New Chinese Cinemas analyzes the changing forms and significance of filmmaking in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong since the end of the Cultural Revolution, with a particular emphasis on how film comments on the profound social changes that have occurred in East Asia over the past two decades. Considering in detail both conservative and progressive stances on economic modernization, it also demonstrates how film has been an important formal structure and social document in the interpretation of these changes. The essays collected here, which were specially commissioned for this volume, also offer extended analyses of the important trends, styles, and work that define Chinese filmmaking in the 1980s.

This book is a study of ancient Greek views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. In a close analysis of three tragedies, and works by Plato and Aristotle, the author argues that we cannot understand the thought of the philosophers without also investigating its relation to the literary works; and that the literary works, in virtue of their form as well as their content, make a distinctive contribution to ethical thought.

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state. Furthermore, Spruyt examines the encounter between these non-European systems and the West. Contrary to unidirectional descriptions of the encounter, these non-Westphalian polities creatively adapted to Western principles of organization and international conduct. By illuminating the encounter of the West and these Eurasian polities, this book serves to question the popular wisdom of modernity, wherein the Western nation-state is perceived as the desired norm, to be replicated in other polities.

"Is what could have happened but never did as real as what did happen? What did happen, but isn't happening now, happened at another time. Analogously, one can say that what could have happened happens in another possible world. Whatever their views about the reality of such things as possible worlds, philosophers need to take this analogy seriously. Adriane Rini and Max Cresswell exhibit, in an easy step-by-step manner, the logical structure of temporal and modal discourse, and show that every temporal construction has an exact parallel that requires a language that can refer to worlds, and vice versa. They make precise, in a way which can be articulated and tested, the claim that the parallel is at work behind even ordinary talk about time and modality. The book gives metaphysicians a sturdy framework for the investigation of time and modality - one that does not presuppose any particular metaphysical view"--

This Element examines eighteenth-century manuscript forms, their functions in the literary landscape of their time, and the challenges and practices of manuscript study today. Drawing on both literary studies and book history, Levy and Schellenberg offer a guide to the principal forms of literary activity carried out in handwritten manuscripts produced in the first era of print dominance, 1730-1820. After an opening survey of sociable literary culture and its manuscript forms, numerous case studies explore what can be learned from three manuscript types: the verse miscellany, the familiar correspondence, and manuscripts of literary works that were printed. A final section considers issues of manuscript remediation up to the present, focusing particularly on digital remediation. The Element concludes with a brief case study of the movement of Phillis Wheatley's poems between manuscript and print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book examines the economic reasons why people choose to live where they live and develops, through analysis of the bid rent function, a unified theory of urban land use and city size. The first part of the book explicates the basic theory of urban land use and optimal city size. Residential location behavior of households is examined in a microeconomic framework and equilibrium and optimal patterns of residential land use are discussed. The corresponding equilibrium and optimal city sizes are studied in a variety of contexts. Part Two extends the classical theories of von Thunen and Alonso with the addition of externality factors such as local public goods, crowding and congestion, and racial prejudice. The rigorous mathematical approach and theoretical treatment of the material make Urban Economic Theory of interest to researchers in urban economics, location theory, urban geography, and urban planning.

Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own is striking and distinctive in both style and content. First published in 1844, Stirner's distinctive and powerful polemic sounded the death-knell of left Hegelianism, with its attack on Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Moses Hess and others. It also constitutes an enduring critique of both liberalism and socialism from the perspective of an extreme eccentric individualism. Karl Marx was only one of many contemporaries provoked into a lengthy rebuttal of Stirner's argument. Stirner has been portrayed, variously, as a precursor of Nietzsche (both stylistically and substantively), a forerunner of existentialism and as an individualist anarchist. This edition of his work comprises a revised version of Steven Byington's much praised translation, together with an introduction and notes on the historical background to Stirner's text.

How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence.

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought gives a comprehensive overview of intellectual life in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world at a time when the boundaries of knowledge were growing rapidly in response to a world undergoing radical change. Organised in two parts, the volume begins with four wide-ranging chapters on key areas of thought: philosophy, science, political and legal theory, and religion. The second part comprises shorter chapters that focus on subjects of emerging inquiry, such as aesthetics, economics, and sensibility and emotion, as well as intellectual disciplines undergoing methodological evolution, such as history. A chronology is provided to help situate historical events, important thinkers, key publications, and intellectual milestones in relation to one another, and guides for further reading point the reader to avenues for deeper exploration of the Companion's various topics.

This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

This is the first full-scale study of the drawings and paintings of the Bront� sisters and their brother, Branwell, including the first catalogue of all known Bront� illustrations, published and unpublished. The Art of the Bront�s comprises 400 illustrated entries, recording such details as medium, dating, provenance, sources, style, and arguments for attribution; and documenting many previously unknown drawings and paintings. In addition, a sequence of narrative chapters provides new material on each of the four Bront� siblings and their relationships to the visual arts, suggesting ways in which their experience of drawing influenced their writing. An annotated and illustrated catalogue which is also a work of scholarly criticism, this publication is a landmark in Bront� studies and in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and painting generally.

Product description
Raymond Murphy's English Grammar in Use is the first choice for intermediate (B1-B2) learners and covers all the grammar you will need at this level. This book with answers has clear explanations and practice exercises that have helped millions of people around the world improve their English. It is perfect for self-study and can also be used by teachers as a supplementary book in classrooms.

This book examines how social science transforms a biological event--a birth--into a social and moral problem. Drawing on Foucault's archaeology of knowledge, the book stresses the role of statistics and other truth-telling discourses in the birth and growth of the illegitimacy problem since the early nineteenth century. Chapters explore the diverse discursive origins of illegitimacy's negative meanings--expense, racial inferiority, social disorder, death, mental incompetence, fatherlessness and selfishness. The book offers an international perspective.

Supermarkets, in all their everyday mundanity, embody something of the enormous complexity of living and consuming in late twentieth century western societies. Shelf Life, first published in 1998, explores the supermarket as a retail space and as an arena of everyday consumption in Australia. It historically situates and critically discusses the everyday food products we buy, the retail environments in which we do so, the attitudes of the retailers who construct such environments, and the diverse ways in which all of us undertake and think about supermarket shopping. Yet this book is more than narrative history. It engages with broader issues of the nature of Australian modernity, the globalisation of retail forms, the connection between consumption and self-autonomy, and the highly gendered nature of retailing and shopping. It interrogates also the work of cultural critics, and questions recent attempts to grasp what it means to consume and to be a 'consumer'.

A History of Everyday Things is a pioneering essay by one of the world's leading cultural historians that sheds light on the origins of the consumer society, and thereby the birth of the modern world. Things that we regard as the everyday objects of consumption have not always been so: how, therefore, have people in the modern world become "prisoners of objects," as Rousseau put it? Daniel Roche answers this fundamental question of historical anthropology, and imaginatively explores the origins of the daily furnishings of modern life.

Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world's most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society - from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao's China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women's liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai's streets and back alleyways.

In this provocative new study one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that an understanding of cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists. Maurice Bloch argues for a naturalist approach to social and cultural anthropology, introducing developments in cognitive sciences such as psychology and neurology and exploring the relevance of these developments for central anthropological concerns: the person or the self, cosmology, kinship, memory and globalisation. Opening with an exploration of the history of anthropology, Bloch shows why and how naturalist approaches were abandoned and argues that these once valid reasons are no longer relevant. Bloch then shows how such subjects as the self, memory and the conceptualisation of time benefit from being simultaneously approached with the tools of social and cognitive science. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge will stimulate fresh debate among scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines.