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In this book the European Union and the twelvepost-Soviet countries forming the Commonwealth of Independent States(CIS) are presented as two comparable cases of regional governanceregimes. The examination of the EU decision-making procedures revealsthat they allow member-states, as well as important domestic socialgroups, to pursue their often-contrasting interests and preferences ina consensual manner. As the whole arrangement is meant to promoteregional integration, it supports and encourages social mobility andthe socially mobile groups in particular.

Contrary to the classic modernist vision, the nation-state as aninstitution of political nationalism does not always promote socialprogress or social justice. It also presupposes an insecure anarchy ininterstate relations. As the post-Soviet experiences, in particular,demonstrate, political institutionalisation of nationalism canactually be in agreement with socially degrading tendencies thatlimited supranationalism can help to overcome. The EU, on the otherhand, presents an advanced example of how supranational institutionsand national governments can be tied together within one and the samestructure in order to balance national interests against common valuesand goals.

This work addresses such problems through the prism of culturalanalysis. Central to it is the assumption that political institutionscannot be understood without exposing the social orientations they aretuned to. ... Read more

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"The European Culture Wars in Ireland" tells the story of Father Robert O'Keeffe of Callan, County Kilkenny, and his conflict with ecclesiastical authority. O'Keeffe's serial lawsuits against his own curates, his bishop, and the cardinal archbishop of Dublin, and his consequent removal as manager of a number of national schools and chaplain of the local workhouse, commanded attention across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the world. In Callan, the town split into warring camps, and riot became a part of life for nearly ten years - the colourful local details eventually inspired two novelists. To contemporaries, Callan and O'Keeffe mattered because they seemed to be an Irish manifestation of a global Catholic-secular culture war that encompassed both the definition of papal infallibility and the German Kulturkampf. For a time, the Callan Schools dominated British political debate, and O'Keeffe secured a private meeting with Prime Minister William Gladstone. Political fury at his removal from publicly funded positions at the behest of clerical authority nearly wrecked the Irish system of national education. In May 1873, the libel trial O'Keeffe v.Cullen saw the competing claims of canon and civil law tested in spectacularly public fashion as the island's first Roman Catholic cardinal was tried before the Queen's Bench. "The European Culture Wars in Ireland" traces the Callan Schools Affair from its origins in 1868 to O'Keeffe's death in 1881. It examines not only the riotous local events and the spectacular libel trial in Dublin, but also the complex and politically charged response of the British state. A new departure in Irish historiography, the book argues that Robert O'Keeffe and his grievances could only become both cause celebre and constitutional crisis because the United Kingdom as a whole was an integral part of Europe, responsive to and influenced by continental concerns. ... Read more

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The eleven interconnected essays of this book penetrate the dense historical knots binding terror, power, and the aesthetic sublime from World War II to September 11th and beyond. Ray argues that globalization cannot be separated from the collective tasks of working through historical tragedies. ... Read more

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Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler draw on the latest developments in feminist theory to explore contemporary German women writers' representations of female subjectivity. Bridging the gap between critical theory and women's writing in German, this book provides in-depth, fully contextualized readings of six key texts. ... Read more

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These studies illustrate the different ways in which the Renaissance made use of its classical heritage, and how a variety of techniques were employed to transform the material that could be derived from the ancient classics so that it could serve the social and cultural purposes of Renaissance man. The scope of the volume covers discussions of catalogues and editions of humanist works; the humanist contribution to the art of discourse; humanism and religion; humanism and political thought; and finally the contribution of the humanists to the useful and fine arts. This volume consists of papers delivered at the second conference on Classical Influences held at King's College, Cambridge, in 1974. This book should be of interest to specialists in classical studies, Renaissance studies and the history of literature and ideas, and specialists in French, German and Italian studies. The last three articles will also interest art historians. ... Read more

