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"Situational Poetics is a deep, cultural history of Henryson's problematic Testament of Cresseid. This book offers wonderful insights throughout, from its analysis of the hybrid "dislocations and double consciousness" of late medieval Scottish literature, Henryson's "Virgilian" career, his admixture of tragedy and satire in the Testament, and the anamorphic temporalities that link Chaucer, Henryson and Shakespeare in their telling and re-telling of the Troilus and Criseyde story. This is an utterly compelling study of Henryson's Testament, one that promises to re-shape completely our understanding of the poem." --Stephanie Trigg, Professor of English, University of Melbourne "A remarkably ambitious attempt to re-situate Henryson's Testament of Cresseid within literary history and to recover the author's deliberately constructed career-profile from the many accidents of transmission. ... the first ever view of Henryson "in the round." --Tom Shippey, Professor Emeritus, St. Louis University "Nickolas Haydock's new book on the great Scot poet Robert Henryson manages to do several things at once that seemed to the rest of us to be incompatible. He firmly places Henryson's work in literary history, but renders him accessible and even in dialogue with new ways of thinking about literature and culture. He is respectful of Henryson's canonical place in Scottish identity but raises questions about how literature works in making national and ethnic identities. Haydock gives us a Henryson for the twenty-first century." --John M. Ganim, Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

Political turbulence was common during the times of dynastic transition in imperial China. Multiple regional regimes frequently rose on the lands of the former unified empire, vying for political and military supremacy until a dominant power emerged and achieved reunification. The period of political fragmentation during the tenth century, known as the Five Dynasties and Ten States (907 979) was typical of such times. From the crumbling of the Tang empire to the next reunification of China proper under the Northern Song dynasty, five short-lived dynasties succeeded one another in the Central Plains, the old political heartland in North China, while about a dozen smaller autonomous regimes occupied though not concurrently the rest of the country (mostly in the south). Lasting more than a half century, the period is thought to have been one of unique political intrigue, during which founding rulers of humble origins engaged in schemes and strategies that increasingly inspire popular interest today. This book is an exploration of the complicated national politics and intricate interstate relations of the early tenth century with a focus on the Former Shu (891 925), one of the Ten States that significantly contributed to the formation of the unique political configuration of the day. From the viewpoint of traditional historiography, the five northern dynasties constituted the central powers of the tenth century that dominated national politics and ultimately led China to the Northern Song reunification. In contrast, southern regimes were usually treated as subordinate or secondary powers, all considered neither legitimate nor capable of ever challenging the north, politically or militarily. This binary grouping and its discriminatory interpretation fundamentally shaped later historians perception of the national politics of Five Dynasties China. Even today, compared to the studies on the political history of the five northern dynasties, the neglect of the southern regimes is obvious in modern scholarship, especially in Western language publications. By focusing on the political history of the Former Shu regime in the south, this book seeks to provide a new understanding of the geopolitics of Five Dynasties China. This book sheds much light on the complicated national politics and intricate interstate relations of the divided tenth-century China. It examines how Wang Jian, a military governor of Tang, rose to power from obscurity in the chaotic late ninth century and founded an empire in what is today s Sichuan province in the early tenth century. Depending on a powerful military, the strategic location, and astute diplomatic tactics in dealing with surrounding powers, the Former Shu under Wang Jian s rule successfully challenged the hegemonies of the most powerful regimes of the day from its base in the south. It was recognized as a political equal and treated as such by the contemporary northern powers, with whom the Former Shu shared the Mandate of Heaven both in rhetoric and in reality. As the achievements of the Former Shu demonstrate, the widely accepted predominance of the northern dynasties over the other states during the Five Dynasties period does not reflect the political reality, at least in the first half of the tenth century, when no single power possessed the capability of destroying other rivals and dominating the entire country. The constructive relationships between the Former Shu and other regimes discussed in this study define a unique political configuration of tenth-century China that was characterized by power balance and pragmatic coexistence among the dynasties and states, which in most cases sensibly chose to share the Mandate and maneuvered to survive by interacting strategically with other powers and thus should be equally treated as regional regimes. This study thus provides a reevaluation of the biased Song interpretation of the Five Dynasties and rethinks national politics, the reality of interstate relations, and the mentality of the contemporary people in perceiving the upheavals and changes of tenth-century China. This book is an important study for scholars and students of medieval China and regional studies. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in political and military history.

