Bücher veröffentlicht von Manchester University Press

There should no longer be any doubt: drones are here to stay. In civil society, they are used for rescue, surveillance, transport and leisure. And on the battlefield, their promises of remote protection and surgical precision have radically changed the way wars are fought. But what impact are drones having on our identity, and how are they affecting the communities around us? This book addresses these questions by investigating the representation of civilian and military drones in visual arts, literature and architecture. What emerges, the contributors argue, is a compelling new aesthetic: 'drone imaginary', a prism of cultural and critical knowledge, through which the complex interplay between drone technology and human communities is explored, and from which its historical, cultural and political dimensions can be assessed. The contributors offer diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary field of aesthetic drone imaginaries. With essays on the aesthetic configurations of drone swarming, historical perspectives on early unmanned aviation, as well as current debates on how drone technology alters the human body and creates new political imaginaries, this book provides new insights to the rapidly evolving field of drone studies. Working across art history, literature, photography, feminism, postcolonialism and cultural studies, Drone imaginaries offers a unique insight into how drones are changing our societies.

Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of the author's developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it challenges the long-held belief that he opposed any form of genre crossing. Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett's work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the 'Beckett canon' to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives and enhances the texts' significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The chapters explore a wide variety of forms - from prose and theatre to radio, television, film and webseries - focusing on the period from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, and even creative rewritings of Beckett's biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author's work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses. Beckett's afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation are forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival and continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett's work in the twenty-first century.

History beyond apartheid explores post-apartheid developments in history writing on South Africa, offering a corrective to charges that South African historiography has seen little in terms of innovation in the years since apartheid. With contributions from scholars involved at the cutting edge of research, the book highlights innovative approaches that have re-shaped the field, situating them in the context of the extant literature. In addition to offering fresh perspectives on the traditional themes of race, class and nation, the book covers histories of the environment, women, creative literature and the fine arts, and of South Africa's global connections and transnational entanglements. The book offers critical reflections on the theoretical and methodological aspects that guide the contributors' work, looking simultaneously backwards at the intellectual traditions on which their scholarship builds, and forward to potential future areas of inquiry informed by unresolved questions. The resulting collection offers an essential resource for emerging and established scholars involved in the practice of South African historiography.

With the military seizing overt power in Egypt, Cairo's grand and dramatic urban reshaping during and after 2011 is reflected upon under the lens of a smaller story narrating everyday interactions of a middle-class building in the neighbourhood of Doqi. -- .

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval 1847-1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century, focusing on new types of cultural work by women and establishing Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century. -- .

Every Siddal poem is close read alongside works by Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Tennyson and Keats and with reference to prevailing cultural, political and religious contexts to give the most comprehensive analysis yet of this enigmatic, previously undervalued poetic voice. -- .

Birth controlled analyses the world of selective reproduction - the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future - through a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of 'controlling' birth: contraception, reproductive violence and repro-genetic technologies. It argues that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies like those that assist conception or allow genetic selection may appear to be an antithesis of other violent versions of population control, this book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. All population control policies target and vilify women (Black women in particular), and coerce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance; Birth controlled argues that assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies employ a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class and caste. To empirically and historically ground the analysis, the book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations, South Africa and India, examining interactions between the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets and their influence on the technologies and politics of selective reproduction. The book provides a critical, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly 'post-population control' era. The contributions draw on a breadth of disciplines ranging from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics and science and technology studies to theology, public health and epidemiology, facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.

This book examines how modern Catholic contemplative nuns in the Netherlands envisioned their spirituality, offering a contextualised exploration of the discourses they adopted to shape their identity as a female spiritual elite in a male-dominated church and society.

Conceiving bodies examines the Old English medical, prognostic, and penitential traditions in order to find the reproductive bodies of women in a corpus of literature that frequently participates in the occlusion of such bodies, and indeed such lives.The early medieval medical tradition is refreshingly free of judgment for women's bodies. Much of the social distaste for bodily processes was laid upon existing texts centuries after their composition, although patriarchal structures underpin the needs and treatments for early reproductive medicine. The language in these texts is far more nuanced than we might expect. Where previous translators and dictionaries have been content to collapse all remedies into general categories like 'women's medicine' or 'childbirth charms', the remedies themselves offer treatments that are precise and specific. Because of the lack of close attention to language, translators often have misidentified the functions of these remedies. By differentiating language and treatments for menstruation, fertility, childbirth, stillbirth, and abortion, this book reveals the distinct medical concerns of medieval women.While its central content is medieval, this book places early women's medicine in conversation with the contemporary medical and political treatment of women's reproductive bodies. Experiences like childbirth, menstrual woes, and infertility create a through line by which bodies now may connect in visceral and emotional ways to bodies then.Rather than assuming early medicine consists only of repressive and uninformed superstitions, this book recognizes and advocates for the ways in which the medieval tradition makes space for people to determine their own medical reproductive destinies.

