Books published by Palgrave USA

This book extends our understanding of the black Atlantic, a term coined by Paul Gilroy to describe the political, cultural and creative interrelations among blacks living in Africa, the Americas and Europe. This study focuses on pre-colonial English literary constructions and their effects on post-Independence Caribbean literature.

This volume brings together compelling new research on South Asian women who have renounced worldly life for spiritual pursuits. Documenting contemporary women's experiences with intimate ethnographic narratives, this book offers feminist insights into Jain, Buddhist, Hindu and Baul ascetic traditions.

What is the appropriate role of religion in scholarship and teaching? Covering topics ranging from religious influences in faculty lives to questions of academic freedom, proselytization, and appropriate limits to religious expression within the Academy, this book seeks to promote faculty self-awareness and encourage dialogue with colleagues.

By reading the plays in technological contexts, Cohen offers new insights into some of Shakespeare's key metaphors, his methods of character development and plot development, his ideas about genre, his concept of theatrical space, and his views on the theatre's role in society.

This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years.

In this study, Kathy Janette Phillips uses literature from World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War and the Iraq wars to argue that labelling broadly human traits 'feminine' helps societies manipulate men to war. Phillips also shows that damning pleasure fuels wars by encouraging the displacement of sexuality into violence.

The Alliance has endeavoured to identify a new raison d'etre since 1991, but no unifying set of priorities has surfaced. In the absence of a menace to their vital interests, and with fundamental policy differences dividing North America and Europe, NATO is succumbing to the pressure of the times.

Focusing on the development of justificatory discourse on global governance, Steffek examines how differing conceptions of distributive and social justice have played a role in negotiations in the domains of security, economics, and protecting the environment.

Drawing on political choice theories in IR and policy decision making, this book provides a deep theoretical understanding of bilateral co-operation and confrontation. Through conceptual modelling and quantitative data analysis, Liu examines how changes in political and economic issues affected relations between China and the United States.

As part of the study of emotions and politics, this book explores connections between affect and cognition and their implications for political evaluation, decision and action. Emphasizing theory, methodology and empirical research, Feeling Politics is an important contribution to political science, sociology, psychology and communications.

This book is an ethnographic study of the martial art of taijiquan (or 'tai chi') as it is practiced in China and the United States. Drawing on recent literature on ethnicity, critical race theory, the phenomenology of race, and globalization, the author discusses identity in terms of sensual experience and the transmission/receipt of knowledge.

Thirty-five years ago Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the Author. For medievalists no death has been more timely. The essays in this volume create a prism through which to understand medieval authorship as a process and the medieval author as an agency in the making.

Control Systems Theory, a newly developing theoretical perspective, starts from an important insight into human behaviour: that people attempt to control the world around them as they perceive it. This book brings together for the first time the work of prominent sociologists contributing to the development of this wideranging theoretical paradigm.

This book looks at the evolution of the Organization of American States (OAS) multilateralism for democracy and the lessons its experience holds for other multilateral contexts. It also tackles the theoretical challenge of bridging the traditional divide between international relations and comparative politics.

A multidisciplinary investigation of the concepts, impact, and writings of contemporary cultural theorist and creative writer, Gloria Anzaldua. Her work has challenged and expanded previous views in American Studies, composition studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminism, literary studies, critical pedagogy, and queer theory.

The Real History of Tom Jones revivifies historical materials from which Henry Fielding constructed the greatest comic novel of the eighteenth century.

These essays explore the place, function and meaning of women as characters, authors, constructs and symbols in Medieval epics from Persia, Spain, France, England, Germany and Scandinavia. Usually believed to narrate the deeds of men at war, this book looks at the key roles often played by women and the impact of this on the history of gender.

This book tells the story of Kwame Nkrumah, the first post-colonial president of an independent African country. The book utilizes previously unpublished and recently declassified IS State Department documents to give an analysis and a chronology of Nkrumah's fall. The book is written for a general audience and for academic historians and students.

Traces the history of medical, social, and cultural ideas about the stomach and related organs since the 17th century, and demonstrates that a focused study of the abdomen is necessary for understanding the deep historical meanings that underscore our obsessions with diet, indigestion, regularity and obesity. Forth from ANU, ACT.

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.

This multi-disciplinary collection of essays draws on various theoretical approaches to explore the highly visual nature of the Middle Ages and expose new facets of old texts and artefacts.

This book explores the rich, complex, literary tradition of the medieval go-between. Idealized going between usually leads to marriage and it develops a new dimension of the much debated question of courtly love and woman's part in it. Chaucer's Pandarus's place in this go-between tradition is a tour de force.

This is the first comprehensive reader that brings African experiences to bear on the ongoing global discussions of women, gender, and society. Bringing together the essential writing on this topic from the last 25 years, these essays discuss gender in Africa from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

This collection makes available for the first time a rich archive of materials that illuminate the history of racial thought and practices in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. A comprehensive introduction shows how these writings are crucial for understanding the pre-Enlightenment lineages of racial categories.

The growth of African immigration to France at the end of the Twentieth Century wrought cultural change in this epicentre of the avant-garde in European art and music. James Winders presents the story of African immigrants to France as a unique chapter in the long history of the reception accorded expatriate artists in Paris.

This book examines the state of women's rights across Europe, from the three-year research of the Network for European Women's Rights. Based on country reports and practical input from researchers and activists in the field, the book is an up-to-date account of the issue of women's social entitlements and rights across Europe.

It was traditionally assumed that a single official language was necessary for the wellbeing of the state, particularly in France and Britain. This assumption is now questioned, and regional languages are making, in some cases, an impressive comeback. This book analyses a range of languages' development, decline and efforts at regeneration.

This is the first study of the emerging phenomenon of sex workers, asserting that they are entitled to workers' rights. Drawing on examples from Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand and the USA the book analyzes the contexts for this struggle and the opportunities and challenges facing these unionization projects.

Theories of authorship and material culture provide the framework for this study. It maps Anglo-American authorship as it shifts from a theoretical to a more material approach to its study in contexts recognized as key to its development: the nineteenth-century literary market-place, twentieth-century experimentalism and postmodern culture.