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In this book, Jeffrey Mehlman dwells on the series of enigmas surrounding the "Blanchot affair", in which one of the leading figures of contemporary French thought was shown to have been a prominent fascist journalist during the 1930s. Using this as a point of departure, Mehlman investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary material, shedding new light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings. The volume provides a provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II. ... Read more

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But why publish something like this in black-and-white?!
The 15th century armorial reproduced here (not in color, unfortunately), comprises a series of fifty-three striking equestrian figures in full tournament heraldic dress. The boldly drawn figures, most of them of sovereigns and great nobles, are highly stylized, to emphasize the herald's art. Heraldry was still evolving at this time, and works of this kind were creating the precedents still followed today. ... Read more

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According to Carol Rigolot, reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible. His poems are antiphonal, and even polyphonic, works where interlocutors are almost always reduced to anonymity. In this book, Rigolot analyzes the poet's multiple strategies of dialogue, capturing his conversations with a surprising range of people--from biblical figures and ancient Greek and Roman authors to artists as diverse as Dante and Shakespeare, Chateaubriand and Hugo, Audubon, Whitman, Poe, Baudelaire, Verne, Mallarmé, Gaughin, Rimbaud, Loti, Claudel, Valéry, Segalen, and Braque. ... Read more

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In this provocative study, Robert Miles uses the tools of modern literary theory and criticism to analyze this very distinctive body of text. Miles introduces the reader to contexts of Gothic in the 18th Century, including its historical development and its placement within discourse and gender concerns of the period. By drawing extensively on the ideas of Michel Foucault to establish a genealogy, he brings Gothic writing in from the margins of 'popular fiction', resituating it at the center of debate about Romanticism.
... Read more

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A Geneology of Modernism is a study of literary transition in the first two decades of this century, a period of extraordinary ferment and great accomplishment, during which the avant-garde gradually consolidated a secure place within English culture. Michael Levenson analyses that complex process by following the successive phases of a literary movement - Impressionist, Imagist, Vorticist, Classicist - as it attempted to formulate the principles on which a new aesthetic might be founded. The emphasis here falls on the ideology of modernism, but throughout the book the ideological question is tied on the one hand to specific literary works and on the other to general movements in philosophy and the fine arts. The major figures under discussion, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Elliot, are placed in relation to thinkers who have been largely neglected in the history of modernism: Max Stirner, Wilhelm Worringer, Pierre Lasserre, Allen Upward, and Hilaire Belloc. Levenson thus situates the emergence of a modernist aesthetic within the context of literary theory, literary practice, and cultural history. ... Read more

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Smart intellectual history--if you can take it.
This is a detailed (painfully so) and scholarly (painfully so) account of the development of Modernist aesthetic theory through the twenties. L.'s contention is that the period, which seems jumbled and contradictory, was in fact a period of distinctive trial and experiment ... Read more

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Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare’s plays its speculative instruments.

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Until recently, capitalism has been regarded as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. By examining China in these Eurocentric terms, China has been perceived, by Westerners and Asians alike, to be a failed version of the West. The aim of this collaborative project is to examine how the experience of capitalism as a European social formation, and as a world system, has shaped knowledge of China. In addition the volume seeks to establish new foundations on which a theory of Chinese society might be built. ... Read more

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Update
Much has happened since the first review. Yet the conclusion remains much the same. There is the same need to get at the roots of Capitalism in China, past and present.

Capitalism in the US has been turned on its head by Wall Street. China, meanwhile, has in some respects done a better job of guiding its growth by using limited market economy tools.

Modern China still faces challenges in seeing a market economy develop fully. And pollution has proven to be a tremendous concern for all. And yet its report card from a Capitalist perspective is perhaps better than that of the US.

What's the impact of historical analysis on China today?
The book is a good read and highly recommended, but there is room to update us on technology's impact on culture and society in China today.

Why did the development of capitalism and technology fail inChina? Does it matter? Has the West trumped the deck in favour of itselfthrough selective interpretation of events? China and Historical Capitalismtells us it is more important to look beyond finding reasons in order tofind out what actually happened in China after the fork in the road ofeconomic development.

