary criticism, Hispanic studies, ethnic studies, cultural anthropology, and the African diaspora.

The essays collected in this Reader represent some of Mahadevi Varma's most famous writings on the "woman question" in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems. The editor has included essays that reflect not only Mahadevi's ideas about the place of women in the home and the world during the nationalist period in India, but also articles that reveal her dreams and hopes for the future (and the past) of the Hindi-Urdu language. While many of these essays were written during the 1920s and 1930s when Mahadevi served as editor for the literary journal Chand, some of them appear to have been written much later, after India gained independence. The translators have tried to remain faithful to the Hindi, often keeping the syntax of the Hindi original.

Written by renowned sinologist Bonnie S. McDougall, this is the first full-length, detailed, and theorized treatment in any language of Chinese-English literary translation transactions and will stand as the major primary source of future studies. It opens up new corners of modern Chinese culture and society that sinologists have hitherto overlooked. This book begins by setting out these two contrasting models of translation that co-existed in China during the 1980s: the authoritarian model and the reciprocal, or gift-exchange, model. The following chapters set down the actual circumstances of each model as it operated in its own zone, in the first such testimony from an active observer and participant in both. Two final chapters examine the new theoretical perspectives that arise from the contrast and the overlap between the two zones. A constant challenge in humanistic studies is the problem of exceptionalism versus universalism. In Chinese studies, for instance, books by academic experts often address only a closed, small world of other experts drawing on decades of language and cultural studies. This book is primarily intended for translation studies researchers whose aim is to extend their academic horizons beyond their customary languages and cultures without wishing to devote the rest of their lives to Chinese studies.

"This is the best study of a single Chinese poet I have seen in decades. And the best study of Du Fu known to me. David Schneider goes beyond previous works in revealing what might be called the source of Du Fu's gravitas. What is especially refreshing is that the author, while making use of well-selected modern authorities to cast light on Du Fu's poetry, is equally careful never to embrace their "theories" fully, with the ancillary danger of anachronism which taints so much contemporary "humanities" scholarship. The combination of empathy and critical thinking here is exemplary. The author writes eloquently and clearly, and is a very fine translator indeed, and gives us some of the very finest translations of Du Fu we now possess." - Jonathan Chaves, George Washington University

Despite the wealth of information describing social movement activity, studies that focus attention on the intricacies of community relationships within the mobilization process are few. Attention is given in this context to the community struggle to determine parameters of health and safety in the face of environmental contamination. This focused effort draws on detailed analysis of community relationships with the media, science, government and community members themselves. Over the course of five years, the author, sociologist Erin Robinson, has uncovered the ways in which community members come to understand the environmental problems they face. This book offers an explanation for how communities faced with environmental contamination can begin to make sense of that reality. The story of this community serves as a case study for how complex efforts to understand a problem facing one's community can be. In this study, the complications of social movement mobilization are analyzed from a perspective that considers the nuances of the mobilization process. In doing so, this study offers a perspective to community mobilization that reflects on processes of negotiation, conflict, acceptance, and rejection of information frames that serve to explain a community environmental problem. This book both demonstrates the ways in which individuals engage in the mobilization process and serves to explain how mobilization occurs. Through a detailed qualitative analysis of in depth interviews, document analysis, and field research, Robinson traces the beginning of a community social movement throughout the life of the movement effort. Whereas many studies of mobilization are historical, this study offers a close analysis of mobilization efforts as they were occurring. The story of how changes in mobilization occur is demonstrated by how individuals gain information from different sources and frame the issues leading to mobilization activities. Overall the book not only contributes to an understanding of why community mobilization occurs, but helps explain that as well. This is an important read for students, researchers, and community groups alike. This book provides sociological context to environmental problems that would be useful in courses and library collections in sociology, social movements, community and environmental studies.

