Books published by EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

The task of the historian would be impossible without verbal resources for dating and describing past events. Historians from Herodotus onwards traditionally relied uncritically on their own native languages (including Greek, Latin and English) to provide all they needed. In so doing, they also took over a traditional Western view of the relationship between language, the world and the passage of time. This determined for them the rational limits of historical knowledge. Their 'histories' could not go beyond these limits without straying into the realms of myth or imagination. Their philosophy of history was circumscribed by their (often unstated) philosophy of language.This book is the first comprehensive attempt to trace the relationship between Western philosophy of history and Western philosophy of language. It spans the whole development of education from the ancient Greeks down to the present day. It examines the impact on history of modern movements, including structuralist and postmodern approaches, as well as the recent advent of television history.Features:*The first comprehensive attempt to relate Western philosophy of history to Western philosophy of language*The author is a leading authority on linguistics and the philosophy of language*The book is written in an accessible style for all levels of reader.

This book is the first major reassessment of the reception of Saussure's ideas throughout the twentieth century. That Saussure's work profoundly influenced developments in such diverse fields as linguistics, anthropology, psychology and literary studies is denied by no one. But what exactly Saussure's views were taken to be by his interpreters has not hitherto been subject to any comprehensive critical survey. How well were Saussure's ideas understood by those who took them up? Or how badly misunderstood? And why? The answers to these questions address central issues in the history of Western culture.Each chapter focuses on one particular interpreter of Saussure's work, but many others are mentioned in context for purposes of comparison, and attention is drawn to connections and disparities between their interpretations. Those whose interpretations are examined in detail include Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Chomsky, Barthes and Derrida.Features:* The author is acknowledged as an expert on Saussure's work* This is the first study of the reception of Saussure's ideas, and how well they were understood by those who took them up* The work of Saussure is a landmark in the history of linguistic thought

This new illustrated paperback edition examines the Scottish country house in all its guises - from great classical houses like Hopetoun, to familiar castles such as Glamis and Craigievar - as well as giving insights into the architects who designed them, including William and Robert Adam, Sir John James Burnet and Sir William Bruce.

Transnationalism in Practice brings together fourteen essays written by Paul Giles between 1994 and 2009 on the subjects of American studies, literature and religion. In an introduction written especially for the collection, Giles traces the evolution of critical transnationalism as it developed through the 1980s and 1990s. The volume includes "e;Reconstructing American Studies"e; (1994), one of the first articles to address the field from a transnational perspective, along with other pieces on methodological and practical issues surrounding the internationalization of American studies. The essays on American literature contain work on Theodore Dreiser, Henry James and the critic F. O. Matthiessen, along with a new study of Jamaica Kincaid in relation to postcolonialism. The section on religion traces the circulation of secularized forms of Catholicism in U.S. culture, from nineteenth-century slave narratives to the musical performances of Bruce Springsteen. Transnationalism in Practice ranges widely, from the culture of colonial America to the novels of Robert Coover and Kathy Acker, while also encompassing a broad range of interdisciplinary topics, from the presidency of George W. Bush to the role of religion in American society. This book will be of interest to all of those concerned with the place of U.S. culture in the world today.

A clear and lively introduction to current trends in the theory, method and tools of discourse studies, this book is a valuable guide for students and teachers of linguistics as well as for those with an interest in the linguistic methods of analysing discourse (media, rhetoric and stylistics, pragmatics, communication studies scholars etc).* Comprehensive, accessible, state-of-the-art textbook * Close analyses of a wide range of narrative and non-narrative texts, both spoken and written* Emphasis on practical text analysis: includes guided activities for self-study or use in a classroom* Suggestions for further reading in each chapter.This revised second edition registers key changes in a rapidly expanding area and thoroughly updates suggestions for further reading and the bibliography.

Introducing poetry, prose, songs and theatre from Nigeria, this engaging volume blends translated extracts with a rich commentary on the historical development and modern context of this hugely creative culture. Examining imaginative prose-writing, the tale tradition, popular song, Islamic religious poetry and modern TV drama amongst other topics, this is a clear and accessible book on a literary culture that has previously been little-known to the English-speaking readership.

A major new reference volume - The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Liberalism is the premier collection of material on a comprehensive range of topics in contemporary liberalism. Liberal theory has been caricatured by its critics as an abstract, unworldly, trivial philosophical navel-gazing pursuit. The Companion counters this view by showing how liberalism can tackle wide-ranging practical concerns that urgently demand attention in twenty-first century politics. Rather than presenting contemporary liberalism simply and narrowly as a survey of what its main academic protagonists have said over the past 30 years, the guiding principle of the volume is to conceptualise it primarily as a set of themes and approaches informed by the challenges to the practice of liberal politics.Issues such as human rights, citizenship, nationalism, feminism, international communities, supranational orders, post-communism and ecocentrism take their place alongside the more familiar and well-worked themes of justice and justification as topics for liberal theorising. The reader is vividly shown the ways in which liberalism engages directly with the problems of practical political life today.This wide-ranging account of contemporary liberal thinking places the emphasis on agenda-setting, showing that contemporary liberalism is live - relevant, proactive, continuously engaged and adaptable - and that the problems faced by the liberal order are sufficiently complex and perplexing to demand the serious, rigorous philosophical reflection offered by contemporary liberal political theory.The Companion allows the reader to explore liberalism's contemporary relevance and to look to its likely future developments. With contributors including Will Kymlicka, Michael Freeden, Richard Bellamy, Rex Martin, Margaret Canovan, Diana T. Meyers, and Kate Soper, this large, definitive edition will be a must-buy for all libraries and a key reference tool for

Popular though biography is, it has as yet received very little critical attention. What nearly all biographies offer is an understanding of their subjects and an explanation of their behaviour. In this book David Ellis, author of the acclaimed third volume of the Cambridge biography of D H Lawrence, meditates on the nature of biography and the way biographers habitually explain their subjects' lives by reference to psychology, ancestry, childhood experience, social relations, the body or illness. Packed with examples and written in a lively, engrossing style, the aim of the book is to uncover the principles which biographers adopt in their efforts to make sense of others' lives whilst at the same time ensuring that their own narratives remain coherent.In exploring the methods of literary biographers and the ways in which they interpret the material they accumulate - from Dr Johnson to Jean-Paul Sartre - David Ellis is able to make challenging and highly valuable comments on biography in general. Although he chiefly draws on recent lives of writers such as Dickens, Henry James, Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Graham Greene, George Orwell, W B Yeats and Hemingway, Professor Ellis also considers the biographies of such compelling, non-literary figures as Mozart, Picasso and Cezanne.With their focus on the understanding of other people as the main feature of biography, the informed and often humorous discussions in this book provide the ideal context for appreciating this fascinating literary form.

Numbers and politics are inter-related at almost every level - be it the abstract geometry of understandings of territory, the explosion of population statistics and measures of economic standards, the popularity of Utilitarianism, Rawlsian notions of justice, the notion of value, or simply the very idea of political science. Time and space are reduced to co-ordinates, illustrating a very real take on the political: a way of measuring and controlling it.This book engages with the relation between politics and number through a reading, exegesis and critique of the work of Martin Heidegger. The importance of mathematics and the role played by the understandings of calculation is a recurrent concern in his writing and is regularly contrasted with understandings of speech and language. This book provides the most detailed analysis of the relation between language, politics and mathematics in Heidegger's work. It insists that questions of language and calculation in Heidegger are inherently political, and that a far broader range of his work is concerned with politics than is usually admitted.Key Features:*A unique introduction to the political dimension of Heidegger's work, opening it up to a wider audience*Offers an original exploration of the relationship between language, mathematics and politics in Heidegger's thinking*Shows how questions of politics and calculation are inter-related in modern conceptions of the politicalBooks in the series are...Valentine and Arditi Polemicization Shapiro Cinematic Political ThoughtChambers Untimely PoliticsElden Speaking Against NumberBowman Post-Marxism Versus Cultural StudiesMarchart Post-Foundational Political ThoughtLittle Democratic Piety

What is the relationship between literary criticism and ethics? Does criticism have an ethical task? How can criticism be ethical after literary theory? Ethical Criticism seeks to answer these questions by examining the historical development of the ethics of criticism and the vigorous contemporary backlash against what is known as 'theory'. The book appraises current arguments about the ethics of criticism and, finding them wanting, turns to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Described as 'the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century', Levinas' thought has had a profound influence on a number of significant contemporary thinkers. By paying close attention to his major writings, Robert Eaglestone argues cogently and persuasively for a new understanding of the ethical task of criticism and theory.

In the inter-war years, groups of enterprising Yoruba traders from a few towns in Western Nigeria established a successful trading network throughout the Gold Coast (Ghana). Then, in 1969, they were abruptly ordered to leave the country. At the time of the exodus, Jerry Eades followed the traders back to Nigeria. There, on the basis of extensive interviews and archival sources, he reconstructed the history of the migration from four Yorubu towns to northern Ghana. The result is one of the fullest and most detailed accounts of chain migration and its implications for economic development ever written.

A book about Jacobean civic pageants.

This topical book examines the debates around contemporary conflicts between liberal democracies and increasingly vociferous special interest groups within society. It analyses the way a new sense of difference and the growth of multi-culturalism are straining modern notions of citizenship and rights, looking in particular at how ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe have escalated to international tragedies, while in the US and Canada, race, ethnicity and radical feminism are at the heart of a social conflict which challenges national identity and the unity of the state.

This book provides a notable addition to the new historiography of mid-twentieth-century Soviet history. Sabine Dullin has researched the history of Soviet diplomacy from 1930 to 1939 through a variety of now-accessible diplomatic, political, administrative and social archives. She has added to the mix the memories and testimonies of diplomatic personnel.Through her research, Dullin sheds light on the workings of the Soviet bureaucracy and in particular the role of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister, and his relations with Stalin. She examines in detail Soviet foreign policy and the process of Stalinisation, and argues persuasively that these 'men of influence' were not simply agents of the Kremlin, but were able, through the 1930s and with the emergence of Soviet power on the eve of the Second World War, to initiate and pursue their own agendas.

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. In this book, Tsarina Doyle sets out to show that a specifically Kantian-informed methodology lies at the heart of Nietzsche's approach to epistemology and metaphysics. The author claims, contentiously, that both Nietzsche's early and late writings may be understood as responses to Kant's constitutive-regulative distinction at the level of epistemology and to his treatment of force and efficient causality at the level of metaphysics.

This new approach to Highland history before the Clearances draws attention to little-studied yet important economic and social processes within the Highland clan system and argues that we should consider the problems of traditional Highland society, economy and environment together. Exploring how the different aspects of the clan system - chiefs and kinsmen, landlords and tenants, farming systems, production strategies and marketing - changed between the 16th-18th centuries, it shows how the character and ideology of clans and chiefdoms are inextricably part of the twin problems of socio-political control and food production. Shifting the emphasis away from depictions of Highland society as lawless and disorganised, this is a welcome antidote to the many romanticised views of pre-Clearance society. Prize Winner! Honorable Mention - Frank Watson Scottish History Prize 1999