Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880

Leah Grisham

August 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-734-4
Availability: In stock
218pp. ¦ $74 £60 €67

'Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880' shows the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels used what the author terms the forced marriage plot - a plot arc in which a greedy father tries to force his daughter into a marriage she does not want but that would be financially expedient to himself - to explore capitalism’s detrimental impacts on women’s right to autonomy. As capitalist economic practices replaced mercantilism, a woman’s value was seen primarily in the economic sense. That is, men came to recognize that women – especially young, marriageable women – could be used as objects of exchange between men. Recognizing this phenomenon, the novelists considered in 'Heroic Disobedience' – Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Stone, and Anthony Trollope – depict the very specific ways in which women were raised to become willing pawns in this system. Religious discourse, conduct guides, marriage and property laws, wages, lack of meaningful education, and inheritance practices combined to leave women with no other options besides dependence on their patriarchs. Importantly, authors who use the forced marriage plot go beyond exposing women’s subjugation by creating – and celebrating – heroically disobedient heroines who believe, above all else, that they have the right to determine their own futures: futures in which they are autonomous agents, not subjected objects.

Unwrapping Racism: Dealing with Differences

Chuck Grose

June 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-679-8
Availability: In stock
151pp. ¦ $31 £25 €28

“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu “Unwrapping Racism: Dealing with Differences” will connect the reader with recent social movements such as gun safety, Black Lives Matter, and college reform movements. The Early social movements would portray racial discrimination within the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Eugenics/Sterilization Movement. The Civil Right Movement of 1950s/1960s highlights Rosa Parks, Dr. M. L. King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis. This book will present key issues, such as cultural privilege and its prevalence. The reader will be lifted up from xenophobia, colonialism and slavery while creatively facing individual responses to those issues today. All those approaches move into our societal goals of assimilation, cultural pluralism and the “melting pot” concept. This volume will make the perfect complement to Dr. Grose previous book "Dealing with differences". Every reader can do something, sometime, somewhere to effectively deal with differences. As the book confronts race, it challenges the reader to grapple with action-oriented exercises, questions, and projects relevant to key paragraphs on every page. At the end of the book, the readers will be empowered to tell their own stories about their experiences with race within each chapter.

Italian as a foreign language: Teaching and acquisition in higher education

Edited by Alberto Regagliolo, UKSW University

August 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-678-1
Availability: In stock
363pp. ¦ $95 £80 €87

This manual focuses on teaching Italian as a foreign language in the academic field, taking into consideration the various subjects and disciplines that can be found in a university course in Italian Studies. Various chapters are included within that range, for example, from Italian phonetics and dialectology to art as a means to deepen elements of the Italian language, to morphology with word formations, and to translation as well as subtitling. The range also covers technology as a tool for telecollaboration, academic writing, and learning Italian through geography or the language of vulgarity. Besides, the manual takes into consideration the use of the Italian press for learning, together with the use of comics and cartoons to teach the Italian language. The contribution aims to be a point of reference both for teachers and students who are focusing on linguistics, philology, didactics, and pedagogy. It lays emphasis on the teaching methodology, the instruments of teaching, and the available resources. It also seeks to deal with the various teaching problems and reflects on the disciplines as well as alternative proposals for teaching.

Mantha: Alchemies of the Cultural Turn

Mark K. Warford, SUNY Buffalo State University

August 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-733-7
Availability: In stock
228pp. ¦ $75 £61 €68

Set against the rich and troubled tapestry of the West’s Greco-Roman inheritance, the Sanskrit root 'manth/-', which roughly translates to “a churn” ('mantha') or “to churn” ('manth'), serves as a cauldron into which age-old binaries are blended. A mantha of the Greek metaphysical notion of the One and the Many drives explorations of a variety of themes, including the Feminine and the Masculine, Self and Other, East and West, Heroes and Monsters, Olympians and Titans, Creativity and Innovation. Accordingly, the psychoanalytic canon is (re)introduced to a diversity of perspectives, from linguistics and Translation Studies to educational theory and horror fiction. Guided by the 'Opus Contra Culturam', Warford, infusing his background in linguistics, Translation Studies, Spanish, Sociocultural Theory, and Global Humanities, demonstrates the importance of stretching beyond what is known in one’s cultural milieu, that “one” taking many forms: the citizen, the student, the professional, the innovator, the scholar, and the infinite intersections of group identifications into which we are susceptible to being siloed. Specific topics include cultural complexes and trauma, Titanism, integrative approaches to human development and learning theory, the Monstrous, as well as creativity and innovation studies.

Pitirim A. Sorokin: Rediscovering a Master of Sociology

Emiliana Mangone, University of Salerno, Italy

June 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-732-0
Availability: In stock
204pp. ¦ $74 £60 €68

Pitirim A. Sorokin is a controversial figure in the history of sociology, of which he remains one of the masters. Those who read Sorokin today must, however, frame the historical reality experienced by the scholar (his Russian and American experiences) because the evolution of his thought had several phases that correspond to his personal, family, and professional lives (he founded and directed the Department of Sociology at Harvard University for many years). This Russian-American sociologist argued that socio-cultural phenomena must be studied following their dynamism (in space and time) since the constituent elements (personality, society, and culture) are constantly changing and cannot be studied separately. Reviving his thought is not a form of celebration but a moment to reflect on how some sociology classics still have their relevance and how, all too often, they are forgotten. This is why this book takes up his main conceptualizations by anchoring them to contemporary society, whose transformations are often difficult to read, and above all to highlight how the role of sociology as a science has, in part, lost sight of its ontological foundation as a service to humanity or public service. The theoretical paths taken by Sorokin range from Social and Cultural Dynamics to Social Mobility and to many other topics, such as man and society in calamities or love and altruism - one of Sorokin's latest topics. All these topics can revive the idea of a sociology that holds together the micro, meso, and macro dimensions and allows us to predict changes in society.