War, genocide, and foreign occupation have taken their toll on Cambodia. These events have demolished infrastructure, overturned ruling parties, and led to the deaths of millions. Although these events are now past, many of the resulting ramifications still linger. One such remnant of the past are the landmines--abundant in number and pervasive in their propagation, landmine-related contamination continues to impact lives more than 30 years after the last war effort. The residual ordnance problem in Cambodia is being confronted by a team of well-intentioned, motivated, and hardworking professionals. Current efforts, however, do not consider, account for, or target economic vulnerabilities that individuals and family structures encounter. This study analyzes the relationship between economic vulnerability and landmine-related incidents. Specific accountability for vulnerability is given in terms of poverty assessment, agricultural vulnerability, and the relationship between the price of metal and tampering-specific behavior. This book provides the first and only comprehensive historical account of landmine-related contamination in Cambodia. This historical account contextualizes the magnitude, origin, and impact of ordnance in Cambodia by analyzing each of the ordnance contributing factions. In addition to providing an historical analysis of landmine-related contamination, this book assesses various types of vulnerability in conjunction with landmine-related incidents. More precisely, poverty, agricultural vulnerability, and the price of metal are all examined separately in accordance with landmine-related accidents and tampering rates. The author Wade Roberts presents research that has enabled the first-ever analysis to take place testing the response of tampering behavior to changing metal prices at the Cambodia-Thailand border. This book also provides a unique approach to the landmine problem, bringing in and comparing various socioeconomic variables of poverty and economic need. Measures of poverty that prove statistically significant in predicting landmine-related incidents include levels of single parenting, the use of firewood for cooking, migration proportions, population densities, male-female sex-ratios, and with low levels of formal education. Critical agricultural measures that are statistically correlated to landmine-related incidents include net rice output, the supply of water, rice yields, crop diversification, floods and droughts, and nonrice agricultural production. The statistical analysis of the price of metal reveals that tampering responds directly, and more than proportionately, to a change in the price of scrap metal. Suggested policy recommendations follow each of these analyses. Given the rich combination of quantitative and qualitative data coupled with the practical recommendations delineated, this book will be of immense value to scholars in poverty management studies, policy studies, and sociology.

China's recent economic growth has fed a rapid increase in the study of modern Chinese language and literature globally. In this shifting global context, authors who work on the edges of the literary empire raise important questions about the homogeneity of language, identity and culture that is produced by the modern Chinese literary canon. This book examines a key segment of this literature and asks, "What does it mean to be of Chinese descent and Chinese-speaking outside of China?" While there have been several excellent works that deal with individual Chinese authors from Malaysia, there is to date no broadly framed and comprehensive study of the body of Chinese diasporic literature emerging from this multiethnic, polylinguistic country. This neglect is surprising given the vibrant development of Chinese Malaysian literature.This book fills the gap by looking specifically at how diasporic Chinese subjects make sense of their Chinese and Malaysian identities in postcolonial Malaysia. This book will be of value to scholars and students of Chinese-language literature and culture.It will also appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Chinese and Southeast Asia studies as well as those interested in postcolonial, diaspora, migration, Asian American studies, and world literature.

The single most influential work in Chinese history is Lunyu, the Confucian Analects. Its influence on the Chinese people is comparable to that of the bible on the Western world. It is neither a tract of prosaic moralism contained in the fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants nor a manual of political administration that prescribes do's and don't's for new initiates. A book claiming a readership of billions of people throughout the history in China and East Asia and now even in the Western world must be one that has struck a chord in the readers, one which appears to arise from the existential concerns that Confucius shared: How can one overcome the egoistic tendency that plagues life? How does one see the value of communal existence? What should be one's ultimate concern in life?These questions call for a line of inquiry on the Analects that is explicitly existential. An existential reading of the Analects differs from other lines of inquiry in that it not only attempts to reveal how the text spoke to the original audience but also to us today. It is not only a pure academic exercise that appeals to the scholarly minded but also an engagement with all who feel poignantly about existential predicaments.In this existential reading of the Analects, the author takes Paul Tillich as an omnipresent dialogical partner because his existential theology was at one time very influential in the West and currently very popular in Chinese academia. His analysis of ontological structure of man can be applied to the Analects. This conceptual analysis reveals that that this foundational text has three organically connected levels of thought, proceeding from personal cultivation through the mediation of the community to the metaphysical level of Ultimate Reality. Few scholarly attempts like this one have been made to reveal systematically the interconnectedness of these three levels of thought and to the prominence to their theological underpinnings.This existential reading of the Analects carries with it a theological implication. If one follows the traditional division of a systematic theology, one will find that the Analects has anthropological, ethical, and theological dimensions, which correspond to the three levels of thoughts mentioned. If one understands soteriology more broadly, one will find the Analects also has a soteriological dimension. The Analects points to the goal of complete harmony in which a harmony within oneself, with the society and cosmos are ensured.If one is to construct a theology of the Analects, the existential reading enables the drawing of certain contrasts with Paul Tillich's existential theology. The Confucian idea of straying from the Way differs from the symbol of fall. The Confucian reality of social entanglement differs from the reality of estrangement. The Confucian paradoxical nature of Heaven differs from trinitarian construction of God. The most important contribution of this study is that it reveals the religious or theological dimension of the Confucian Analects.This is an important book for those engaged in the study of the Confucian Analects, including those in Chinese studies as well as comparative theology and religion.

