Ever since Michel Foucault's highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison - slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements - has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces.
Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities.
This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.
;Climate Change Policy in North America is the first book to examine how cooperation respecting climate change can emerge within decentralized governance arrangements.
;Gieri traces a history of the Pirandellian mode in cinema and investigates its characteristics, demonstrating the original nature of Italian filmmaking that is particularly indebted to Pirandello's interpretation of humour.
;Is disseminating information the main purpose of scholarly scientific literature? Recent work in science studies signals a shift of emphasis from conceptual to material sources, from thinking to doing, and from representing the world to intervening in it. Scientific knowledge production is no longer seen as a process of seeking, collecting, organizing, and processing abstract elements, but instead one of assembling the many different material 'bits and pieces' of scientific culture in order to make things work.
In "Deflating Information," Bernd Frohmann draws on recent work in the social studies of science, finding the most significant material in the coordination of research work, the stabilization of matters of fact, and the manufacture of objectivity. Arguing for a 'deflationary' account of information, Frohmann challenges the central concept of information studies, thereby laying a foundation for a documentalist approach to emerging issues in the field.
;Selena Daly’s work is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.
;Few studies of Canadian cinema to date have engaged deeply with genre cinema and its connection to Canadian culture. Ernest Mathijs does just that in this volume, which traces the inception, production, and reception of Canada’s internationally renowned horror film, Ginger Snaps (2000).
;The essays in Latin Learning and English Lore cover material from the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon literary record in the late seventh century to the immediately post-Conquest period of the twelfth century.
;Using the semiotic theory of American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, Johansen applies psychoanalysis, psychology, literary hermeneutics, literary history, Habermasian communication, and discourse theory to literature, and, in the process, redefines it.
In Marginal Subjects, Akiko Tsuchiya shows how the figure of the deviant woman--and her counterpart, the feminized man - revealed the ambivalence of literary writers towards new methods of social control in Restoration Spain.
These are the notebooks that Northrop Frye kept while writing his two final books, "Words with Power" and "The Double Vision," essentially workshops out of which the books were constructed.
The television spectacles of Oka and the Rodney King affair served to focus public disaffection with the police, a disaffection that has been growing for several years. In Canada, confidence in the police is at an all-time low. At the same time crime rates continue to rise. Canada now has the dubious distinction of having the second highest crime rate in the Western world.
How did this state of affairs come about? What do we want from our police? How do we achieve policing that is consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? The essays in this volume set out to explore these questions. In their introduction, the editors point out that constitutional order is tied to the exercise of power by law enforcement agencies, and that if relations between the police and civil society continue to erode, the exercise of force will rise - a dangerous prospect for democratic societies.
;Semiotics Unbounded offers a new and original survey of the science of signs, evaluating it in relation to the problems of our time, not only of a scientific order, but also the problems concerning everyday social life.
;Inspired by the work of economists Ha-Joon Chang and Dani Rodrik, editors Andrew Smith and Dimitry Anastakis bring together essays from both historians and economists in this collection to test claims that wealth comes from either protectionism or free trade.
;Source of Wisdom is, ultimately, a contribution to the understanding of medieval English literature and the textual traditions that contributed to its development.
;The study establishes the nature and aims of Finnegans Wake as Menippean satire and interprets the Wake in that light. McLuhan examines Joyce's use of language, and in particular his use of ten hundred-lettered words (thunderclaps).
With contributions by some of the leading scholars in the field, this book is a distinguished collection of essays on Old and Middle English literature and textual analysis.