""Slum" is among the most evocative and judgmental words of the modern world. It originated in the slang language of the world's then-largest city, London, early in the nineteenth century. Its use thereafter proliferated, and its original meanings unraveled as colonialism and urbanization transformed the world, and as prejudice against those disadvantaged by these transformations became entrenched. Cuckoo-like, "slum" overtook and transformed other local idioms: for example, bustee, favela, kampong, shack. "Slum" once justified heavy-handed redevelopment schemes that tore apart poor but viable neighborhoods. Now it underpins schemes of neighbourhood renewal that, seemingly benign in their intentions, nonetheless pay scant respect to the viewpoints of their inhabitants. This Oxford Handbook probes both present-day understandings of slums and their historical antecedents. It discusses the evolution of slum "improvement" policies globally from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It encompasses multiple perspectives: anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, politics, sociology, urban studies and urban planning. It emphasizes the influences of gender and race inequality, and the persistence of subaltern agency notwithstanding entrenched prejudice and unsympathetically-applied institutionalized power. Uniquely, it balances contributions from scholars who deny the legitimacy of "slum" in social and policy analysis, with those who accept its relevance as a measuring stick of social disadvantage and as a vehicle for social reform. This Handbook does not simply footnote the past; it critiques conventional understandings of urban social disadvantage and reform across time and place in the modern world. It suggests pathways for future research and for alleviative reform"--

"The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship on regional language literary productions (in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), the critical works and the surveys focus only on that particular language and therefore frequently suffer from a lack of comparative breadth and/or global access. Both reflect the paradigm of monolingualism within which much literary scholarship on Indian literature takes place. This handbook instead focuses on the multilingual pathways through which modern Indian literature gets constituted. It features cutting-edge literary criticism from at least seventeen languages, and on traditional literary genres as well as more recent ones like graphic novels. It shows the deep connections and collaborations across genres, languages, nations, and regions that produce a literature of diverse contact zones, generating innovations on form, aesthetics, and technique. Foregrounding themes such as modernity and modernism, gender, caste, diaspora, and political resistance, the book collects an array of perspectives on this vast topic"--

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

Why plan? How and what do we plan? Who plans for whom? These three questions are then applied across three major topics in planning: States, Markets, and the Provision of Social Goods; The Methods and Substance of Planning; and Agency, Implementation, and Decision Making.

A timely collection of critical essays that reveal the complexities and opportunities of revolutionary changes in higher education in Africa. The contributors exude transformation themes from Africanisation to technology. Not only have they rethought higher education but they highlight recommendations that would liberate institutions of higher education in Africa.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary historical contexts. The Handbook's coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the recalcitrant atavisms of Irish Gothic fiction; nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Seán O'Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women's fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.

The study of Irish history, once riven and constricted, has recently enjoyed a resurgence, with new practitioners, new approaches, and new methods of investigation. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History represents the diversity of this emerging talent and achievement by bringing together 36 leading scholars of modern Ireland and embracing 400 years of Irish history, uniting early and late modernists as well as contemporary historians. The Handbook offers a set of scholarly perspectives drawn from numerous disciplines, including history, political science, literature, geography, and the Irish language. It looks at the Irish at home as well as in their migrant and diasporic communities. The Handbook combines sets of wide thematic and interpretative essays, with more detailed investigations of particular periods. Each of the contributors offers a summation of the state of scholarship within their subject area, linking their own research insights with assessments of future directions within the discipline. In its breadth and depth and diversity, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History offers an authoritative and vibrant portrayal of the history of modern Ireland.

This volume embodies a problem-driven and theoretically informed approach to bridging frontier research in urban economics and urban/regional planning. The authors focus on the interface between these two subdisciplines that have historically had an uneasy relationship. Although economists were among the early contributors to the literature on urban planning, many economists have been dismissive of a discipline whose leading scholars frequently favor regulations over market institutions, equity over efficiency, and normative prescriptions over positive analysis. Planners, meanwhile, even as they draw upon economic principles, often view the work of economists as abstract, not sensitive to institutional contexts, and communicated in a formal language spoken by few with decision making authority. Not surprisingly, papers in the leading economic journals rarely cite clearly pertinent papers in planning journals, and vice versa. Despite the historical divergence in perspectives and methods, urban economics and urban planning share an intense interest in many topic areas: the nature of cities, the prosperity of urban economies, the provision of urban services, efficient systems of transportation, and the proper allocation of land between urban and environmental uses. In bridging this gap, this book highlights the best scholarship in planning and economics that addresses the most pressing urban problems of our day and will stimulate further dialog between scholars in urban planning and urban economics.

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.