First published in 1989, this book analyses fiction and long narrative, drawing on a broad range of writing from earlier periods and on recent narrative theory. Gillian Beer looks at the work of writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Philip Sydney, Samuel Richardson, and George Eliot. Three chapters on Virginia Woolf demonstrate how Woolf’s reading of past literature, philosophy, and science gave her an intellectual and emotional purchase on problems of feminism and modernism. Beer examines how writers create dialogues with past writing, how readers of the present day engage with the difference of past literature, and how we make contact with the desires and debates of past readers.

The Encyclopedia of Cosmology, first published in 1993, recounts the history, philosophical assumptions, methodological ambiguities, and human struggles that have influenced the various responses to the basic questions of cosmology through the ages, as well as referencing important scientific theories. Just as the recognition of social conventions in other cultures can lead to a more productive perspective on our own behaviour, so too a study of the cosmologies of other times and places can enable us recognise elements of our own cosmology that might otherwise pass as inevitable developments. Apart from modern natural science, therefore, this volume incorporates brief treatments of Native American, Cave-Dweller, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Megalithic, Mesopotamian, Greek, Medieval and Copernican cosmology, leading to an appreciation of cosmology as an intellectual creation, not merely a collection of facts. It is a valuable reference tool for any student or academic with an interest in the history of science and cosmology specifically.

The poetic nightingale is so familiar it seems hardly to merit serious attention. Yet its ubiquity is significant, suggesting associations with erotic love, pathos and art that cross culture and history. This book examines the different nightingales of European literature, starting with the Greek myth of Philomela, the raped girl, silenced by having her tongue cut out, and then transformed into the bird whose name means poet, poetry and nightingale simultaneously. Moving from the classical to the Christian worlds, Jeni Williams discusses nightingales and nature in the early church and sees the emergence of the figure as an emotive emblem of the aristocracy in mediaeval vernacular debate poetry. Her final chapters use the nightingale and the myth to examine Elizabeth Barrett Browning's struggle for an active female voice in Victorian poetry.

First published in 1997, this collection of articles and essays analyses the political economy of reform and change in Eastern Europe during the years of Gorbachev’s perestroika and the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Written by Polish economist Jan Winiecki, between 1984 and 1996, this work explores the issue of the feasibility of reform and change during the period of decline and collapse of communist economic order and, later, the emergence of the capitalist economic order in the post-communist Eastern Europe. Split into three parts, the work considers firstly the failures of Gorbachev’s political economy of reform, secondly the determining factors in the collapse of the Soviet system, and finally the feasibility of the systematic change which began in the wake of its collapse.

In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians – mainly German, American, British and French – have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.

First published in 1991, this title provides a comprehensive and objective account of the basis of ‘green’ arguments and their social and political implications. By the beginning of the 1990s, environmental awareness had become widespread, popular, and fashionable throughout the West, adopted by politicians, manufacturers and advertising agencies. The book sets out to explain why and how the ‘green wave’ developed, and examines the forces still shaping green politics and policies at an international level. With important implications across the fields of Sociology, Development Studies and Environment and Sustainability, this reissue will be valuable to a broad student and academic readership.

First published in 1990, Richard Clutterbuck's fascinating analysis of European security confronts the problems of internal European community frontiers and technological aids in combating terrorism and international crime. He looks at what the EC countries have done in the past, describes the technology now becoming available, and makes radical proposals for airport security, fighting drugs, and overcoming the intimidation of witnesses and juries. Above all, he foresees he exciting prospect of the USSR, the USA, and a united Europe co-operating for the first time to overcome the common enemies of terrorism and international crime.

>

First published in 1991, this book investigates not only the processes of industrial relations themselves but also the climate in which they work. As well as studying union behaviour, it views the topic from the wider perspective of human resource management and integrates theories of industrial relations and organizational analysis. The extensive empirical evidence presented, which draws on manufacturing and service industries in Canada, is used to examine such areas as cooperation between union and management, employee perceptions and corporate culture. This interesting reissue will be of importance to all those studying the dynamics of organizations and industrial relations processes, and ways in which a productive climate can be established and maintained.

Imagining Culture, first published in 1996, discusses literature as a whole rather than a partisan interest in those who are in or out of favour, and how that literature relates to other arts as well as to philosophical, historical, and cultural contexts. This title will be of interest to students of literature and cultural studies.