Is Antarctica the only continent in the world where colonialism never left a footprint? The question is deceptively complex, because despite lacking an indigenous population, Antarctica has not existed in isolation from the economic and political structures of the modern world. Being labelled a continent for science and peace has never prevented Antarctica from being a space where the rivalries of the Cold War and the inequalities between the developed and the developing world played out. Colonialism and Antarctica asks two questions: what analytic value can the concept of colonialism hold to explain the past and present of Antarctica? And can thinking about colonialism in Antarctica help reveal the limits to the analytic value of colonialism as a concept more generally? The book aims both to define a particular field of inquiry and to help stimulate further debate. Truly multidisciplinary, it includes contributions from history, philosophy, archaeology, political geography, and political science. Colonialism and Antarctica also foregrounds perspectives from outside the Anglophone world and invites reflection on how knowing Antarctica is connected to power and justice.

In an era of mass extinction, climate emergency, and biodiversity collapse, what role do digital media have in securing liveable futures? To what extent are digital media mitigating or intensifying environmental crises? And what theoretical, empirical, and methodological frameworks are needed to make sense of emerging digital ecologies? In a context where digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics--for better and for worse---Digital ecologies confronts the political and ethical stakes of these developments. The collection draws together leading social science and humanities scholars, in order to examine the growing entanglement of animals, plants, and ecosystems, with digital media technologies. The book's original empirical chapters explore novel mediated encounters between humans and other animals: from exercise apps where users race wild animals, to livestreams of chickens and lobsters, and digital sound recordings of extinct species. Authors interrogate new forms of governance and surveillance arising with digital media - as satellite-tagged birds monitor the high seas, or digital smart forests and seed data bases reconfigure life in new ways. More broadly, the book explores the political and ethical potentials new assemblages of human, animals, technologies, and environments: as social media creates complex opportunities for environmental activism and new ecologies of software emerge. Beginning with the editors' own agenda-setting introduction, and closing with three chapter-length provocations for the future of research in the field, the book offers both an overview and intervention into the rapidly expanding field of digital ecologies.

Delving into the intricate web of clinical research and psychotropic drugs, On Trial illuminates the captivating story of psychiatrist Roland Kuhn. Long celebrated as the discoverer of the first antidepressant Tofranil, more recently he has become the subject of controversy after patients exposed his extensive drug testing on unwitting subjects at the Münsterlingen Psychiatric Clinic in Switzerland. But is it fair to condemn him according to today's ethical standards, which themselves emerged from the research practices of his time?Drawing on Kuhn's extensive, newly accessible private archive, the book explores the early era of industry-sponsored clinical research in psychiatry. It unravels the interplay between the clinic, patients, physicians, nurses, corporations, and authorities, examining the forces that converged during the experiments.Spanning the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Münsterlingen drug trials are meticulously situated within the evolving landscape of medical experimentation. Which people and institutions were involved, and who knew what? How were substances tested, which patients were affected? According to which patterns were the drugs administered? When did which values, guidelines, and standards apply, and what role did they play in practice?On Trial not only reconstructs the Münsterlingen drug tests but also weaves them into a broader tapestry about the historical development of clinical trials. This thought-provoking exploration enriches our understanding of the psychopharmaceutical journey while challenging us to consider the enduring ethical dilemmas that underpin medical research.

How robust are children's rights in a highly interdependent world? How have these cherished rights fared in the face of adversity, and what has driven these pressing challenges?In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly unveiled the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), receiving endorsement from 196 states worldwide--every UN member except the United States. This pivotal moment raised expectations of an era where children's rights would hold sway. The lofty ideals of human rights and the sanctity of children's dignity resound in policy documents, but on the ground, a complex range of challenges unfolds. The interplay of global governance structures, national strategies, and local factors creates a landscape where children's rights often teeter on the precipice. Considering more than three decades since the CRC's inception, this book comprehensively explores a wide range of contemporary crises, raising crucial questions about the effectiveness of international commitments in children's rights. Unlike conventional human rights scholarship, this book spotlights often-neglected crises, unveiling the blind spots in scholarly and policy dialogues. It champions a global perspective, recognizing the profound influence of global and transnational forces. The book's accomplished contributors, hailing from various academic disciplines including international relations, law, education, political science, and public policy, collectively enrich this examination with diverse perspectives. Their multidisciplinary expertise enables the readers to gain deeper insights into complex global issues, transcending conventional boundaries and fostering a holistic understanding.

