Published this week

December 11, 2008

? = Review forthcoming

ART AND DESIGN

- Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti

Edited by Fae Brauer, research professor in visual theory, University of East London, and Anthea Callen, professor of art history, University of Nottingham. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 97807546586

Exposing uncanny resemblances between eugenic sexual management and body imagery in France, Britain, Communist Russia, Nazi Germany and the US both before and after the Second World War, this book reveals how art and sex promoted the eugenic quest for the perfect body.

- Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation

By Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, assistant professor of modern and contemporary art, Tulane University. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754664659

This book focuses on Liliana Porter's playful but subversive dismantling of the limits that firmly separate everyday reality from the world of illusion and simulacra.

BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

- Leadership, Loyalty and Deception

By D. Christopher Kayes, professor of organisational behaviour, Georgetown University. Palgrave Macmillan, £25.00. ISBN 9780230524828

This work uncovers new lessons from the race to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, drawing from the latest thinking on leadership, psychology and management to show how a culture of goal-setting and pursuit can hurtle towards disaster.

HISTORY

- The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850

By Alison Twells, principal lecturer in social and cultural history, Sheffield Hallam University. Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00. ISBN 9781403920409

Twells traces the development of the popular missionary movement aimed at global cultural transformation, from its beginnings in evangelical enthusiasm in the 1790s to the early 19th century, when it occupied a central place in a broader national culture.

- Finance and Modernization: A Transnational and Transcontinental Perspective for the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Edited by Gerald D. Feldman, professor emeritus of history, University of California, Berkeley, until his death in October 2007, and Peter Hertner, chair in economics and social history, University of Halle. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 97807546616

Beginning with studies of the Austrian banks, their development and their crises, this volume then moves on to look at case studies of important aspects of financial activity - German stock markets, railway investment and information networks.

- Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940

By Christopher G. White, assistant professor of religion, Vassar College. University of California Press, £26.95. ISBN 9780520256798

This book examines how 19th- and 20th-century American believers rejected older, often evangelical, theological traditions and turned to scientific psychologies to formulate new ideas about mind and spirit and new practices for spiritual growth.

- Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense

By Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt distinguished university professor of anthropology and historical studies, the New School for Social Research. Princeton University Press, £35.00 and £13.50. ISBN 9780691015781 and 5774

Attending to hesitant, uncensored and confused assessments and asides, Stoler offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms.

- The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany

By Susannah Heschel, Eli Black chair in Jewish studies, Dartmouth College. Princeton University Press, £17.95. ISBN 9780691125312

Heschel examines the membership and activities of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, the controversial theological organisation that became the most important propaganda organ of Nazi Protestantism.

- ? Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography

By Clifton Crais, professor of history, Emory University. Princeton University Press, £17.95. ISBN 9780691135809

Based on research and interviews that span three continents, Crais tells the entwined histories of an illusive life and a famous icon. In doing so, he raises questions about the possibilities and limits of biography for understanding those who live between and among different cultures.

- Ronald Reagan and the 1980s

Edited by Cheryl Hudson, associate research fellow in history, University of Oxford, and Gareth Bryn Davies, university lecturer in American history, University of Oxford. Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50. ISBN 9780230603028

The essays in this volume revisit the 1980s to examine the factors that contributed to Ronald Reagan's political and cultural triumphs, provide an assessment of the political, social and economic substance and legacy of his policies, not just for Americans but for the shape of the world order.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

- The Subjunctive in the Age of Prescriptivism

By Anita Auer, assistant professor of English language and linguistics, University of Utrecht. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230574410

Auer presents a comparative study relating to the description, use and development of the inflectional subjunctive in English and German in the 18th century.

- Leadership Discourse at Work

By Stephanie Schnurr, assistant professor of English, University of Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, £45.00. ISBN 9780230201804

Drawing on authentic discourse data, Schnurr focuses on humour, illustrating that an analysis of leadership discourse may offer interesting new insights into the complexities of leadership performance.