If novelist Paul Mark Scott (1920-1978) has secured a niche in English literature, it is on the merits of his Raj Quartet and its sequel, Staying On, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1977. Yet by the time he had published The Jewel in the Crown in 1966, he had supported his family on his writing for six years, worked as a literary advisor for several publishers, routinely written book reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and Country Life, and published eight novels. Scott's literary reputation was already considerable when, at the age of 44, he embarked on The Raj Quartet that would take up the last fourteen years of his life-a masterpiece that reinterpreted the major events of his generation and challenged his contemporaries to face the legacy of their past. Beginning in 1964, Scott negotiated with the Harry Ransom Research Center at The University of Texas-Austin for the purchase of his manuscripts. Later, when he was teaching creative writing at the University of Tulsa in 1976, he arranged to sell his letters to the archives at McFarlin Library. Many years after his death, David Higham Associates (the literary agency for which Scott worked from 1950-1960 and which acted as Scott's own agent until his death in 1978) sold archival materials to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin. Only a limited amount of material from McFarlin's Paul Scott Collection has been published to date. The David Higham Collection has not been systematically used until now. Together, the Tulsa and Austin Collections involve many thousands of Scott's professional and personal letters, to a large degree untapped by scholars of literature. In this two-volume collection, Janis Haswell makes available to the reading public for the first time several hundred letters from the Tulsa and Austin archives, as well as dozens of private letters to daughters Carol and Sally Scott. Scott's letters never disappoint. They are intriguing, well-penned and (in most cases) well-preserved in carbon form by Scott himself. They explore in depth and detail available nowhere else his view of the themes and structure of his novels; his experience and views of India; his dealings with publishers, agents, critics, readers, and writer friends (the likes of Muriel Spark, Gabriel Fielding, M. M. Kaye); his role as an agent and influential reviewer of fiction; his trials in supporting himself and family as a freelancer; his experience as a teacher in the United States; and his love and loyalty to family and friends.

This book addresses two issues related to the structure of local government: the determinants of consolidation and the potential impact of consolidation on local government spending. This is a narrow undertaking and leaves important elements of local government reform for future analysis. The study's primary foci are examining the factors that influence city-county consolidation, considering the impact of city-county consolidation on local government spending, and estimating the potential savings that could result from the scale economies and efficiency gains from consolidating local government units. While other regions of the United States are considered in this study, but the analysis focuses primarily on the Midwest where population declines and changes in the employment base and state policies (such as property tax caps in Indiana) have had dramatic effects on the fiscal viability of local governments. The current economic climate, along with policy changes related to property tax restructuring in many states, has led to substantial reductions in local governments' budgets. As a result, many local governments are in crisis and are considering some level of consolidation. Statistical methods and data on consolidation referendum attempts in the United States since 1970 are used to test whether governments that have consolidated (i.e., voters approved the consolidation referendum) had higher spending prior to their consolidation (as measured by local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures) compared to the average local government in the state. The effects of city-county consolidation are explored; using consolidation referendum data, the impact of consolidation on local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures is examined. The influence of consolidation on economic development is also investigated with some interesting results. The study also used two methods to estimate the savings from government consolidation and presents aggregate models to examine the potential savings from economies of scale and efficiency improvements. The book also helpfully provides a helpful discussion of the economies of scale and efficiency for several functional areas, including police and fire protection, sewerage, solid waste, public welfare, administration, health, education, and libraries. This book will be an essential resource for political scientists and policy makers interested in American government. Written in a highly accessible manner, it will also be a valuable read for students and general readers.

American media interests have expressed profound dismay over the phenomenon of libel tourism whereby American authors and media companies have been successfully sued for defamation in foreign courts where there is little if any connection between the venue and the parties. Media interests view these proceedings as forum shopping of the worst sort because essential American First Amendment rights are being compromised. In response to this concern, federal legislation commonly known as the SPEECH Act (Securing the Protection of Our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act) became law in August 2010. The SPEECH Act promises to disturb the traditional American practice of extending comity or recognition to foreign judgments except where those judgments are repugnant to American concepts of justice. Foreign defamation judgments are routinely denied recognition under existing law and there would seem to be no reason for specific legislation dealing with defamation. However, in the absence of this legislation, recent developments in the English common law may open a window for greater international cooperation regarding defamation judgments. This book looks at defamation law from the viewpoint of freedom of speech theory as well as doctrinal law and demonstrates that the common law, while presenting a truer match with essential theory, frequently fails in practical application while Supreme Court interpretations of the First Amendment, while less sound theoretically, typically yield more satisfying results. Nevertheless, there are also ongoing changes in both bodies of law and the similarities will soon outweigh differences and recognition of foreign defamation judgments should no longer be routinely rejected. American media interests are quite rightly concerned about defamation actions being commenced against them in countries where freedom of speech is not as well developed or as protected as it is by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Of late, London has been the forum of convenience for lawsuits which have become known as Libel Tourism litigation because of the flimsy connection of the publication to the venue. As a consequence, media interests have been lobbying for protective legislation and on August 10, 2010, the federal SPEECH Act became law. This book discusses the ostensible reasons for this legislation and examines the law in light of traditional principles of extending recognition to foreign judgments as an essential aspect of comity among nations. In order to properly evaluate the SPEECH Act and its likely implications, this study critically examines the ongoing degradation of First Amendment speech protections in the US and the developing English common law defamation privileges and reaches some startling conclusions. In this first critical study of the SPEECH Act, Harry Melkonian not only examines the specifics and likely application of this legislation as well as the underlying phenomenon of Libel Tourism but also provides a radically new perspective on the incipient convergence of US First Amendment and English common law freedom of speech and defamation principles. Uniquely, the book approaches the concept of convergence from the viewpoint of both doctrinal law and free speech theory and amalgamates the results through application of the traditional law of comity among nations. Defamation, Libel Tourism and the SPEECH Act of 2010 is an essential book for everyone involved with international legal aspects of the media including publishers, broadcasters, as well as legal professionals and academics.