"Extremely well-researched and coherently argued, this book presents top-quality research and draws appropriately on the existing knowledge in this area. The focus on fidelity across different kinds of relationship structures is very original and will prove an important contribution to the field of relationship research. A key strength of this study is that the analysis pays attention to both commonalities and diversity (which is rare, even in qualitative research). The analysis is also both clearly expressed and sophisticated." - Dr. Meg Barker, Open University "This is a fascinating investigation of the meaning of 'love, ' 'sex, ' and 'fidelity' for different kinds of couples. Kassia Wosick reports on a survey and in-depth conversations with couples that were straight and gay, monogamous and non-monogamous, traditional and polyamorous. 'Love' and 'being special' are enormously important in all of these groups. But she also finds startling differences. For some, sexual exclusiveness is critical. For others, being faithful means not loving anyone else, but sex with others is ok. For polyamorous couples, having explicit rules and being open and honest is the heart of fidelity and being special. And "having sex" can mean many different things. This book persuasively argues that we need more flexible, emotion-focused concepts of love, commitment and fidelity. The traditional focus on sexual exclusivity does not fit many contemporary relationships. This is a very valuable book for researchers and therapists, and for all of us who care about 'love, ' 'sex, ' and 'faithfulness'." - Professor Francesca Cancian, University of California, Irvine "Engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched, and well written, Sex, Love, and Fidelity: Study of Contemporary Romantic Relationships provides a compelling analysis of evolving relationships with a unique focus on levels of monogamy that surpasses previous studies to contribute refreshing insights into current meanings of sexuality and love. Wosick untangles the myriad cultural assumptions underlying the concept of fidelity and details the various ways in which fidelity expresses in a range of contemporary relationships, from dual fidelity and strict monogamy through veiled fidelity and almost monogamy to specified fidelity and non-monogamy and ending with agentic fidelity and polyamory. Now that few people in the US expect to be monogamous in the classical sense of marrying as a virgin and remaining in one, life-long, sexually exclusive relationship, Sex, Love, and Fidelity provides the information necessary for us to update our understandings of contemporary love and commitment." - Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, Sheff Consulting Group

With a paucity of authoritative firsthand information on North Korea available to the citizens of the world's democracies, discourse on the subject is impeded, and the democratic deficit regarding national policies towards the DPRK is necessarily broadened. Indeed, at no other time has the need for this information been more acute. The six-party talks regarding the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula made plain the DPRK's ambition (and ability) to play a larger role in world affairs, and its formal nuclear tests have exacerbated the tension and urgency of the situation. The death of Kim Jong Il and succession of his son Kim Jong Un, and recent reopening of bilateral discussions with the United States further increase the necessity of a nuanced understanding of contemporary society within the DPRK. If the world is to effectively deal with the reality of North Korea, reliable information is critical. This book, recommended by Alternative Nobel Prize winner Johan Galuting, is a response to this problem. It takes as its point of departure the notion that all leaders and governments, no matter how odd or dysfunctional their behavior may seem, act in a fundamentally rational matter-but that this rationality must be put into context in order to be properly understood. That is, their rationality is not independent of their historical experience, their culture, their value structure, or their institutional constraints, and all of these things must be considered in order to discover the rationality behind the decision making that appears on its surface to be so 'irrational' and/or 'dangerous.' Only by understanding this can these policy responses be rendered intelligible, perhaps even predictable. In this respect, the book speaks to broader and more timeless themes of theoretical import. As a test case, the book seeks to demystify the "intelligence black hole" that is North Korea. In so doing, it supplies the reader with much needed factual information garnered through firsthand experience by those who have actually visited and done research in North Korea. Each chapter consists of previously unpublished research by prominent experts in the field. The book is organized topically in order to make its information quickly accessible. This volume also differs from most in the breadth of its coverage: its goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of North Korean society rather than an in-depth treatment of any single characteristic of it. This book not only puts a face on the hermit kingdom, but it also provides the reader with the theoretical guidance necessary to actually understand it, placing the Kim family in the broader context of the society in which the family has propagated itself. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, North Korea Demystified represents the first edited volume on North Korea to address the succession of Kim Jong Un. North Korea Demystified is an important volume for all political science and history collections focused on the politics and cultures of East Asia. In addition to being an invaluable resource to a scholarly audience, the book will also be of interest to policy makers, journalists covering East Asia, businesspersons interested in North Korea as an emerging market, and students (both advanced undergraduate and graduate).