The mid-century (1930s-60s) was an era of seismic shifts for British women, including those living under British rule in the colonies, in both the public and private spheres. The traditional narrative of these years is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. This book aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics. The essays in this collection explore how women represented the transformation of the quotidian -- including the home, employment, family life, and religious participation -- during the mid-century.

An important interdisciplinary collaboration that contextualises how Brexit has changed citizens' rights and presents the experiences of Brexit in the UK, EU and beyond. The authors contributing to the project come from different disciplines, including sociology, law, anthropology and political sciences. The book analyses citizenship and migration policies and how Brexit has changed the rights of British, EU and third-country nationals. Further, it locates such policy changes within the longer histories of British and EU migration policies. This highlights how Brexit was not an isolated event, but rather has found place within wider trends of restriction of citizenship rights on both sides of the Channel. Through different ethnographic and cultural studies, the book presents the experiences of British and EU nationals in the UK, Belgium and Spain. It discusses issues of citizenship and naturalisation, belonging, conviviality and hostility, families, risk and political mobilisation, to show the wide-ranging consequences of Brexit. By triangulating different experiences and perspectives, it shows how Brexit involves a loss of formal rights (and attempts to contain them). At the same time, it shows how Brexit involves wider issues of transformation of British and EU societies, and questions of who and how is accepted in such societies. Taken together, the analyses of the book aim to put at the centre the citizens impact by Brexit and to show the long-term consequences of the Brexit process. A wide-ranging analysis that allows to understand the ramifications of Brexit in the future of the UK and the EU.

Relics, dreams, voyages conjures a new cultural map of the early-modern world. Its main theme is centre and periphery, and many exiles are celebrated here: Jacobites and recusant Catholics; wandering Gaelic scholars; mercenary soldiers in Moravia and Slovenia; art dealers in c18 Rome. This book also considers centres of baroque culture outside the mainstream: exiled English Catholic Colleges in Flanders and Spain; a remote symbolic garden in rural Scotland; architectural fantasies from an isolated circle at Birr in the midlands of Ireland. It meditates on cultural transmission from Asia and the Americas to Europe: one test case is the painter Rubens, his circle of Antwerp Jesuits, and what they learned from the New Worlds. Many of the essays consider the secretive cultures of exiled or persecuted British Roman Catholics, including the pseudo-relics constructed in Antwerp for the posthumous cult of Mary Queen of Scots, and the triumphal procession of a vandalised statue at the exiled English College in Valladolid. The visual arts are examined across a wide temporal and geographical span, and many subversive iconographies are decoded: at the French and English courts, in remote Scotland, in Nagasaki, in Valladolid. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book draws many astonishing, unfamiliar and beautiful texts, things and events, into a cartography of the subtle, sometimes secret patterns of baroque culture worldwide. This books offers a new, extraordinary cultural geography of the baroque world, opening doors to many rich and strange cultural artefacts, from "China to Peru."

John Polidori is the least regarded figure in the history of literary vampirism and yet his novella The Vampyre (1819) is perhaps 'the most influential horror story of all time' (Frayling). Polidori's story transformed the shambling, mindless monster of folklore into a sophisticated, seductive aristocrat that stalked London society rather than being confined to the hinterlands of Eastern Europe. Polidori's Lord Ruthven was thus the ancestor of the vampire as we know it. This collection is a first book-length critical study that explores the genesis of Polidori's vampire. It tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first-century paranormal romance. It includes a critique of the fascinating and little-known The Black Vampyre (1819) - a text inspired by Polidori and the first Black vampire in fiction. Leading and emerging scholars of the vampire and Gothic provide innovative analyses of the variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori's revenant. The collection advances from the ground-breaking research of Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day and the first special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to vampires. Appended is an annotated edition of the text of The Vampyre and supplementary material.Polidori died a suspected suicide aged 25; he has been sorely neglected. This stimulating collection makes a coherent case for the importance of John Polidori's tale and redeeming 'poor Polidori'.