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This lively and intellectually vigorous conspectus of studies approaches the subject of exile from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributions to the volume give due attention to the 20th century migratory phenomena, theorised by Edward Said, Julia Kristeva and Salman Rushdie. They also show that the discourse and experience of exile is not the stuff of modernity alone. The volume illustrates that the waning of the Middle Ages, Reformation and Restoration politics, and the importation of Egyptian mummies into a 19th-century England hungry for imperial exotica reveal displacement, dislocation, otherness and the uncanniness of observing strangers-on-display to have long been part of European cultural currency. The essays range across a variety of disciplines: literary studies, modern languages, history of science, philosophy and museum studies. ... Read more

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Do audit cultures deliver greater responsibility, or do they stifle creative thought?
We are all increasingly subjected to auditing, and alongside that, subject to accountability for our behaviour and actions. Audit cultures pervade in the workplace, our governmental and public institutions as well as academia. However, audit practices themselves have consequences, beneficial and detrimental, that often go unexamined.
This book examines how pervasive practices of accountability are, the political and cultural conditions under which accountability flourishes and the consequences of their application. Twelve social anthropologists look at this influential and controversial phenomenon, and map out the effects around Europe and the Commonwealth, as well as in contexts such as the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and Academic institutions. The result provides an excellent insight into auditing and its dependence on precepts of economic efficiency and ethical practice. This point of convergence between these moral and financial priorities provides an excellent opening for debate on the culture of management and accountability. ... Read more

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The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first transatlantic voyage has provoked an outpouring of scholarship on how European exploration and colonization affected America. This book of eleven essays from leading scholars in the fields of intellectual and cultural history reverses that trend by focusing on the ways in which contact with the Americas transformed European thought.

The result of an international conference sponsored by the John Carter Brown Library, this collection addresses the impact of Spanish, French, and English experiences in the New World. The essays consider whether and how knowledge of America changed the mental world of European thinkers as reflected in their understanding of history, literature, linguistics, religion, and the sciences.

In assessing the process by which Europeans sought to understand America, this volume responds to issues raised by Sir John Elliott nearly a generation ago, and the collection concludes with an essay in which Elliott reflects on the scholarship of the last twenty-five years on this subject.

The contributors are David Armitage, Peter Burke, Luca Codignola, J. H. Elliott, Christian Feest, Roland Greene, John M. Headley, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Henry Lowood, Sabine MacCormack, David Quint, and Richard C. Simmons. ... Read more

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The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never before appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the "Turkish Renaissance" manifests itself, to some degree, as an "age of beloveds," in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful office-holders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.

The authors show that the "age of beloveds" was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon; it extended into western Europe as well. They demonstrate this by examining the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by immensely powerful absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense and peculiar interest in love and the beloved. The Age of the Beloveds reveals a new commonality in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different. ... Read more

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Jerzy Lukowski shows the pressures and tensions, both from below and from governments, which increasingly challenged traditional ruling groups in Europe during the century before the French Revolution. The position of the nobility depended on a stable world which accepted their authority; but that world was becoming fractured as a result of social and economic developments and new ideas. Lukowski explains the basic mechanisms of noble existence and examines how the European nobility sought to preserve a sense of solidarity in the midst of widespread change.
... Read more

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The house of Belgium and its many houses-institutional and personal, literal and metaphoric-captured in a blend of social and cultural analysis that offers a microcosm of European society since World War II. Sensitive, perceptive, revealing, and delightfully readable. -Eugen Weber. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Inside view of a Belgian over a book over Belgium

Despite some little mistake, this book is quite good book for people who are about to come to Belgium or ever went to Belgium. It describes different socio-professional classes in Belgium , riches and "poor", flemish and wallons, ... (but most are catholics).

The main default of this book is that is looks to me quite "old-fashioned" because now, society has evoluted a lot and lots of things have changed since the first voyage of Renée C. Fox.

In conclusion, if you're intersted in Belgium or in life in "traditionnal" european countries, you must readit. ... Read more

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Those who think otherwise, though they may fail, deserve our attention, says H. Stuart Hughes. In Sophisticated Rebels, Hughes shows what happened to the revolutionary spirit after the 1968 suppressions in Prague and Paris: dissenters learned their lesson and began to pursue their goals in patient, realistic, limited fashion, eschewing violence and inflammatory ideological rhetoric. Yet theirs were the voices protesting what even conformists recognize as social evils; the manipulative routine of bureaucratic authority, public and private; the soullessness of life in the sprawling conurbations European cities have become; the deadening of sensibility that allows us to screen out from consciousness the possibility of nuclear war.

Hughes takes up in turn the innovations in dissidence during a reactionary age: the foreign workers, especially Moslems, who flooded the more prosperous countries of Europe in the 1970s, creating a large underclass; the advocates of local cultural autonomy, such as the Welsh and Bretons; the independent-minded theologians Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff arrayed against Pope John Paul II, who was himself rebelling against a dilution of Catholic theology; Poland's Solidarity and with it the longing for reunification of a sundered continent; the frustration of Soviet dissent, from the hope of Khrushchev's "thaw' to the sufferings of Sakharov; the collapse of Eurocommunism and the falterings of democratic socialism; and the slow advance of the German Greens toward a society on a human scale. Although European dissent, with the exception of the Greens, has failed to shake the hold of conservative rule, Hughes believes the subject matter of dissent--notably the protest against the nuclear menace--has lost none of its timeliness for the century ahead, and the dissenters themselves face the future with both stoicism and hope.

Serving as markers throughout the route are brief analyses of the relevance of novelists and social critics, among them Milan Kundera, Adam Michnik, Yuri Trifonov, Roy Medvedev, and Jürgen Habermas.

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Taking in a wide variety of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts--fiction, poetry, travel writings, guidebooks, periodicals, and business histories--The Beaten Track attempts to grasp what modern representations of "culture" owe to the long process of confrontation with a democratizing and institutionalizing European tourism. Buzard argues that an exaggerated perception, first emerging after the Napoleonic Wars, of the Continental tour's sudden radical openness to virtually "every" level of society took firm hold on the British and American travelling imagination--a hold strengthened, over the years, by the visible labors of travel popularizers such as Thomas Cook and professional guidebook publishers such as Murray and Baedeker. One consequence--traceable in sources ranging from Punch and Blackwood's Magazine to writings by Wordsworth, Dickens, Frances Trollope, Ruskin, Anna Jameson, Henry James, Forster, and others--was a new set of formulations of what constitutes "authentic" culture (in a given place) and "genuine" cultural experience (in a given person). Accounts of the modern European tour evolved a symbolic economy of practices aimed at distinguishing the true "Traveller" from the "Vulgar Tourist"--mainly on the basis of imputed personal merits, not explicit social privileges. Its various forms of "anti-tourism" helped to make the European tour an exemplary cultural practice of modern liberal democracies, appearing at once popularly accessible and exclusive. ... Read more

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Garcia Mainar's critical study of the films of the late Stanley Kubrick includes analysis of all but his last work, Eyes Wide Shut, and offers both a formal analysis of the films based on style and narrative pattern, and a theoretical, postmodernist approach to ideas presented in the films. Garcia Mainar is particularly concerned with analyzing the relevance of spectacle in Kubrick's films, seeing it as a disruptive mechanism that can call into question the value and necessity of communication. He identifies different kinds of spectacle in the films, and proceeds to a detailed examination of these different forms in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Narrative and stylistic patterns in reviewing Kubrick...
It's about time someone would write up a profound review onsuch a profound director. Such a book should be almost the cinematiccontra to the excellent review, "Rhetoric of fiction", by Wayne C. Booth, where he examines the question: "Where does the real story lie?", to which th answer is, ofcourse, in the reader/viewer's mind, and not on the screen, or in the pages of the book. But this book is not such... Such examples are lacking in the book, which is very interesting, there's no mistake in it, but it doesn't examine the purpose of such narrative and stylistic tools, but only very broadly points them out.

Still, very good. ... Read more

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This title brings into focus central aspects of recent developments in European film and media culture. Through studies of both film and television the question of national identity, European integration and globalisation is analysed in a both Eastern and Western European context. This volume offers case studies of the more historical and institutional context of European film television, studies of European TV drama, children's television, TV entertainment formats, and comparative studies of European art cinema and art television and American (Hollywood) films and TV-serials. ... Read more