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This volume's relevance may be explained, first and foremost, during a time of unprecedented loss of life around the world each day. The data, which is oftentimes incomplete and misleading, nonetheless reveals the state as deficient as well as negligent in its response to social healthcare needs. This volume attests to the fact that pressing global public health concerns are ever present as subjects of societal discourse and debate in developed and developing states. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic makes the omission of the ethics of personal data collection analysis in the international relations literature even more salient given the rise of contact tracing and increased uses of mobile phone Apps to track citizens by states and firms across the globe, as this volume's chapters analyzing the responses to COVID-19 in Iran and Taiwan explain. For this reason, dialogue connecting research and practice is necessary to identify ways to address these emerging challenges at the conceptual, economic, legal, political, and social levels. The perspectives of researchers and the experience of practitioners must come together to bring the discussion forward. In response to this plea, a community of research-practitioners remains in dialogue after two Bosch Workshops at New York University to define the contents of case studies in this volume. The responsibility of this research-practitioner community is to grapple with specific issues that define the state of the discipline in personal data collection ethics. Case studies, including prominent uses of crowd-mapping platforms and mobile telephony Apps, document legal and human rights concerns in remote areas. Field research speaks to cases ranging from an analysis of Iran's response to the COVID-19 pandemic to the exploitation of personal data collection to perpetuate modern slavery through re-education camps in the People's Republic of China to crowd-mapping stories of physical abuses in public spaces by Safecity in India. The emphasis on the ethics of personal data collection in this edited volume through various case studies is to bring race and gender to the forefront once again as lenses to understand international relations. The myth of the founding of international relations in 1919, analyzed by Acharya and Buzan (2019) a century later, is one that obfuscates the influence of race relations as well as gender in the early development of the discipline during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These case studies broaden the ways we understand international relations in the West and, as importantly, in the non-Western space given the countries that are the subjects of analysis: China, Iran, Taiwan, and India, as well as the European Union and the United States. As the contributors focus on the relevance of race and gender across cases, this volume underlines our concerns about the future of democracy in the face of the rising tide of authoritarianism around the world. The plight of the world's largest and most plural democracy, India, under the Modi government, the increasingly aggressive nature of China under President Xi Jinping as well as the challenge of Trumpism in the United States make these concerns, which place illiberalism at the center of developments, pressing as well as timely.

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim intends to offer different practical attempts to build on Durkheim¿s legacy and investigate the issues and controversies that characterise contemporary societies and thus contribute to develop further this path of critical enquiry into ¿classical sociology¿.

Family law is a site of social conflict and the erasure of non-traditional families. This book explores how conservative religious and progressive queer groups can cooperatively work together to expand family law¿s recognition beyond the traditional state-sponsored family. This book also looks to future arenas of queer and religious political cooperation beyond family law.

This book begins by defining the term 'fake news', a term which has come to great public prominence since the start of our current millennium. Fake news, broadly defined, is used to describe 'false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting'. By giving some high-profile examples, this volume shows how the concept differs from lying and propaganda on one side and then from postmodern arguments about the relativism of all knowledge on the other. The book outlines the way that various national governments have become concerned with the concept in recent years, and points to contemporary worries about the behaviours of social media, about manipulation by both state and non-state actors, and about the developing technological capacity that allows almost any individual to produce 'deep fakes' that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine photographs or film footage. The volume explains why fake news can be productively examined through the lens of theatre and performance. We see how various forms of theatre have shared the epistemic function of the news: that is, to furnish the public with reliable factual information, and the book includes discussion of theatre-makers who have attempted to use theatre in this way. This book also traces the way that the concerns of our own historical moment about fake news echo the repeated worries expressed throughout theatrical history. The examples selected in this section of the book are therefore taken from the canonical high-road of Western theatrical texts, by figures such as Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, Lorraine Hansberry, Joan Littlewood, and Sarah Kane.