This book strives to address this gap in the research literature by focusing on the intergovernmental role of the nation's governors. This is done by examining the lobbying efforts of the governors through their national organization, the National Governors Association (NGA). The NGA has been a prominent representative of state interests for a number of decades, and the increasingly complex relationships between the states and the federal government--and the governors' role as manager of those relationships--have ensured that the governors and the NGA remain at the center of many critical national policy debates. Furthermore, the NGA serves as the primary organizing body of the governors, and the organization allows the state executives to effectively exert their influence over important policy decisions at the federal level. For these reasons, the NGA is a most appropriate organization for the study of governors as they work to influence federal policy. Taking a mixed method approach, this study highlights the factors that affect the ability of governors to shape national policy decisions and examines the results in the context of contemporary literature on the governorship, intergovernmental relations, and federalism. This book is therefore ideal for all who are interested in U.S. governorship, intergovernmental relations, and federalism generally.

Mo Yan, the most prolific writer in present-day China as well as one of its most prominent avant-gardists, is an author whose literary works have enjoyed an enormous readership and have caught much critical attention not only in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan but also in many other countries around the world. This book provides the most comprehensive exposition of Mo Yan's fiction in any language. Author Shelly Chan delves into Mo Yan's entire collection of literary works, considering novels as well as short stories and novellas. In this analysis, Mo Yan's works are dealt with in a diachronic fashion--Chan discusses the development of Mo Yan's style throughout his career by considering themes that he has addressed in a variety of narratives over time. This provides the reader with valuable insight into understanding how individual narratives fit into the entire collection of Mo Yan's body of literary work. Scholars will also welcome the book's extensive reference to secondary scholarship and theory, which skillfully deals with the Chinese scholarship and thoroughly covers the English-language sources on Mo Yan as well. This book on one of the most important figures in contemporary Chinese literary history will be a landmark resource for scholars in Asian studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism, as well as an enticing read for people interested in Chinese literature and historical fiction.

The disparate poetry of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell remains loosely connected by the New England region. The original voices in this verse form in part out of historical trends shaping the environment, as speakers confront a landscape informed by its past and transformed by cultural movements from the nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth century. As the first region in America, New England offers a locus in which to better understand the emergence of poetic voices closely identified with the experience of their surroundings. Tracking these voices in the verse of four seminal poets over the course of roughly one hundred years allows for a thorough survey of common links as to how speakers respond to historical shifts as well as how they view the landscape in the context of a shared literary tradition. Though scholars have explored the relationship between the work of these four poets and the New England region, the primal lyric tension that ultimately defines the voices that readers have come to identify as Dickinson or Lowell warrant closer investigation. No study has yet to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to read the speakers of this verse in the context of historical changes in their surroundings. This post-structural reading allows for arguably the closest consideration as to how voices take shape in the New England region based upon how the various speakers view the landscape they inhabit through a version of Emerson s perspective via his paradoxically transparent eyeball : an invisible presence that remains in the foreground because of rhetoric that describes it. For these speakers, history as well as literary tradition serves as such rhetorical covering , which in part offers a new way of considering how they come to sound like they come from New England by their visual experience of the environment. In connecting what has become rather standard post-structural theory to the practical relevance of local New England history, this book strives to bridge a recurring divide in literary study. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis to look specifically at the poetic speakers in part makes such an interdisciplinary examination possible. To see New Englandly ironically means to be seen by the formative historical effects of New England. Cultural movements shaping the experience of the speakers surroundings thus inform their conscious and unconscious desires as they in turn project such desires onto the land. The paradox of Emersonian vision especially central to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, wherein transparency gets covered with textual awareness, comes to exemplify this regional view taken by the speakers in the verse of the other poets here as well. The connection of Emerson s transparent eyeball in the New England landscape to the Lacanian gaze offers a means to extend a fundamental trope for lyric vision in the region. Such a critical and theoretical link especially in Stevens s verse offers a revision of readings by scholars like Harold Bloom and Richard Poirier who, though recognizing the importance of Emerson s eyeball as a metaphor of visual priority, have refrained from examining its full implications in a collective body of American literature. The insights that follow such an analysis perhaps make the strongest contribution to the existing scholarship of New England poetry by broadening the scope of the region and the reach of the historical effects that define it. The site of the Lacanian b ance defined as the gap between nature and the symbolic which ultimately defines the speakers inherent self-division, consistently charges the poetry with the greatest tension, paradoxically linking speakers to New England by threatening to disrupt their imaginative connection to their surroundings. This recurring gap around which vision and rhetoric move ultimately make the speakers of Stevens and the other three poets more regional than any slight reference to pine trees, barns, or graveyards. New England Landscape History in New England Poetry is an important book for readers interested in American poetry (especially the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell), psychoanalysis and literature, deconstructive analyses of modern poetry, and New England regional history.