The context for the first part of this study is the community (sangha) of early Buddhism in India, as it is reflected in the religion's canon composed in the Pali language, which is preserved by the Theravada tradition as the only authentic record of the words of the Buddha and his disciples, as well as of events within that community. This book does not assert that the Pali Canon represents any sort of "original" Buddhism, but it maintains that it reflects issues and concerns of this religious community in the last centuries before the Common Era. The events focused on in part one of this study revolve around diversity and debate with respect to proper soteriology, which in earliest Buddhist communities entails what paths of practice successfully lead to the religion's final goal of nibbana (Sanskrit: nirvana). One of the main theses of this study is that some of the vocational and soteriological tensions and points of departure of the early community depicted in the Pali Canon have had a tendency to crop up in the ongoing Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka, which forms the second part of the study. In particular, part two covers first a vocational bifurcation in the Sri Lankan that has existed at least from the last century of the Common Era to contemporary times, and second a modern debate held between two leading voices in Theravada Buddhism, on the subject of what constitutes the right meditative path to nibbana.With a few notable exceptions, both members of Theravada Buddhism and the scholars who have studied them have maintained that the Pali Canon, and the ongoing tradition that has grown out of it, has a singular soteriology. The aim of this study is to deconstruct tradition, in the simple sense of revealing the tradition's essential multiplicity. Prior to this study, past scholarship--which preferred to portray early Indian and Theravada Buddhsim as wholly rationalist systems--has shied away from giving ample treatment on the noble person who possesses supernormal powers. This book examines the dichotomy between two Theravada monastic vocations that have grown out of tensions discussed in part one. The bifurcation is between the town-dwelling scholar monk and the forest-dwelling meditator monk. Scholars have certainly recognized this split in the sangha before, but this is the first attempt to completely compare their historical roles side by side. This is an important book for collections in Asian studies, Buddhist studies, history, and religious studies.

Thomas Traherne (1637-1674) was one of the most original writers of the early modern period. The exciting discovery of his lost manuscripts at the beginning of the twentieth century aroused an intense interest among poetry lovers and scholars of seventeenth-century literature, which has continued to this day. The finding of other challenging Traherne manuscripts over the course of the century has furthered the study of this remarkable "radically optimistic" figure. The most important contribution of this book is to demonstrate that Felicity is not a simplistic or sentimental notion but is grounded in a cognitive experience, which has been the subject of considerable research in recent decades. The book is framed by an introductory chapter that shows Traherne's position in the early modern history of a science of cognition and a concluding chapter that relates his discovery of a holistic state of consciousness to twentieth-century theoretical and experimental developments. The second and third chapters concentrate on what are recognized to be Traherne's core texts on Felicity, the Centuries and the Dobell folio poem sequence. The analysis of these two works uncovers the deep structures of Traherne's thought and sets the stage for the examination of other texts relevant to his foremost subject, Felicity. The fourth chapter investigates the seminal part played by Felicity in other poetry and prose, including Traherne's Felicity-based ethical treatise Christian Ethicks and the encyclopedic Commentaries of Heaven, which combines poetry with prose. Also included in this investigation are poems which, in effect, constitute another sequence--albeit a sequence badly edited by Traherne's brother Philip after Traherne's death. The subsequent chapter explores the presence of Felicity in texts contained in the Lambeth manuscript, discovered at the end of the twentieth century. These texts confirm the intellectual depth and sublime artistry with which Traherne communicated his cognitive breakthrough. Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind is an important, timely addition to all literature and British cultural collections.

This book sets up the prospect of learning about one of social science's most important methods--fieldwork--by discussing its frequent failures and frustrations. While some books do take up related issues, most represent the research process in ideal and potentially abstract forms-a process rather void of human fallibility and separate from the everyday context in which academics conduct their work. The collection delivered here is much more acutely oriented to the problems of conducting fieldwork--a considerable contrast to the squeaky-clean depictions of fieldwork in standard undergraduate methods texts and occasional reflexive treatises in methodological journals. The contributors in this volume address a wide range of issues and obstacles that they have confronted at various stages in their respective research careers, and their real research examples are drawn from the authors' respective disciplines of anthropology, political science, historical archaeology, criminology, social psychology, and sociology. Topics range from power struggles with institutional review boards to conducting fieldwork in dangerous settings or in societies undergoing political transformation. In reflecting on their personal experiences, authors provide practical guidance on how to overcome the types of problems that typically confront academic researchers in their daily work. This book will be a valuable resource for all collections in the social sciences.