Based on the findings of a 15-month research project led by the Centre for Cultural Value, this significant new book offers a comprehensive overview of the impacts of Covid-19 on the UK's cultural sector and highlights implications for its future direction.The book provides a summary of the local, regional and national policy responses to the crisis. It offers a rigorous statistical analysis of the impacts of these policy responses and of the pandemic itself on the cultural workforce across the UK and a mixed-methods analysis of audiences' responses to the pandemic. These insights are nuanced and illustrated via detailed case studies of a number of key sub-sectors of the cultural industries (theatre, museums and galleries, screen industries, libraries and festivals) and via an ecosystem analysis of the Greater Manchester city-region. The book identifies and critically reflects on the core, recurrent themes that have emerged from the research and highlights the implications for cultural practitioners, organisations, funders and policymakers as we move into the endemic stage of Covid-19. It advocates for a more equitable and regenerative cultural sector, where freelancers and marginalised cultural workers and audiences are valued and included, and for a more engaged and collaborative approach to cultural sector research to enable to sector to know itself better and adapt to rapid change.

Graveyard Gothic examines the crucial role played by graveyards and other burial sites in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. This book includes seventeen specially commissioned chapters from key international scholars that explore the graveyard's Gothic significance from the eighteenth century to the present day, and ranges far beyond British culture to consider representations from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. It offers unparalleled historical and geographical scope and engages a number of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. Chapters on key texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frame the graveyard as a site of solace and metaphysical speculation that nevertheless exemplified the emerging Gothic mode by offering both supernatural potential and a reminder of the links between past and present. The book then traces the journey of the graveyard trope as it became more complex and spread across cultures, languages and continents throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors focus on its role in war Gothic, YA novels, weird fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose, as well as a vast array of novels and audiovisual texts. Important chapters demonstrate how film and TV in particular were responsible for enduring visual tropes that still shape our sense of the graveyard's Gothic identity. With its vast geographical scope, the book is also able to reveal the graveyard as a space of both oppression and resistance in texts that depict colonial conquest and exploitation. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping possible future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic establishes the graveyard as a quintessential Gothic chronotope and, in the process, defines a new area of Gothic Studies.

Exhibiting Irishness traces constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s. Exhibitions were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As sources of entertainment and education, they were enmeshed in the politics of nationalism, trade and tourism. The book explores how the politics of display influences the production of Irish identity according to a host of contexts. It considers how the practices of display were shaped by issues of funding, organisers' motives, and the larger purpose of the event itself. This in turn fed back into Irish understandings of themselves politically, economically, socially or culturally. The chapters examine exhibitions in Ireland, the British Empire and the United States. As a valuable contribution to scholarship, each exhibition is placed in the wider political, economic and cultural locale of its time. By thinking transnationally, the book explores how Irishness worked itself out through gender, capitalism and race in a larger network of empire and whiteness from the 1850s to the 1960s. A saleable Irishness emerged in historic exhibits and are now the product of a lucrative global phenomena of Irish culture. Tourism today offers the Irish landscape, the Irish people, and Irish products. Exhibiting Irishness tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness - an Irish identity always on sale.

Resisting Olympic evictions examines the mobilisation of space to resist removals in favelas in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games. The ethnographic account follows the resistance to evictions in Vila Autódromo focusing particularly on a series of events known as Occupy Vila Autódromo which sought to mobilise the space of the favela as a tool for resistance. In constructing the space as welcoming, friendly and safe, these events challenged the myth of marginality underpinning the attempts to evict the community. Beyond this, the liminal nature of the events crystalised this idea clearly for activists who participated in them, allowing this idea to spread around the world through both social and traditional media in the glare of the Olympic media spotlight. Ultimately, residents constructed an alternative vision of what a favela could be, memorialising this in a museum of evictions to serve as an example in the ongoing struggle for housing rights. In doing so, the book offers a significant contribution to debates around integrating informal communities with formal urban structures in a democratic, participatory way and the conflicts over urban space that this ignites, experienced in cities around the world.