The essays are reflections of current thinking onthe 'post-Needham' project by well established scholars using, if I canstretch the terminology, post-marxist analytical tools and language. JosephNeedham, and his lifetime work on Science and Civilisation in China, is, ofcourse, the backdrop for the essays.The chronology of the essays beginswith the development of European capitalism and is completed with theidentification of a market economy in pre-modern China.

My favorite essayis that of Francesca Bray, "Towards a critical history of non-Westerntechnology." Perhaps it is because I read her book, The Rice Economiesof Asia (University of California Press, 1986). But it is also because sheis probably one of the more qualified persons to bridge Needham's work withpost-Needham work given that she produced Volume VI of Needham's series. Parts of her essay deal with basic definitions of technology, economy andcapitalism. In essence it provides clear guideposts to reinterpretNeedham's work by showing the development of technology beyond the cut-offperiod that signals the rise of the West. The following chapter, by R. BinWong, goes on to narrate the development of China's market economy, whereEurope's economic development is the usual topic of study.

Havingexperienced the development of the internet over the last half decade, onecan't help but look back at the exercises in this book as also partlymisguided. The authors state at the beginning that they do not addresscurrent economic development in Asia, but instead focus on how capitalism"has been conceived as a European social formation" and howcapitalism,"as a world system has shaped knowledge of China."Yet, so often, the assumptions that underlie their uses of terms such as'capitalism' result in freezing time to suit their needs and to leave theWest in a category of cultural and social development that built the worldoutside into an image of what it wanted to see. They do not to seecapitalism and technology as systems that can develop beyond theirexperience to date. Neither do they consider current (or even recent)interaction between technological development and society in China.Certainly, it is another large topic. But a peak at the issues wouldhelp.

Ultimately, the reality they build comes with its own set ofdistortions. Perhaps its the nature of the beast, but it would be nice toleave the door open and say: "Hey, Needham, Weber and all the socialscientists and thinkers pre-Foucault or Pre-Habermas, etc. just had adifferent set of problems than we have today. ... But we recognize that weare also missing part of the picture. ... and here is where we need tofocus next."

(This is short version of the review that excludeschapter summaries)

Charles de Trenck is based in Hong Kong and published"Red Chips and the Globalisation of China's Enterprises" in 1997 ... Read more

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Finding ancestors is inextricably bound up with questions of place: Where did they live, and where did they go? Where are those records? But when researchers are ready to "jump the pond" and start tracing their roots in "the old country," the unfamiliarity of foreign places can make answers elusive.

This book shows genealogists how to get the information they need using the Internet, through correspondence and, when remote options are exhausted, going to the source in person. It combines the beginner-friendly how-to instruction that's made Family Tree Magazine the nation's #1 genealogy title with information-intensive directory listings, genealogy basics and travel guide savvy.

Dividing Europe into 14 sections-from Great Britain to Eastern Europe and everywhere in between-this book provides readers an introduction to each area's history, plus the basic how-tos of finding and using relevant records, including Internet mailing lists, organizations, archives and libraries, Web sites, genealogy societies, periodicals, vital records and more.

The Family Tree Guide Book to Europe is the only book of it's kind-packed with information that's unavailable anywhere else in a single volume. ... Read more

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Family Tree Guide Book to Europe
Book is exectly what I was looking for.
I bought it used and it is in excellent condition.
I will continue to order from Amazon,com

An enthusiastically recommended self-teaching tool
The Family Tree Guide Book To Europe: Your Passport To Tracing Your Genealogy Across Europe by Erin Nevius in collaboration with the editors of Family Tree Magazine is a superb reference and an enthusiastically recommended self-teaching tool -- especially for the genealogist seeking to trace family roots through the diverse and rich cultural history of Europe. Individual chapters present regional guides and resource listings for Ireland, England and Wales, Scotland, France, Poland, Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic Region, Spain and Portugal, Greece and the Mediterranean, and more. Written in down-to-earth terms, peppered with timelines, websites, names and address of archives and organizations, and more, The Family Tree Guide Book To Europe is an excellent, easy-to-follow, thoroughly "user friendly" primer and a welcome addition to personal and community library Genealogy Reference collections. ... Read more