This book remedies the near-complete lack of individual senator-level data available to scholars. Moreover, the dataset that Bell compiles represents a much more comprehensive list of Senate filibusters than any that has previously been compiled. Data are available for the entirety of the period from 1790 to 2008. The text provides a fully current (through the end of the 110th Congress) list of Senate filibusters from the first recorded instance in 1790. This new list undergirds a comprehensive historical analysis of filibusters and a full exploration of both micro-level (individual senator) determinants of filibustering and macro-level (institutional) factors that affect filibustering and its consequences. Beyond compiling and sharing the raw data on who filibusters what, Bell demonstrates that senators' filibustering behavior is frequently an extension of senators' legislative behavior more generally. The book makes it clear that filibustering is simply one strategy among many that senators employ as they try to advance their sometimes competing goals of representing their constituents, serving their political parties, and crafting good legislation. Building on work by Franklin L. Burdette (1940), Richard S. Beth (1994), and Gregory Wawro and Eric Schickler (2006). Filibustering in the US Senate offers a readable, accessible analysis that clarifies the meaning of important terms and offers practical insights into the uses-and abuses-of Senate legislative procedures. The timeliness of Filibustering in the US Senate, its interesting subject matter, and the accessible nature of the analysis will appeal to general and professional readers of political studies, as well as to practitioners in government.

Challenges and Opportunities: The Future of the Internet, Volume 4 is the fourth volume in a series on the future of communications by the Pew Internet &American Life Project and Elon University. Is Google making us stupid what is the future of intelligence in the age of instant information? This and other important issues were addressed by nearly 900 expert respondents who wrote compelling answers to the 10 questions asked in the Future of the Internet IV survey. Technologists, business leaders, scholars and others shared their views about the Internet and the evolution of: intelligence; reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge; identity and authentication; gadgets, applications and the predictability of innovation; personal and social relationships; industrial-age institutions; cloud computing; the Semantic Web and Linked Data; Generation Y, also known as the Millennials; and the core values of the Internet, such as the end-to-end principle. This book is an extension of and deeper look at the results of six Pew Internet/Imagining the Internet Center reports generated from the survey in 2010. About the series: Technology builders, entrepreneurs, consultants, academicians, and futurists from around the world share their wisdom in The Future of the Internet surveys conducted by the Pew Internet &American Life Project and Elon University. The series of surveys garners smart, detailed assessments of multi-layered issues from a variety of voices, ranging from the scientists and engineers who created the first Internet architecture a decade ago to social commentators to technology leaders in corporations, media, government, and higher education.

The essays in this book present new scholarship on the subject of empire building from a postcolonial and transnational perspective, using literary texts and cultural practices to focus on the exchange of ideologies and the intricacies of nation building, state-power, democracy, and anti-democracy, up to the recent "war on Terror." -- Publisher sumary.

Arthur Laurents's career as a playwright, screenwriter, book writer for musicals and director spanned over half a century. His first Broadway play, Home of the Brave, was produced in 1945; his last play, Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are, was produced in 2009 when he was ninety-one. Although he is best known for his work on the classic musicals Gypsy and West Side Story and for his screenplays for Rope, The Way We Were, and The Turning Point, Laurents is the author of seventeen full-length plays, numerous screenplays and three volumes of memoirs. Despite the length and distinction of Laurents's career, until now no one has written a full-length critical study of his work. Laurentss' name was associated with a few hit musicals and films, but his best work, the plays he wrote since 1975, are not as well known. One reason is that the economics of the American theatre have changed during the writer's lifetime and Laurents's serious plays were performed Off-Broadway or at regional theatres. Few were published, except in acting editions, until a volume of Selected Plays was assembled in 2005. Moreover, Laurents's highly controversial volumes of memoirs, filled with attacks on people who he felt betrayed him over the years, overshadowed his later work. Ignoring most his own plays in the memoirs did not help to maintain his reputation as a serious playwright This book rectifies the absence of a serious examination of all of Laurents's major work. This first comprehensive study of Laurents's work focuses on the subjects and themes that recur in his work, particularly the interrelated topics of gender politics, homosexuality and the dynamics of marriage. The position of women and gay men changed greatly over the sixty-plus years of Laurents's career and we see those changes reflected in his work, particularly in the shifting power dynamics within a marriage. Laurents was fascinated by the dynamics of marriage. In his plays there is always a tension between love and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of monogamy. In works like The Enclave, we also see a variety of ways in which gay men try to live proud lives in a heteronormative society. In that play and in Two Lives, Laurents examines how gay men negotiate something like a marriage before gay marriages were legally sanctioned. The book also covers the ways in which Laurents's plays reflect his interest in leftist politics from the 1940s through the various liberations of the late 1960s and 1970s. Above all, the study argues that if there is any common theme running through the plays, films and memoirs, it is betrayal-betrayal of marriage partner, friend, artistic collaborator and, most important, betrayal of one's own ideals. The Works of Arthur Laurents will be of particular interest to students and scholarsof American drama, musical theatre, American film, gender studies, gay studies, and Jewish studies.

Digital Media in East Asia sees digital media as an important element in the integration of South Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan, with economic/commercial interaction now being accompanied by regional sharing of content and services. It argues that the underappreciated scale of East Asian activity in this key sector is setting up the region as a global leader in the new economy, quietly building global dominance in manufacturing, digital implementations and, most recently, digital content production. The book also argues that the rise of prominence reflects the still active presence of national governments in East Asia in selecting and promoting commercial success in emerging industries. The combination of infrastructure development, regulation, investment, training and promotion used by each of the national governments in the study has produced impressive national and regional integration across manufacturing, service, government and education. The national innovation strategies of the East Asian governments have, in sum, produced impressive results, sparking widespread private sector investment and the development of sizeable content production communities. Of particular importance is the reality that linguistic and cultural barriers are keeping most of the digital content within East Asia, the world's fastest growing market for digital materials, a process that is re-enforcing the developing cultural ties within the region. Digital Media in East Asia makes significant contributions to East Asian studies (Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China), the scholarship on national innovation, and to debates about the economic, social, cultural, and political importance of digital media. As such, it will be of value in media studies/cultural studies collections, and will be of interest to scholars of Asian business, political science, national innovation, and political economy.

In the major literature on early modern Japan, the sakoku (closed country) edicts lurk in the background, and while scholars are generally aware of the major tenets of the policy, for example, the inability of Japanese to travel abroad or the clampdown on Christianity, the specifics of the edicts have yet to be studied in detail despite its potential to reveal much about this era of Japan's history. This work seeks to clarify the seventeen-article sakoku edicts of 1635 as well as to situate the edicts in the general foreign policy of seventeenth-century Edo Japan. This book will also examine a number of other policies that evolved in the first half of the seventeenth century to complete what is commonly (and somewhat erroneously) referred to as the "closed-country period." A great number of works on European and Chinese interactions with Japan have appeared over the past few decades, and most of them have done a fine job of dispensing with the myth that Japan was somehow hermetically sealed from the outside world. Scholars are aware that the Dutch played a large role in keeping the shogun informed about affairs in Europe, and that the Chinese were coming to Japan in ever greater numbers. They are also aware of the relationship between Japan and Korea. However, the fact remains that the Tokugawa did take pains to regulate the interactions of Europeans with Japan, and these measures are generally found in the various edicts passed by the bakufu in the first half of the seventeenth century. This book translates and illuminates the specific machinery of Japan's foreign relations, especially as it pertained to European trade and Christianity. In so doing, this study will situate the edicts--which are largely taken for granted, even though little has been studied--in Japan's early modern history. There are two insights this book presents. First of all, the study will demonstrate that the sakoku edicts were not a monolithic piece of legislation, but rather they evolved over time. The edicts against Christianity, the expulsion of the Spanish and the Portuguese, and the establishment of the machinery to regulate foreign trade were all responses to historical stimuli, and as such evolved in response to Japan's interactions with Europe and European trade and ideas. Second, this work will show that, ironically, the Tokugawa control of Japan's foreign policy was meant to strengthen its domestic control, especially vis-à-vis the powerful daimyo of western Japan, who traditionally profited with relations with the West. Therefore, there is much more to the sakoku edicts than simply the regulation of Japan's relations with foreigners. This book will appeal to the wider academic community working on pre-modern and early modern Japan. It will also be of value to those whose work involves the expansion of Europe into Asia, as well as European-Asian interactions. Written in a highly accessible style, this book will be of interest to even the casual reader of Japanese history.

From the Edo-period works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon and Saikaku Iharu, to modern texts by Nagai Kafû, Tanizaki Junichiro, and Nobel-prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, the Japanese literary canon is filled with works about the demimonde, or karyûkai. After years of being closed off to Western influences on both its literature and social policy, Japan fully opened up to the West in the late nineteenth century and finally abolished legalized prostitution in 1956. Until then, the idea of a space set aside for sexuality, like Tokyo's Yoshiwara district, had been a powerful catalyst in structuring stories about the demimonde, and in fact, narratives about the demimonde have continued to flourish in Japan even in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, even though the actual physical space of the traditional karyûkai has disappeared. In breadth and accomplishment, Japan's demimonde literature rivals that of any other national literature; yet very little work analyzing the cultural, psychological, and textual significance of this space has been published to date. What is more, bringing comparative approaches to Japanese literary studies is a relatively new phenomenon, but Western literature is essential to understanding both the wider context in which demimonde literature blossomed, as well as to probing what is unique about Japan's karyûkai-themed texts. The Demimonde in Japanese Literature applies both a comparativist approach and psychoanalytic models to the examination of the literary karyûkai in a way that allows for a penetrating and multi-dimensional reading of its meaning in works produced during Japan's tumultuous twentieth century. This book analyzes representations of the demimonde in Japanese literature and other arts from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1990s, through fiction, critical essays, films, photographs, and performances by Nagai Kafû, Kôda Aya, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kuki Shûzô, Mishima Yukio, Hosoe Eikoh, Tamura Taijiro, Murakami Ryû, Ohno Kazuo, and Matsumoto Toshio. Throughout the book, the author views the demimonde in general and the karyûkai in particular through the changing paradigms of spatial terms and configurations in the twentieth-century Japanese imagination. In some narratives written during the pre-World War II period, for instance, the karyûkai is distanced from the reader by the connoisseur as a way of containing and idealizing it in 1930s Japan, in a climate of intense censorship and military imperialism; in others it is chronicled as disruptive to public space, its values and fetishes spreading into new physical spaces in the tumultuous interwar Tokyo metropole. During the postwar era, as the book's close readings show, the demimonde is often shown to transcend psychic space via the taboo movement of memory, and occasionally it is internalized in the text via a celebration of small spaces and a poetics of dwelling. Surveying such a variety of writings and artists allows for a thorough analysis of the representation of the space of the demimonde not just in literary texts, but in films, photographs, and dance/performance art as well. The study also draws on comparative examples from Western demimonde texts, especially those that were pivotal for Japanese writers and artists, and she uses them to formulate a complex argument about the socio-cultural, psychological, aesthetic, literary, and political significance of the space of the karyûkai. The book also helpfully includes translated passages from books that were not previously translated in their entirety into English, including Koda Aya's Nagareru. The Demimonde in Japanese Literature is an important book for all Asian studies, comparative literature, and women's studies collections.