LITERATURE

- Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death

By David Ian Rabey, professor of drama and theatre studies, Aberystwyth University. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9781403994738

This study considers the full range of Barker's theatrical and theoretical work in exploring and dramatising life's extremity, brevity and intensity in order to create a moment of knowledge beyond the received terms of history.

- Shakespeare and Character

Edited by Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson professor of English studies, McGill University, and Jessica Slights, associate professor in English, Acadia University. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230572621

To answer the central question of what character is and to begin to provide a new critical vocabulary for character study, the contributors to this study examine the theory, history, formal properties and the literary and performance possibilities of the Shakespearean character.

- British Literature of the Blitz

By Kristine A. Miller, associate professor of English, Utah State University. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230573659

Analysing conflicted representations of class and gender in British literature and film of the Blitz, this book interrogates the ideal of the People's War, which claimed to unite men and women of all classes in defence of the home front.

- Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage 1580-1635

By Christian M. Billing, lecturer in drama, University of Hull. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754656517

Combining analysis of Early-Modern anatomical science, social phenomena such as cross-dressing, examples of proto-feminist cultural agency and close readings of English professional theatre texts, this is an investigation into shifting dramatic representations of the sexed and gendered body.

- ? Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence

By Jenny Holt, lecturer in English literature, Meiji University. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754656623

Holt argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional, biographical and journalistic work, had a disproportionate role to play in the development of social perceptions of adolescence in British society and on ideas of civic education.

- Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance

By Elisabeth Hodges, associate professor of French, Miami University of Ohio. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754662068

Hodges draws out the relationship between the city and the self in Early-Modern French literature and culture, showing the impact of the city in human history and cultural production to be so profound that it cannot be extricated subjectivity.

- Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography

By Maria DiBattista, professor of English and comparative literature, Princeton University. Princeton University Press, £11.95. ISBN 9780691138121

The subject of this work is not Virginia Woolf, the person who wrote the novels, criticism, letters and famous diary, but a different being altogether, someone or something DiBattista identifies as "the figment of the author".

- The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century

Edited by Laurel Brake, senior research fellow, Birkbeck, University of London, and Marysa Demoor, professor of English literature, Ghent University. Palgrave Macmillan, £45.00. ISBN 9780230217317

This volume collects views and research by eminent experts in the field of Victorian periodicals on some of the most memorable 19th-century magazines and newspapers.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Buddhism and Postmodern Imaginings in Thailand: The Religiosity of Urban Space

By James Taylor, senior lecturer in anthropology, University of Adelaide. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754662471

This book presents a rethink on the significance of Thai Buddhism in an increasingly complex and changing postmodern urban context, especially following the financial crisis of 1997.

- Theology, Psychology and the Plural Self

By Leon Turner, associate researcher in the faculty of divinity, University of Cambridge. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754665199

Turner explores the seemingly disparate ways that Christian theology and the secular human sciences have approached the complex question of whether the human is self-singular and unified or essentially plural.

- Free Will and Reactive Attitudes: Perspectives on P.F. Strawson's Freedom and Resentment

Edited by Michael McKenna, professor of philosophy, Florida State University, and Paul Russell, professor of philosophy, University of British Columbia. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754640592

This volume brings together a focused selection of the major contributions and reactions to the free will and responsibility debate inspired by P.F. Strawson's Freedom and Resentment.

- Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image

By John Mullarkey, lecturer in philosophy, University of Dundee. Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00. ISBN 9780230002470

Mullarkey examines all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film image and philosophy, and tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists as well as general philosophical positions.

PSYCHOLOGY

- The Meaning of Madness

By Neel Burton, former visiting fellow in psychology, University of Oxford. Acheron Press, £14.99. ISBN 9780756035301

Burton, a psychiatrist and the award-winning author of two medical textbooks, proposes to open up the debate on mental disorders to try to answer some difficult but important questions. The Meaning of Madness aims to offer a readable and authoritative account that draws on literary, scientific and philosophical sources.

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