The book argues that the definition of a "e;fixer"e; emerges when local journalists are de-professionalized and their field expertise and connections are stripped away to produce a faceless, nameless, set of "e;eyes and ears"e; in service of the 24/7 media machine. The fact that we have the same news 24/7 across a range of news channels is an outcome of the simultaneous process of centralized decentralization-media conglomerates controlling news distribution and exhibition by hiring a scattering of fixers to do the groundwork of global news production. But working as a daily wager in journalism is not about risks taken or the self-exploitation endured. Rather, the role is an attack on the basics of the profession itself, the basic dignity of the journalist as an upholder of democracy. A fixer, who must be the eyes and ears of the people against forces of status quo, is reduced to a role and given as an instrument in regular journalists' hands to be used as a resource. Challenging existing literature on the topic, the book reveals the tension between actual local reporters and the role (read fixer) they are hired to fill. The book argues that fixer as a role emerges in tandem with news practices that leads to decontextualizing local events, people and stories to fit the consumption patterns of market economy, a colonial practice resurging in contemporary capitalism. The book holds not just the hierarchies in journalism responsible for feeding the dark underbelly of global news production, but also identifies the field inequality that produces violence against those local reporters. The issue is a quite serious challenge. Offering on-the-ground view of the situation from local perspectives, the book examines the consequences of the political economy of corporate media, and the price journalists pay for diminishing the life expectations as well as intellectual labor of journalists working as "e;fixers."e;This book is unique in that it studies fixers not as a role but rather as a political position, objective condition and subjective experience. Theorizing on the emergence of the fixer as an outcome of colonial capitalism, the book brings Marx, himself a journalist, back into the twenty-firstcentury discourse-taking discussions of intellectual labor back to the origins of capitalism-revealing how structural inequality takes a toll on journalism as a profession. As U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson once declared that the first casualty of war was truth, the book suggests that the sacrifice of truth has become a routine, both in liberal democracies and in the war-torn Global South. The first casualty, in this reckoning, is not truth itself, but the bearers of truth, i.e., journalists, many of whom now find themselves reduced to the category of fixers.

Following the Nationalist defeat on the mainland in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers retreated to Taiwan, forming the Republic of China (ROC). To many it seemed almost certain that the People's Republic of China (PRC) would attack and take Taiwan, perhaps as early as summer 1950. Control over a number of offshore islands, especially Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu) became a deciding factor in whether the PRC could invade Taiwan or, conversely, the ROC could invade the mainland. Twice in the 1950s tensions peaked, during the first (1954-55) and second (1958) Taiwan Strait crises. During both these events the U.S. government intervened diplomatically and militarily. This work provides a short, but highly relevant, history of the Taiwan Strait, and its significance today. This small body of water-often compared to the English Channel-separates the PRC and Taiwan and has been the location for periodic military tensions, some threatening to end in war. During the 1950s, the two outbreaks appeared like they might result in a global war. During the evacuation of the Dachen Islands, for example, the U.S.Navy sent seven aircraft carriers and was authorized to nuke three Chinese coastal cities if the PLA tried to interfere.In the modern era, the Taiwan Strait separates democratic Taiwan from the authoritarian PRC. This study will discuss the origins of these conflicts, the military aspects of the confrontations, and, in particular, the complicated and largely secret diplomatic negotiations-including two previously unknown Eisenhower-Chiang secret agreements-going on behind the scenes between the U.S. government and the nationalist government in Taiwan. This book ends with a short discussion of the ongoing Covid crisis, and how the PRC might take advantage of this crisis to extend its political and, eventually, military control over Taiwan.

This book is about the presence of music in novels. More specifically, it is about music in the early modern novel, with an emphasis on seventeenth-century musical prose from The Netherlands. The essay provides a concise and an accessible introduction into the subject and presents an overview of this compelling and fascinating new research area. In recent years the interest in this subject has substantially increased both among literary criticswho coined a special term for the phenomenon and speak of 'music novels'and academics, who started doing systematic and in-depth musico-literary research. Initially, the research was focused mainly on the influence of music in novels from the period around 1900, the works by modernist writers like Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Later, also the novelistic oeuvre of twentieth- and twenty-first-century 'musical' authors like Milan Kundera, Simon Vestdijk and Toni Morrison became subject of study. It is remarkable that up until now the presence of musical elements in prose works from earlier centuries received almost no attention from academic researchers. This essay wants to contribute to filling this lacuna. The book offers the reader an impression and overview of this intriguing interdisciplinary field. First, it presents an exploration of the role and function of musical elements in seventeenth-century Dutch prose fiction. Many examples from primary literature are discussed and are consistently considered in the light of contemporary European developments. Secondly, the publication serves as an introduction to a fascinating new research area, that is at an international level, too, virtually unexplored. This makes it the first transnational study devoted to musical practices in the Golden Age novel. Accordingly, the text investigates several options for future research.

