Paradise Lost First published in 1980. Paradise Lost was once a favourite text for family reading; today it is confined to the educational system which treats it as an object to be investigated rather than a subject that demands response. Professor Hunter writes inevitably for an audience of literary students but he invites them to consider Paradise Lost as a text that must be enjoyed before it can be explained. He understands the need to explain complexities but is mainly concerned with the onward flow of our engagement with an ancient poem. Milton’s narrative technique is explored as a system which both encourages and frustrates our native sense of story. His poetic power is shown to grow from our assent to its brilliant evocation of as if fictions. Milton is a master of audience manipulation of dramatic tension and intellectual paradox. These characteristics are described in the context of the task the poem sets itself to tell the untellable and describe what no man has ever seen. The power of Milton’s art is traced through his rehandling of Homer and Virgil and in his daringly individual fidelity to scripture. Professor Hunter does not try to smooth away the contradictions inherent in Milton’s ambition to write an English classical Christian epic. He rather stresses the contradictions as cues to a properly alert reading. And this is what the book aims at above all a response to Paradise Lost which is alert to poetry and unintimidated by scholarship. GBP 29.99 1
Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland Commitment Friendship Pleasure This title was first published in 2000: Women in the 19th century have long been presented as the angel in the house. The author re-writes this history by investigating the life and working conditions of a number of middle-class women who sought to establish themselves as professional artists in Scotland. Contrary to the orthodox view preoccupied with oppression and difficulty the author demonstrates that women artists of the period were independent producers teachers and travellers alert to changes in taste and fashion. They derived great pleasure from their work and enjoyed the benefits of women working together forming their own and joining existing professional associations. The book is not biographical but elaborates on the life and working conditions of middle-class artists by discussing their work in terms of economic and social history. | Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland Commitment Friendship Pleasure GBP 31.99 1
Enhancing Legislative Drafting in the Commonwealth A Wealth of Innovation Legislation has traditionally been viewed as a text addressed to and used by lawyers and judges. But with enhanced accessibility via electronic publication of legislation in many Commonwealth jurisdictions drafters speak not only to lawyers and judges but also to untrained users. This shift of the legislative audience has changed radically the requirements for legislation and its drafting. This is crucially important as the quality of legislation within the Commonwealth remains an essential element of democracy and the rule of law. The book aims to alert policy officers legal officers law reformers and drafters of the many innovations in the drafting of legislation within the Commonwealth. And ultimately to bring to light the academic foundations of the modern approach to legislative quality which really boils down to effectiveness of the legislative product. This book was based on a special issue of Commonwealth Law Bulletin. | Enhancing Legislative Drafting in the Commonwealth A Wealth of Innovation GBP 38.99 1
The Physical Actor Contact Improvisation from Studio to Stage The Physical Actor is a comprehensive book of exercises for actors. It is carefully designed for the development of a strong and flexible physical body able to move with ease through space and interact instinctively on-stage. Annie Loui draws on her training with Etienne Decroux Carolyn Carlson and Jerzy Grotowski to bring Contact Improvisation into the theatrical sphere. She explains how it can be used to develop alert and embodied listening skills in the actor and how to apply it to working with texts on stage. This book will guide the reader through a full course of movement skills including: Partnering skills Spatial awareness for groups and individuals Fine motor control through mime Heightened co-ordination and sustained motion New for this edition are additional partnering exercises in-depth applications of contact improvisation to monologues and scenes and a chapter on devising physical theatre performances. | The Physical Actor Contact Improvisation from Studio to Stage GBP 34.99 1
Fifty Key Irish Plays Fifty Key Irish Plays charts the progression of modern Irish drama from Dion Boucicault’s entry on to the global stage of the Irish diaspora to the contemporary dramas created by the experiences of the New Irish. Each chapter provides a brief plot outline along with informed analysis and alert to the cultural and critical context of each play an account of the key roles that they played in the developing story of Irish drama. While the core of the collection is based on the critical canon including work by J. M. Synge Lady Gregory Teresa Deevy and Brian Friel plays such as Tom Mac Intyre’s The Great Hunger and ANU Productions’ Laundry which illuminate routes away from the mainstream are also included. With a focus on the development of form as well as theme the collection guides the reader to an informed overview of Irish theatre via succinct and insightful essays by an international team of academics. This invaluable collection will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of theatre and performance studies and to lay readers looking to expand their appreciation of Irish drama. GBP 27.99 1
Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914 For Decadent authors Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism perversion transition and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914 while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted darker perverted other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly John Keats’s works are a particular focus in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity isolation addiction fragmentation representation romance and voyeurism as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism. | Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914 GBP 38.99 1
The Remote Work Handbook The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy The Remote Work Handbook: The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy is for readers seeking to leverage the business benefits of a flexible remote workforce. It is a practical guide for building and implementing remote work at any size organization. C-suite executives operation leaders business owners or entrepreneurs who recognize the workplace is changing can use it to re-tool their operations for a strategic business advantage. Mari Anne Snow the author is a recognized remote work expert with over 20 years of experience leading remote teams and has re-written the rules of leadership to unlock the potential in remote and distributed teams. In this book she shares all her secrets. The book explores the untapped potential of remote teams and lays out the business case for adopting a new flexible workplace model to build organizational resilience and a competitive edge. It takes the reader through the step-by-step process of constructing a remote work operating model staging an implementation then institutionalizing and sustaining the change. It includes down-to-earth professional and personal stories that alert the reader to the top priorities and operational realities they will face as they craft their own implementation plan for operationalizing remote work at their company. | The Remote Work Handbook The Definitive Guide for Operationalizing Remote Work as a Competitive Business Strategy GBP 28.99 1
Dickens’ Novels as Poetry Allegory and Literature of the City Focusing on the language style and poetry of Dickens’ novels this study breaks new ground in reading Dickens’ novels as a unique form of poetry. Dickens’ writing disallows the statement of single unambiguous truths and shows unconscious processes burrowing within language disrupting received ideas and modes of living. Arguing that Dickens within nineteenth-century modernity sees language as always double Tambling draws on a wide range of Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song and what happens in jokes in caricature in word-play and punning and in naming. Working from Dickens’ earliest writings to the latest deftly combining theory with close analysis of texts the book examines Dickens’ key novels such as Pickwick Papers Martin Chuzzlewit Dombey and Son Bleak House Little Dorrit Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. It considers Dickens as constructing an urban poetry alert to language coming from sources beyond the individual and relating that to the dream-life of characters who both can and cannot awake to fuller different consciousness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin Lacan and Derrida Tambling shows how Dickens writes a new and comic poetry of the city and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This volume takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to all readers of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies and more widely to all readers of literature. | Dickens’ Novels as Poetry Allegory and Literature of the City GBP 38.99 1
Gendered Approaches to Spatial Development in Europe Perspectives Similarities Differences This book explores the extent to which gendered approaches are evident and effective in spatial development in selected European countries. Beginning with an introduction to theories and concepts of gender space and development the book includes a brief historical review of gender in spatial planning and development throughout Europe in general and an overview of different national frameworks in European countries comparing legal organisational and cultural similarities and differences. This is followed by a critical reflection on how simplifications and stereotypes of gender concepts are used in the practice of spatial development. The main part of the book offers a transnational discussion of planning practices on selected thematic topics. It starts with gender-sensitivity in urban master planning and at neighbourhood level referring to different types of planning manuals. Furthermore the book focuses on gender-sensitive evaluation in urban planning as well as international agendas for sustainable development as a framework for a new generation of gender equality policies. The chapter authors assert that climate change migration and austerity have threatened gender equality and therefore spatial development needs to be especially alert to gender dimensions. The editors end with an outlook and suggestions for further action and research on gender issues in spatial development. With inputs from some of Europe’s leading thinkers on gender space and development this volume is designed to inspire students scholars and practitioners to reflect upon the contribution that gendered approaches can make in the various fields of spatial development and environmental planning. | Gendered Approaches to Spatial Development in Europe Perspectives Similarities Differences GBP 39.99 1