This is the first English translation of Hariulf's History of St Riquier, which describes the history of an important monastic community in northern France from its foundation in the seventh century until the closing years of the eleventh century. Writing in a period of intense religious and political change, Hariulf presents the history of his house as he would like it remembered, as a source of social and political stability and a centre of monastic excellence. Under the protection of its founder and patron, Richer, whose miracles recur throughout the history, Hariulf portrays his brothers in religion at work and worship. He recounts the support the community received from the emperor Charlemagne in building the great monastic church and his work is important for the description of the treasures, both material and spiritual, accumulated by the monks. In his pages we see the creation of a great monastic estate, the problems of maintaining it and the complexities of its management as experienced by a succession of abbots. The seizure in the tenth century of the relics of the community's patron and their recovery during the many conflicts that took place as the Carolingian empire collapsed reveal the political as well as the religious importance of relics. Hariulf's is a long and sweeping narrative with a cast of many characters; this new translation offers the opportunity to consider the work as an exercise in the writing of history, the creation and representation of the past, and how a community's history might be presented to foster a communal identity in a changed and changing society.

Italian graphic design explores the emergence and articulation of graphic design practice in Italy from the interwar period to the 1960s. It offers a much-needed critical and historical analysis of the role that graphic design has played in Italian design culture. As such, it contributes to a more diverse, inclusive and contextualised understanding of Italian design and visual culture. Drawing attention to everyday design practices, education, networks, organisational strategies, mediating channels and discourses on modernism, the book addresses the struggle for graphic designers to define their practice and its adaptation to shifting political and cultural environments, as well as changing design discourses. It traces the lineage of graphic design back to typography, tackles its problematic relation with advertising and addresses graphic designers' efforts to negotiate their professional identity with industrial designers. It problematises and shows new evidence on Italian design during and following fascism, addressing the grey area between alignment and resistance. A series of case studies brings to light neglected actors of Italian design: the vocational schools Scuola del Libro and Cooperativa Rinascita, and the professional body Aiap. They also offer new perspectives on protagonists of the historiographical canon: the Studio Boggeri, the Milan Triennale and the industrial design organisation ADI. This book will serve as a standard reference for students from undergraduate level upwards, as well as scholars working on Italian design and cultural history and those interested in the development of graphic design internationally.

Courteous Exchanges demonstrates the importance of courtesy as a discourse shaping reader and audience experiences in the English Renaissance. It focuses on significant correspondences between the works of Spenser and Shakespeare, but it also considers how Castiglione's Book of the Courtier provided these two authors with a rich mine of concepts and vocabulary and a predecessor in the art of encouraging reader engagement in these terms of analysis.Wareh analyses Love's Labour's Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale in tandem with The Faerie Queene, examining how such topics as education, gender, religion, race, and aristocratic identity are offered up to reader and audience interpretation. She suggests that Renaissance audiences and readers, through the reflections and responses provoked by this process, were led into a recognition of their overlapping roles as judges of texts and people. The habits of thought they thus developed supported a critical evaluation of the cultural fiction of inherited gentility and the social performance of courtesy that supports it. The works of Spenser and Shakespeare contributed to the social construction of Renaissance aristocratic identity, but they also provided tools for its critique.

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, 'non-literary', non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe's use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy. As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Nashe elicit and continue to provoke a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe's often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a 'King of Pages', he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. This book questions early modern conceptions of authorship and textual transmission through assessing Nashe's self-representation, authorial legacy, and literary celebrity: it traverses the mercurial way in which Nashe characterized himself as a messenger in print; addresses news and Nashe's denunciations of uncritical news-reading; examines Nashe's engagement in the Marprelate controversy and its resonances into the seventeenth century; assesses his ghostly influence on later writers and discusses the conscious materiality of Nashe's writing and its consumption. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe not only excelled at textual performance, but that his personae also became a contested site as readers actively participated and engaged in the reception of Nashe's image.

Romantic nationalism has profoundly shaped the contours of Syrian identity under Baathist rule, creating deeply rooted habits of thought that continue to impact the lives of Syrians today. Far from being an indigenous construct, this specific ideal of national identity has roots in 18th- and 19th-century French and German social philosophy, which was closely studied and championed by the Baathist "founding fathers." This vision of the national community included, among other features, a novel view of gender roles in public life, emphasizing the muscularity of patriarchal protectors and the adoration of supporting women. Gender, passion, and nation in Baathist Syria is the first book to address these European borrowings in Baathism and to document how the associated gender ideologies filtered down to impact the everyday lives of Syrian women and men. Tracing the concepts of Romantic, muscular nationalism from the writings of the Baathist founders, to political and legislative implementations, and ultimately to impacts on everyday popular culture, the book demonstrates how a new regime of Romantic gendered identity became central in Baathist efforts to unify the country's heterogenous religious and ethnic communities. Continuing up to the current day, the final chapters of the book address how this gendered nationalism has contributed to violent conflict in Syria and how it is being challenged by new concepts of civic pluralism.