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. These national atlases mirror and embody some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; colonialism and postcolonialism; the geography of biopolitics.

Robert K. Merton (RKM) was an important figure in the mid-nineteenth development of sociology in terms of social theory, methodology and several substantive areas key to understanding modern societies ¿ the sociologies of science, media, professions and bureaucracy. This book reveals the different components of RKM¿s work and how each relates to the other.

Grand-Gugignol Cinema and the Horror Genre traces important contributions of the Parisian Grand-Guignol theatre's Golden Age as theoretical considerations of embodiment and affect in the development of horror cinema in the twentieth century. This study traces key components of the Grand-Guignol stage as a means to explore the immersive and corporeal aspects of horror cinema from the sound period to today. The book is a means to explore the Grand-Guignol not only as a historical place and genre, but theoretically, as a conceptual framework that opens up an affective mapping of Grand-Guignol attractions in cinema. In a broader theoretical sense, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare positions Grand-Guignol cinema in corporeal and affective terms as a way to discuss central themes from the Golden Age of the Grand-Guignol theatre as they figure within the framework of post-representational analysis in cinema studies. Post-representational analysis draws meaning out of matter, or the material intensities of films; here, making sense (representation and meaning) and also sensing (in a more corporeal, sensorial way) have political relevance that cut across gender, class, race and sexuality. The author deploys the Grand-Guignol as a conceptual tool to reveal its important influence on the horror genre by focusing on the dominant themes of the Grand-Guignol theatre that cinematic horror has taken up in its own immersive theatrics of the corporeal and sensorial. This study's restoration of a long Grand-Guignol tradition in cinema makes it a significant contribution to new theorizations of horror. It brings seemingly disparate traditions into conversation, as American, Canadian, French, and Italian cinema are all important sites for thinking through cinematic embodiment. These four countries have developed their own important genres and movements of Grand-Guignol cinema: the slasher, the "French Films of Sensation," Canadian "body horror," and the giallo. The Grand-Guignol famously operated in a dead-end of Chaptal Street, in the Pigalle district of Paris; this study offers affective and corporeal readings that open up new byways beyond the dead-end of psychoanalytic readings that continue to be dominant in horror genre scholarship.

Other Canon Economics: Essays in the Theory and History of Uneven Economic Development brings together key essays on development economics from one of the most prolific and important development economists and historians of economic policy today.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive survey of the life and work of David Ricardo (1772-1823), a major contributor to the British classical school of political economy. John E. King's editorial introduction sets Ricardo's work in the economic, political and social context of his time, emphasising his strong defence of economic and political liberalism and his opposition to the beneficiaries of contemporary 'Old Corruption'. King's later chapter deals in more depth with Ricardo's political views and his position on important questions of economic policy, as well as the controversial conclusions that were drawn from his theoretical works by the so-called 'Ricardian Socialists'. A very different approach is taken by Wilfried Parys, whose discussion of Ricardo's - highly successful - business activities raises the question of how they may have influenced the development of his theoretical ideas. A detailed examination of particular aspects of this theoretical work is provided by Ghislain Deleplace, who examines his theory of money; by Gilbert Faccarello whose subject is the Ricardian theory of international trade; by Christian Gehrke, who analyses Ricardo's distinctive approach to explaining the distribution of income; by Alex Thomas, who is concerned with Ricardo's role in British classical political economy, with particular reference to the theory of value; and by Bryan Turner, who sets out Ricardo's complex and important relationship with Robert Malthus and the latter's population theory. Michael Howard explains how Ricardo was interpreted, and criticised, first by Karl Marx and then, over the next century and a half, by various strands of the Marxist movement around the globe. William Coleman's chapter investigates similar issues from a very different perspective, exploring the critical reception and interpretation of Ricardo's economic thought in the 'New World' society of Australia. And Heinz Kurz examines the causes and considers the consequences of some of the widespread misinterpretations of Ricardo in the two centuries since his death.