The Platform of Agile Management And the Program to Implement It Facing the amplitude and the acceleration of changes management must also change and it must become alert adaptable and agile. The children of the Internet the likes of Google Amazon Facebook and Tesla are born agile and they challenge the traditional organizations that have long lost their original agility. The latter may have innovated externally i. e. on the market-oriented part of their organization. Yet internally their mindset their models and their methods have remained tightly trapped in traditional tenets. Confronted with the need for deep changes an increasing number of business-leaders launch change-management programs yet conceived and carried out in traditional ways up to 70% of them result in partial or total failure. Management cannot innovate itself it needs people with the right motivation and with the right mind-set. However stuck in the old system people can only keep working in the old ways and means. Thus the leadership must start by replacing a traditional system with a new and agile one which will unbridle entrepreneurship. The Platform of Agile Management and the Program to Implement It combines 3 principles that help to innovate thinking 3 paradigms to innovate behaviours and 3 practices to innovate and to accelerate actions. The proposed platform is comprehensive connective and congenial. It is implemented with an agile program that combines top down push by the leadership with the bottom up pulled by the people. Then the proposed platform will generate continuous improvements and innovations of the performance drivers. | The Platform of Agile Management And the Program to Implement It GBP 36.99 1
Work and Labor Relations in the Construction Industry An International Perspective The need for a skilled motivated and effective workforce is fundamental to the creation of the built environment across the world. Known in so many places for a tendency to informal and casual working practices for the sometimes abusive use of migrant labor for gendered male employment and for a neglect of the essentials of health and safety the industry its managers and its workforce face multiple challenges. This book brings an international lens to address those challenges looking particularly at the diverse ways in which answers have been found to manage safe and productive employment practices and effective employment relations within the framework of client demands for timely and cost-effective project completions. Whilst context history and contractual frameworks may all militate against a careful attention to human resource issues this makes them even more deserving of attention. Work and Labor Relations in Construction aims to share understanding of best practice in the industries associated with construction and related activities recognizing that effective work organization and good standards of employee relations will vary from one location to another. It acknowledges the real difficulties encountered by workers in parts of the developing world and the quest for improvement and awareness of some of the worst hazards and current practices. This book is both critical and analytical in approach and seeks to alert readers to the need for change. Aimed at addressing practical issues within the construction industry from a theoretical and empirical standpoint it will be of value to those interested in the built environment employment relations and human resource management. | Work and Labor Relations in the Construction Industry An International Perspective GBP 38.99 1
Homeland Security Scams A direct consequence of the War on Terror launched after the attacks of September 11 2001 is an awareness of the need for homeland security. This war is being used to justify a huge expansion of government powers and spending but funds allocated for homeland security are often for programs far removed from anything that might be termed defense or security. In Homeland Security Scams James T. Bennett shows that this government spending is doing very little to make us safer but a great deal to make us poorer less free and more dependent on the federal government. Regardless of the color of the security alert issued by the Homeland Security czar the spending light is always green as pork barrel dollars are showered on programs of dubious worth. Lobbyists lobby for homeland security grants and contracts; corporations and state and local governments are becoming ever more dependent on federal subsidies; the vested interest in prolonging and intensifying the concern about homeland security increases; and lobbyists press for ever more money. As Bennett makes clear with government money comes government control. Law enforcement and emergency response agencies at all levels of government are being effectively nationalized. Police power is being concentrated and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) envisions a surveillance state that the East German State Police under Communism would have envied. In this hard-hitting critique Bennett argues that all the spending and surveillance will not win the War on Terror or preserve us from natural disasters. The foe cannot be beaten (we're having trouble even finding the enemy) cannot surrender and still has awesome powers to lay waste to American cities and citizens. He argues that we should view terrorism as just one of many other serious threats to individuals and to nations. More sternly he warns that the War on Terror is also a War on Privacy and a War on Liberty. GBP 42.99 1