Kategória: E-books

Josephinische Mandarine : Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich 1848 -1914

In diesem Buch werden die Institution Bürokratie und die personelle Gruppe der Beamten in Österreich (Cisleithanien) in ihrer Wechselwirkung zwischen 1848 bis 1914 untersucht: Im Zentrum stehen der bürokratische Apparat, nationale und politische Identitäten sowie Loyalitäten der Beamten, die Alltagskultur im Amts- und Privatleben, Fragen der neu eintretenden Frauen, sowie des Selbstbildes und des Fremdbildes der Beamten.

The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

California and television, as it were, conspire in a vampirologic: the forever-young is what has been there the longest, what really “takes us back.” And so we also will take ourselves back: to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, already almost charmingly quaint, and Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus The Origin of the German Mourning-Play. What can come of this improbable conjunction? It will not seem too strange that Benjamin, posthumous wanderer across the textures of Americana, should again take up lodging at the Hotel California. But more is at stake than just another hapless visitation from the on high of high theory: reading Buffy as the remediated afterlife of the dead-on-arrival genre of the baroque German mourning play, Adler’s book records the first broken, awkward steps toward a project that, with the recent rise of “quality television,” seems more urgent than ever before: a political-theological characteristic of the television series.

Plankton Dreams: What I Learned in Special-Ed

In Plankton Dreams,Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay crafts a proud, satiric style: the special ed student as literary troublemaker. ‘Mother had always taught me to learn from circumstance,’ he writes. ‘Here, the circumstance was humiliation, a particularly instructive teacher.’ ‘But I’m not complaining,’ he continues. ‘Humiliation, after all, made me a philosopher.’For all of its comic effects, the book alerts readers to an alternative understanding of autism, an understanding that autistics themselves have been promoting for years.

More Than a Game : The Computer Game As Fictional Form

The first academic work dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. Applies practices of reading texts from literary and cultural studies to consider the computer game as an emerging mode of contemporary storytelling in an accessible, readable manner. Contains detailed discussion of narrative and realism in four of the most significant games of the last decade:’Tomb Raider’,’Half-Life’,’Close Combat’and’Sim City’.

A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of Central and Southern Sinai

After publishing A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill:2000), Rudolf de Jong completes his description of the Bedouin dialects of the Sinai Desert of Egypt by adding the present volume.

Antarctica: Music, sounds and cultural connections

From 2011 until 2014, Australia marked its long-standing connection with Antarctica by celebrating the centenary of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. The icy continent, with its extremes of climate and environment and unique soundscapes, offers great potential for creative achievements in the world of music and sound. This book demonstrates the intellectual and creative engagement of artists, musicians, scientists and writers.

Navigating the Kingdom of Night

In 2011, Amy T. Matthews published End of the Night Girl, a novel which engages creatively with questions of identity politics and the ethics of fictionalising the Holocaust. Navigating the Kingdom of Night is a critical exegesis in which the author contextualises End of the Night Girl in terms of the critical debate surrounding Holocaust fiction.

Journey of the Universe

Today we know what no previous generation knew: the history of the universe and of the unfolding of life on Earth. Through the astonishing combined achievements of natural scientists worldwide, we now have a detailed account of how galaxies and stars, planets and living organisms, human beings and human consciousness came to be. And yet… we thirst for answers to questions that have haunted humanity from the very beginning.

Radicalism and Music : An Introduction to the Music Cultures of Al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants

Radicalism and Music offers a convincing argument for music’s transformational impact on the radicalization, reinforcement, and motivational techniques of violent political activists. It makes a case for the careful examination of music’s roles in radical cultures, roles that have serious impacts, as evidenced by the actions of the Frankfurt Airport shooter Arid Uka, Sikh Temple murderer Wade Page, white supremacist Matthew Hale, and animal-rights activist Walter Bond, among others. Such cases bring up difficult questions about how those involved in radical groups can be stirred to feel or act under the influence of music.

Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë

These letters give an insight into the life of a writer whose novels continue to be bestsellers. They reveal much about Charlotte Brontë’s personal life, her family relationships, and the society in which she lived. Many of her early letters are written with vigour, vivacity, and an engaging aptitude for self-mockery. In contrast, her letters to her’master’, the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, reveal her intense, obsessive longing for some response from him. Other letters are deeply moving, when Charlotte endures the agony of her brother’s and sisters’untimely deaths. We learn also of the progress of her writing, including the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, and of her contacts with her publishers, including the young George Smith; and we recognize in her letters the life-experiences which are transmuted into the art of her novels.