Bøker utgitt av Peter Lang AG

British economic and industrial policy since 1979 is examined using a wide range of sources. Was this really «new», revival of earlier approaches or a rigorous extension of the IMF-imposed policies on the 1974-79 Labour Government? The question is asked: Was the creation of a large pool of unemployed labour necessary for reshaping the economy or was the aim to secure fundamental changes in the relations between capital and organised labour? Due to setbacks suffered by trade unions in the 1980s with factory closures and major job losses, the author questions Labour¿s motives in softening any meaningful opposition to the Conservatives, supporting ERM in 1990, reducing the role of trade unions in the Party itself and retaining key policies of the Thatcher era especially its trade union laws.

Contemporary materialism, in its varied configurations, persistently challenges claims that the body can be relegated to a subservient position when compared to reason. In most pertinent colonial and postcolonial studies the body is seen as a text, upon and by means of which signs of difference are instituted. Yet, to be able to test and appreciate to what extent the postcolonial body was and remains today a battleground for discursive control, it is helpful to start with the awareness of the somatics of the traveller himself ¿ his agreement to and with his own person or lack thereof vis-à-vis other bodies, his translation of the somatic into the semantic. The traveller¿s body, when rendered in writing, becomes a symbolic construct which enters into a relation with the represented world, and the nature of this multifaceted, troubled alliance ¿ if alliance it is ¿ forms the main theme of this book.

This companion offers for the first time a book-length review of medical practitioners and episodes in Dickens¿s fiction. The novels and sketches are examined from a medical-historical viewpoint, revealing in several cases a topicality which has been obscured by time. The accuracy of Dickens¿s descriptions is confirmed by comparison with medical texts published between the 1700s and the present. Examination of the reception of Dickens¿s works by members of the medical profession brings fascinating insight into Dickens¿s popularity among doctors, the degree to which his characters continue to «live», and the diversity of opinion with which they and their medical states are interpreted. The Public Health movement, arising in the Victorian Age, finds its way into Dickens¿s fiction, and even more into his weekly journals. The folk remedies, movements outside the medical mainstream and superstitions found in Dickens¿s works reflect not only his own convictions, but also the state of medicine in an age of flux. These aspects in the works of a nineteenth-century medical layman are made accessible and presented in a form readable for laymen and professionals alike.