The Spirit of the Laws is the canonical text of modern republicanism and the English translation - always deficient heretofore - is critical to an appreciation of those deliberations that led to adoption of the Constitution of the United States. The present update recovers the sense of the original French.

The book is a concise and comprehensive resource for people who are middle-aged and beyond and are facing the prospects of their own aging and of caring for elderly loved ones-an often overwhelming task for which little in life prepares us. Using an interdisciplinary approach and many personal anecdotes, Professor Hoffman develops recommendations for building sustainable social, legal, medical, and financial support systems for aging and caregiving.Aging with a Plan combines thorough research with engaging anecdotes and practical advice. It offers one-stop shopping for anyone in need of guidance without a lot of time for independent research. The book answers questions such as: What legal documents should you be sure to have? What expenses should you anticipate in retirement and how do you save for them? What do you need to know about medical care as you or your loved ones grow older? How should you approach conversations about the sensitive topic of safe driving with elderly loved ones? What options exist for end-of-life care, and how do you make sure that your wishes will be followed? The book is user-friendly and accessible to a general audience, and each chapter ends with a helpful checklist.The book draws on the author's background in law and bioethics as well as personal experience with health care and the elderly. Dr. Hoffman presents thorough research to bolster her advice. She also writes of her parents' many challenges during their last years and her husband's Parkinson's disease. This is an illuminating, engrossing, and immensely useful resource.

This book focuses on experiences from various backgrounds of six children who lived in temporary relocation areas in Cape Town, South Africa. Themes identified examined the effects of forced removals, displacement, and marginality on the lifeworlds of children.

Revolutions in post-digital archival practice and other forms of historical research necessitate an increasingly sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare studies, with Shakespeare-based films serving as an ideal model for the ongoing transformations of many disciplinary fields.

The internationalisation of higher education gives rise to the curious entity of the global university. Like any organisation within an institutional environment undergoing change, the global university is riddled with numerous contradictions and The Ethics of Internationalisation undertakes a critique of the ethical elements.

Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therese Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC's many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. This book investigates what motivated these women to become outspoken public broadcasters and how they manage to overcome the obstacles in their way. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, it traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.

The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel brings together leading scholars and upcoming researchers in contemporary ethnomethodology to bring out the experimental character of Garfinkel's legacy in the social sciences and beyond.

In Defense of Reason After Hegel builds upon and enlists the arguments of Hegel to refute the disempowerment of reason perpetrated by the peddlers of misinformation in public life and by analytic philosophy and postmodernism in the academy. Undermining their assaults on truth, In Defense of Reason After Hegel shows how the fundamental character of nature and of mind allow reason to be autonomous and allow us to enact a reality of freedom in accord with right and freely create works of fine art. The book examines how life and language provide the means for reason to be autonomous and how the autonomy of thought precludes natural evolution or bioengineering from enhancing our capacity for philosophical thinking. It unravels the perplexities of the logic of self-determination and to show how the will can achieve self-determination in the conventions by which agents engender the institutions of freedom. The book then unveils the limitations of the principle of contradiction, which bars the way to an understanding of how anything can be determinate and how thought and action can be free. Thereupon the paradoxes that arise in thinking time are resolved by liberating thought of the formality of the principle of contradiction. The revolutionary character of Hegel's conception of consciousness is next explored to make intelligible how animals and young children can be conscious and self-conscious, as well as how philosophical thought can overcome the epistemological limitations of the opposition of consciousness. On this basis, the book draws upon Hegel's Philosophy of Mind to show how language can originate and be an appropriate vehicle of autonomous reason. The book examines the structure of the institutions of freedom that talking animals can enact. It highlights the philosophical underpinnings of the fundamental shortcomings in the American constitution and American society and draws lessons from the author's recent campaign to shed light on how the philosophy of right can be a guide to social reform. It also examines how the autonomy of fine art can be realized in sculpture, contrary to claims made by Hegel that would tie this individual art to the classical style.