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Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world--an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century.
The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization--in short, of westernization--that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his history. He focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on more "internal" developments such as the popularization of the Kabbalah and the rise of Hasidism. Thus he describes the elements of Jewish experience that became the basis for a "core Jewish identity"--an identity that accompanied the majority of Jews into modernity. ... Read more

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A Standard Work With Depth & Breadth
Please don't be put off by uninformed reviewers- I find these last critiques quite unhelpful. Hundert's work is the consummation of a career dedicated to bringing our understanding of the East European Jewish past out of a conceptual ghetto by taking the Polish context seriously and tracing the development of a Jewish social and economic niche in Polish towns and cities. At the same time, Hundert details inner Jewish life, covering every conceivable dimension of Polish-Jewish civilization during the 18th century- religious, communal, economic, cultural (especially print culture), social, etc. It provides an interesting description of the spread of kabbalah, the rise of Hasidism, and the emergence of a Polish Jewish bourgeoisie. Most importantly, Hundert draws attention to the demographic significance of Polish Jewry, which constituted about 3/4 of the world Jewish population by the 18th century! Admittedly, it can be dense at times; but would you prefer a sleek but superficial account? The persistent reader is rewarded with a rich exposition of East European Jewish life, which was decimated during WWII.

dense all too dense
The subtitle is misleading:this thorough discussionof the non-integration of Jews in the Polish Republic for several centuries does not reveal the genealogy of modernity at all.It reveals why a modernized and nationalized Poland in the later nineteenth and twentieth century would not be able to tolerate such a large undigestible blob in its midst.

A great book for European Jewish history
It is well worth reading but I wish it was longer and more detailed.And, would it be so terrible if it were discovered that changes to Jewish religious practice in 18th Century Poland were borrowed or influenced from sources outside the Jewish religion?Maybe one day we will know more. ... Read more

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For the English people, the image of the monarchy is deeply bound up with the idea of nationhood. This book surveys aspects of England's royal heritage dialogue from the late middle ages to the 19th century, by looking at the representation of the monarchy in a variety of public monuments, both surviving and lost. Geographically, this study is confined to England. It concentrates on monumental sculpted portraits because that was the way in which the image of the monarchy was customarily presented in the most immediate and permanent form at large scale in the public arena. The creation of and reaction to royal statues and memorials in public places is only one indication as to the mood of the time, but it can be a telling sign. The aim of such memorials was to consolidate and commemorate shared loyalties and beliefs, focusing on the monarchs. Made of durable materials, they were supposed to last, and their history did not end with the inauguration ceremony. They were sometimes protected by railings, more often than just by their talismanic value. However, in an ever-changing political climate, the railings were not always enough.Image-smashing was a feature of the political upheavals of the reformation, the Commonwealth and the Glorious Revolution, though monuments were not always destroyed without protest. For some, the idea of Englishness depends upon monarchy. There was widespread resistance to the idea that Oliver Cromwell should be commemorated by public memorial. The English generally remained uncomfortable with the idea of republicanism. The monarchial government of the middle ages, thought to be sanctioned by God, was very different from the figurehead the monarchy has become. The monuments discussed have all been subject to reinterpretation in light of changed circumstances, and in some cases their original significance has become obscured. ... Read more

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"Earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of theplanetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth, as a surface or asolid body, to locate it within infinities of space and to communicate and share images ofit."--from the Preface

Long before we had the ability to photograph the earth from space--to see our planet as it wouldbe seen by the Greek god Apollo--images of the earth as a globe had captured popularimagination. In Apollo's Eye, geographer Denis Cosgrove examines the historicalimplications for the West of conceiving and representing the earth as a globe: a unified, sphericalbody. Cosgrove traces how ideas of globalism and globalization have shifted historically inrelation to changing images of the earth, from antiquity to the Space Age. He connects theevolving image of a unified globe to politically powerful conceptions of human unity. ... Read more