Sixteenth-century China experienced an economic transformation which saw the spread of commercialization and a consumerist material culture that pervaded all aspects of life. As society began to respond to the economic transformation, the ideology and culture of patriarchal descent-line ethics, hitherto an urban, literati trend, began to find resonance among up-and-coming literati families within rural communities. By the end of the sixteenth century, Chinese society, especially in the Jiangnan region and along the southeastern coast, had began to make the transition from the lijia system of household registration into corporate groups overtly organized by kinship relations and unified by the common symbols of the ancestral hall, lineage trust estates, compilation of lineage genealogies and in the symbolic performance of ancestral sacrificial rituals. At the same time, the middle decades of the sixteenth century saw the growing incidence of Japanese wokou piracy along the southeastern coast of China. The county of Haining in Zhejiang province was one such victim of the depredations of the wokou. Yet by the end of the century, it had also been transformed from a rural backwater into a prosperous area known for its lineages which enjoyed literary fame and official influence. The process by which groups within the local community of Haining created their identities as lineages is the focus of this study. While there has been much discussion about the wokou crisis, little attention has been paid to the impact of the wokou upon the littoral societies. Along the coast, the limited reach of the Ming empire was given a boost by the appointment of an anti-wokou administration which in turn marked the beginning of a more extensive incorporation of the maritime periphery into the larger administrative structure. The process of incorporation would have presented opportunities for interested parties to gain political legitimacy and social ascendancy through the adoption of patriarchal descent-line ethics and its accompanying rituals and cultural symbols. This book thus examines the appearance of lineage society in Haining against the background of the wokou raids and the problems brought about by the anti-wokou campaign. This is the first study that takes the innovative and unique approach of linking the rise of lineage organization in Haining, Zhejiang province, to wokou activity. By using Haining as the geographical focus of research, this study provides a good comparative study to published works on Chinese lineage organization which had focused largely on Guangdong, Fujian and Anhui provinces. Through the use of previously un-utilized genealogical records of the lineages resident in Haining, the story of how the local groups in Haining responded to the wokou raids through adopting imperially sanctioned ritual practices and cultural symbols to negotiate the transformation of their local communities into the Neo-Confucian model of corporate family organization emerges. The impact of this transitional process within the local community is extrapolated in the case studies of inter-lineage and intra-lineage conflicts. At the same time, the true extent and impact of the wokou crisis, long held by scholars to be of devastating effect on the Ming polity, is also re-examined. Lineage Society on the Southeastern Coast of China is an important book for Asian studies and history collections.

This book examines three overarching themes: Chinese modernity's (sometimes ambivalent) relationship to tradition at the start of the twentieth century, the processes of economic reform started in the 1980s and their importance to both the eradication and rescue of traditional practices, and the ideological issue of cosmopolitanism and how it frames the older academic generation's attitudes to globalisation. It is important to grasp the importance of these points as they have been an important part of the discourse surrounding contemporary Chinese visual culture. As readers progress through this book, it will become clear that the debates surrounding visual culture are not purely based on aesthetics--an understanding of the ideological issues surrounding the appearance of things as well as an understanding of the social circumstances that result in the making of traditional artifacts are as important as the way a traditional object may look. Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture is an important book for all collections dealing with Asian studies, art, popular culture, and interdisciplinary studies.

This book explores the intersection of public policy and the fast changing digital media economy. Over the last 20 years, digital technologies and digital content have revolutionized many aspects of social, economic and political life around the world. Governments, locked into the policies and programs of the traditional economy, are struggling to respond to this dynamic and commercially unique global ecosystem. This study examines the nature and extent of the digital economy, looking at both the commercial diversity within the sector and the different digital implementations across the world. While the digital engagement of North America is well known, the scale and intensity of digital growth in East Asia is not fully understood not are the transformative changes occurring in parts of Africa. The digital world is marked by the unexpected and rapid re-orientation of economic, social, cultural and political affairs. The digitization of work, for example, has already brought major disruptions within national economies. Governments are struggling to respond, in part because of pressures from the traditional industrial and resource sectors but also because of the unique, somewhat anarchistic nature of the digital content industry. The Global Digital Economy provides a profile of the global digital environment, reviews current government digital policies (with an emphasis on innovative strategies), and offers policy suggestions for national and subnational governments. Countries that respond creatively to the digital economy--like Taiwan, South Korea, Finland and Israel--stand to prosper from the anticipated accelerated growth of the sector. Those nations that struggle to keep pace with the digital infrastructure needs of the new economy and with the potential for employment and business creation stand to fall behind economically. This book provides a policy roadmap for the digital economy and identifies the risks and opportunities of this core sector in the twenty-first-century economy.

