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The book deals with the analysis of key political actors in the 'new democracies' from Central and Eastern Europe. It is focused on the character of elites - particularly political ones - and their role in the process of societal change. The argument is that elite configuration has strong impact on developmental dynamics of these societies.

This book provides a comparative analysis of 21st Century US/EU agendas in Africa. It focuses on how discussions about the Hard/Soft/Smart and Civilian/Normative Power, Security-Development Nexus, HS etc. informed and influenced the US/EU Africa agendas. What are the reasons for the different salutations to two pivotal policies (JAES P&S /AFRICOM)?

The author analyses Victorian literary criticism as a rich source of contemporary interpretative ideas. She follows the interpretative pursuits of nineteenth-century readers and analyses Tennyson's The Princess through the prism of their critical ideas.

The book describes a valuation approach tailored to brokers and analyses insurance intermediary M&A revealing positive abnormal returns for acquirers. It provides a comprehensive analysis of insurance intermediaries including an up-to-date market perspective, pointing out performance drivers for tied agents.

This book critically reflects upon how images are mobilised within certain knowledge traditions, beyond the established categories of art, scientific visualisations and religious images. Thinking through and with images across ages, the authors seek to expand our understanding of the relationship between the visual and the epistemic.

This media linguistic study provides a genre history of the personal weblog, using a diachronic corpus (1997-2012). The results on several dimensions (e.g. situation, structure etc.) are used to outline a coherent genre history of the personal weblog in its various relations to different on- and offline genres.

South Africa was a divided society under apartheid, which also shaped the churches ethnically. The legacy of apartheid continues to cause division between people through inequality, injustice, skewed power relations, and marginalisation. This book deals with the relationship between the catholicity of the Church and the ethnicity.

This volume includes studies of ritual change and social transformation in Singapore, Germany and the US. It focuses on the changes and adjustments of rituals in times of migration.

This book analyses the relationship between literature, history and politics in post-Soviet Russia. It explores the impact of the collapse of the USSR on Russian literature and culture and the changing content and reception of fiction on historical themes under Presidents Yeltsin and Putin. It discusses the value of various theoretical concepts, such as postmodernism, trauma, nostalgia, and the notion of discourse as power, in analysing post-Soviet historical fiction. The book shows that Russian society¿s confrontation with its past has remained one of the main themes of Russian culture during the period 1991-2006. Notwithstanding the gradual decline of the literature of sensational disclosure associated with Gorbachev¿s perestroika, a more oblique investigation of many aspects of Russian and Soviet history and an interest in the philosophy of history have continued to be significant preoccupations of post-Soviet culture. Individual and family history continue to be explored in memoirs and autobiographical writings, while the history and destiny of Russia have been passionately debated in literary journals and the media, as Russians search for a new ¿national ideä to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of communism. This study suggests that there is a remarkable continuity between post-Soviet literature and pre-revolutionary Russian literature and thought.

Literariness is present on all levels of the literary work, in the tensions between the artificiality and naturalness of speech, experimentation and revitalization of tradition, objective observation and a biased vision of the world, its visibility and invisibility, expressibility and inexpressibility, and a realistic and an imaginative focus.

How do young people with migration backgrounds take part in and shape urban leisure socialities in European cities? Presenting results of a long-term ethnographic research project carried out in ethnic club scenes in Paris, London and Berlin, this book challenges assumptions about migrant community dynamics and ethnic segregation.

The thesis addresses the question of human consciousness in its oscillation between conditioning and transcendence: the impact of cultural worldviews on the individual's lifeworld and their gradual transcendence as a form of spiritual practice. It discusses the embodiment of belief systems and the individual's power to transcend cultural precepts.

This collection of essays, by a number of established scholars and artists, proposes new directions for Marxist cultural theory and the criticism of modern visual culture. It addresses a diverse range of topics, including the state and revolution, Communist and post-Communist aesthetics, Situationist thought and the avant-garde, subjectivity and commodification, and the politics and problems of contemporary artistic practice. The contributions also consider several other pressing questions in the visual arts, from the practice of digital culture to appropriations of critical theory, from the relations of art and the spectacle to architecture in the age of global modernity. This book on Marxism and art is not offered in a spirit of nostalgia: on the contrary, it testifies to the continuing vitality and confidence of historical materialist thought in the field of cultural theory and practice in the 21st century.

Monika Kocot's book on Edwin Morgan's literary achievement, both poetry and drama, foregrounds the themes of cultural transgression, dialogism of the author's creative design, and various, potentially subversive games of sense creation: "verbivocovisual" constellations, mythopoetic "writings-through," and intersemiotic translations.

On the History of Rock Music follows the development of rock music from its origins up to the present time. Rhythmic patterns behave as archetypes for specific rhythms. In 250 score examples, the author identifies the characteristic rhythmic patterns in rock styles, ranging from rock and roll, hard rock and punk rock to grind core.

This book is the first introduction into anthroposophy and anthroposophical medicine on the basis of epistemology, physics, chemistry, molecular biology, neurobiology, psychology, philosophy of mind, history of science, and evidence based medicine. Justification of a non-reductionist, academic anthropology and medical practice accounting for body, life, soul, and spirit.

The volume is concerned with sociolinguistic issues of language endangerment and globalization. In the light of increasingly complex and variable multilingual environments the book explores research areas such as language policy, linguistic inequalities and language attitudes. Case studies of endangered minority languages conclude the book.

The book analyses a mode of apophasis in contemporary theoretical discourse. It explores the relationship between negative theology and Jacques Derrida's textual practice, as well as the similarities between apophasis and the trope of transgression in the works of Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille or Michel Foucault.

The author presents the phenomenon of 'Hollandism' in the 19th century painting, art criticism and literature. She discusses cliches attached to the culture of the Golden Age of Holland (e.g. its bourgeois and Protestant character, its realism and its genre character) and the modern aspects of northern Netherlandish painting of the 17th century.