? = Review forthcoming

ART AND DESIGN

- James Barry, 1741-1806: History Painter

Edited by Tom Dunne, emeritus professor of history, University College Cork, and William Pressly, professor of art history, University of Maryland. Ashgate, ?60.00. ISBN 9780754666349

These essays on Barry and his contemporaries offer perspectives on the painter's life and bring into relief the singularity of his commitment to his vision for history painting despite adverse cultural, political and commercial currents.

GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

- Managing Europe's Water Resources: Twenty-first Century Challenges

By Chad Staddon, senior lecturer in human geography, University of the West of England. Ashgate, ?60.00. ISBN 9780754673217

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After detailing the history of water management, Staddon surveys the major frameworks used for managing water and provides a synoptic treatment of major water management issues in all EU nations.

HISTORY

- The International Order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s

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Edited by Shigeru Akita, associate professor of British imperial and Commonwealth history, Osaka University, and Nicholas J. White, reader in imperial and Commonwealth history, Liverpool John Moores University. Ashgate, ?55.00. ISBN 9780754653417

The contributors to this volume reconsider the nature and formation of Asia's economic order during the 1930s and 1950s in light of the new historiographical developments in Britain and Japan.

- Italy's Divided Memory

By John Foot, professor of modern Italian history, University College London. Palgrave Macmillan, ?55.00. ISBN 9780230618473

Foot argues that contemporary Italian history has been marked by a tendency towards divided memory. Events have been interpreted in contrasting ways, and the facts themselves often contested.

- A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution

By Carolyn Eastman, assistant professor of history, University of Texas at Austin. University of Chicago Press, ?26.00. ISBN 9780226180199

Eastman argues that ordinary men and women gave meaning to American nationhood and national belonging by first learning to imagine themselves as members of a shared public.

- 1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War's End: A Brief History with Documents

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By Padraic Kenney, professor of history, Indiana University. Palgrave Macmillan, ?17.99. ISBN 9780312487669

This volume uses six case studies from the Cold War period to explore common characteristics of political change and the differing strategies and views of those who sought to free themselves from dictatorship.

LAW

- Islam and Human Rights: Selected Essays of Abdullahi An-Na'im

By Abdullahi An-Na'im, Charles Howard Candler professor of law, Emory University, and Mashood A. Baderin, professor of law, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Ashgate, ?80.00. ISBN 9780754628231

This anthology brings together a selection of articles written by the international scholar Abdullahi An-Na'im on the relationship between Islam and human rights.

LITERATURE

- Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism

By Syrithe Pugh, lecturer in English, University of Aberdeen. Ashgate, ?50.00. ISBN 9780754656142

Through case studies of three poets using classical allusion, imitation and translation for the purpose of oppositional polemic in 17th-century England, Pugh examines the political ideas behind and implications of the distinct theories of intertextuality they embrace.

- Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors

By Ian Smith, associate professor of English, Lafayette College. Palgrave Macmillan, ?55.00. ISBN 9780230620452

Smith argues that the 16th-century preoccupation with rehabilitating English tells the larger story of an anxious nation redirecting attention away from its own marginal, minority status by racially scapegoating the "barbarous" African.

- Romanticism and the Object

By Larry H. Peer, professor of comparative literature, Brigham Young University. Palgrave Macmillan, ?50.00. ISBN 9780230617384

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Peer explores ways in which European Romantic culture and its artefacts were shaped by "object aesthetics", a new and often disruptive use of objects in literary expression.

- Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions

By Edward J. Ahearn, university professor of comparative literature and French studies, Brown University. Ashgate, ?55.00. ISBN 9780754668824

Ahearn shows that works from literature and the social sciences can together illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish separately and suggests that neither literature nor the social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery.

MUSIC STUDIES

- A Language of its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music

By Ruth Katz, Emanuel Alexander professor emeritus of musicology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. University of Chicago Press, ?33.00. ISBN 9780226425962

Katz argues that the indispensable relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process in turn shaped the artform itself.

POLITICS

- Mapping the European Public Sphere: Institutions, Media and Civil Society

Edited by Cristiano Bee, research fellow in politics, University of Surrey, and Emanuela Bozzini, researcher in politics, University of Trento. Ashgate, ?60.00. ISBN 9780754673767

This book examines three relevant issues that are marking the European communicative landscape: the role of media and journalism in shaping European debate, the function of public communication in promoting institutional activities, and the implications of processes of inclusion to and exclusion from the public sphere.

- The World Views of the U.S. Presidential Election: 2008

Edited by Matthias Maass, visiting fellow in political science, National University of Singapore. Palgrave Macmillan, ?60.00. ISBN 9780230618688

This study investigates the perception of the candidates, the issues and the importance of the 2008 election from abroad, and discovers that these shared perceptions amount to a "world view".

SOCIAL SCIENCES

- Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society

By Kathryn Rountree, associate professor of social anthropology, Massey University. Ashgate, ?50.00. ISBN 9780754669739

Taking Malta as a case study, Rountree shows what it is like being pagan in a society where the majority of the population is Roman Catholic, and Catholicism permeates public and domestic, social and political life.

- ? Peace Processes

By John D. Brewer, professor of sociology, University of Aberdeen. Polity, ?55.00 and ?18.99. ISBN 9780745647760 and 7777

Peace processes are mostly very fragile. Brewer takes a new approach to the topic by beginning from the premise that sociology can identify those factors that help to stabilise them.

- The Sociology of Globalization

By Luke Martell, reader in sociology, University of Sussex. Polity, ?60.00 and ?18.99. ISBN 9780745636733 and 6740

Taking in the cultural, political and economic dimensions of globalisation, Martell introduces key debates and critically evaluates the causes and consequences of a globalising world.

- Women and Material Culture

Edited by Maureen Daly Goggin, professor of rhetoric, Arizona State University, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, professor of English, Arizona State University. Ashgate, ?150.00. ISBN 9780754668565

Reframing the scholarship on women and material culture, this three-volume set explores how women from widely different times and places made meaning - and formed identities - through the materials they created and consumed.

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