The problem of language constituted the most contentious subject of the philosophies and human sciences in the twentieth-century and drove what came to be known as the linguistic turn to Western thought. Phenomenology, linguistics, analytic philosophy, speech act theory, anthropology, psychology, poststructuralism, media studies, and ordinary language philosophy all addressed language as the primary vehicle of human thought and communication, and queried whether any accurate linguistic representation of reality were possible. The sound of the human voice lay at the center of the debate. The central question raised by Husserl s phenomenology and de Saussure s linguistics, and discussed throughout the century, concerned whether the sounds of the voice were intrinsic to meaning or were simply relative. In a related phenomenon, vocal experimentation marked the twentieth-century avant garde, which included the nonsense verbal texts of Dada; the electronic mediations of Samuel Beckett and Peter Handke; and the playful, ironic, and confrontational performances of Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and the Wooster Group. The experiments mirrored the fixation with voice and language as expressed in the philosophies and sciences. Yet despite the centrality of the voice for the philosophy of language, linguistic study, and performance, no book-length study before now has focused solely on vocal expression. The voice ranks with gesture as one of two media of communication available to every fully able-bodied human being, and yet theatre studies tends to take a visual approach to its objects of critique: the body, the dramatic text, and the mise-en-sc ne. Because the voice registers as a crucial media of expression in the theatre, theatre studies also can provide valuable contributions to the discussion of voice and language undertaken in other disciplines. The theatre as a social and public art form reveals a great deal about what we think and feel in regards to our communications with each other. Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century is the first book of theatre studies to identify and articulate theories of voice as expressed in the philosophies, human sciences, and physical sciences of the twentieth century. It also identifies parallels between the theories and the vocal practices of twentieth-century performances that shared similar concerns with issues of language and mediation. This book adopts as a central premise that the introduction and proliferation of electronic forms of communication stimulated the interest in voice and language in the scholarly discourses of the twentieth century and stimulated as well the fascination with the sounds of the voice as expressed in the twentieth-century avant garde. Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century is the only book of theatre and performance studies to address the sounds of the human voice and as such ranks as an invaluable addition to all theatre, philosophy, performance studies, communications, and cultural studies collections.

Discussion on Pacific literature invariably focuses on anglophone, and sometimes francophone, writing, and efforts to assert local cultures against Western influence. But, the Pacific has also been a site for dramatizing Japanese fears and desires in Japanese writing. These arose from its imperialist expansion and its concern over the activities of other powers in the Pacific region. Japanese colonial, military, economic, and tourist involvement in the Pacific has been a target for criticism on the part of writers from Oceania. Most contemporary Japanese literary texts portray the Pacific Islands as the most backward part of the world. Such Japanese attitudes toward the Pacific Islands are characterized by a lack of dialogue with the islanders and their views of Oceania. This book mainly deals with twentieth-century discourses on postcolonial relationships between Japanese and Pacific Islanders, as have been produced and transformed through the world powers colonial dynamics over the islands and sea. It examines Japanese images or representations of the area, especially Micronesia on which the term Nanyo centered and considers responses from Pacific Island writers in English. Through such comparisons of Japanese and Pacific Islander texts, this book connects postcolonial representations of the Pacific from Japan and the Pacific Islands to examine trans-Pacific cultural movements involved with Japan. In doing so, it brings to light the Pacific as a locale of diverse subjects coming together over imperialist regimes. This book presents the incomplete, unstable, and fluid decolonizations produced from vantage points of the colonizer colonized, diasporic returnees, emigrants, and hybrids. The Pacific reemerges as a palimpsestic communal space concerned with wa: harmony, unity, peace, mildness, pacific, and Japanese. Relating and encompassing imperial and anti-imperial cultures, and drawing their fangs, the wa space produces oceanic decolonization. Nanyo-Orientalism is an important book for Japanese and Pacific studies, comparative literature and culture, and postcolonial studies.

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.

This book is a comprehensive compilation of results from eight major research reports released in 2012 by the Pew Research Center and Elon University. In The Future of the Internet Survey V, more than 1,000 experts shared their views as they imagined the future of the Internet and: the always-on, hyperconnected generation in their teens-to-20s by 2020; the mobile Web, HTML5, and native apps; e-money, mobile wallets, and financial transactions through near-field communication; gamification--the influence of game mechanics implemented for interactivity and engagement; "e;smart systems"e; and the evolution of more efficient homes; corporate responsibility in the digital age; the influence of "e;Big Data"e; in the cloud; and the future of higher education.

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