The first book-length study of Sydney-based Horwitz Publications, the largest and most dynamic Australian pulp publisher to emerge after World War II. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged, softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been so far recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback from the late 1950s onwards. Horwitz was adept at seeking out and exploiting the porous spaces that existed, sometimes only temporarily, between pulp and mainstream publishing: where mainstream literary forms were reconfigured to suit more sensational tastes, authorial reputation was fluid, and government regulation failed to keep pace with shifting reading tastes and social mores. Its dealings were aggressively transnational in scope, moving beyond London, to directly encompass the United States and other overseas fiction markets. And Horwitz continually mined international literary and publishing fashions and successes to create local analogues of popular pulp and mass-market publishing genres, giving them a makeover to align them with Australian cultural sensibilities, tastes and legislative environments.Horwitz Publications, Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback examines the authorship, production, marketing and distribution of Horwitz pulp paperbacks. It includes ground-breaking material on the conditions of creative labour: the writers, artists and editors involved in the production of Horwitz pulp. The book also explores how Horwitz pulp paperbacks acted as a local conduit for the global modern: the ideas, sensations, fascinations, technologies, and people that came crashing into the Australia consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s. This is part of the larger story of Australian pulp fiction's role as an unofficial archive of changing tastes, ideas, controversies and debates about gender, race, class, youth, and economic and social mobility that occurred in 1950s and 1960s Australia.

This volume studies the concept of refuge as well as historical forced displacement and statelessness, trying to provide potential lasting solutions to the many problems associated with this situation. It moves from the pressing crisis of refugees to the crisis of humanity that seeks to find refuge.

The book is a firsthand account of Dr. Hannah Jaicks' journey through western Montana's ranching landscapes to showcase the stories of ranchers and affiliated groups who are pioneering strategies for reducing conflicts with wildlife, while also stewarding the landscape. Americans depend on these people who live by working on the land. Ranchers have the power to shape the future of our lands, waterways, and wildlife communities, but enduring perceptions frame ranching as a unilaterally destructive force to the environment. Perception is slippery ground to base an argument on, however, and reality is far more complicated. Often seen as antithetical to one another, American ranchers and wildlife have long been entangled with another. The book is about producers and partner organizations who are forging new paths in conservation and addressing these seemingly intractable entanglements to sustain working ranch operations alongside healthy wildlife populations. It elevates the voices of these people striving daily to achieve wild and working landscapes in the West and serves as a model for how others can begin to do the same. The author takes readers on a journey up western Montana to a different valley in each chapter and showcases the place-based stories of everyday conservation heroes who practice regenerative ranching, provide consciously raised agricultural products, advance strategies for collaborative conservation and protect vital habitat for endemic wildlife that would otherwise be developed and subdivided beyond repair. Ethnographic storytelling is interwoven with psychological theories to inform readers about progressive ways to make the world we share - with people and animals - a better place to live. Illustrations by Katie Christiansen of wildlife and conflict-reduction tools accompany the text, helping to underscore the vivid realities of shared landscapes and how they are achieved. There is no doubt the history of ranching is laden with problematic examples, and public and private rangelands are not universally in good condition today. This book aims to capture the increasing recognition that strong ranching practices coincide with good land and wildlife stewardship measures, but ranchers need help. If we want to see more of this remarkable work happening, environmentalists and concerned citizens need to step up and ensure these practices are not only possible but also become the norm. Everyone must be willing to come to the table and navigate discussions about how to work together more effectively and collaboratively. This book is a roadmap for how people can begin to do so.

Most books about the Irish Famine tend to take Ireland's reliance on potato for granted and treat the arrival of the deadly blight in 1845 as merely the trigger event that launched a humanitarian crisis-one that the British government famously failed to manage. In this work, considerable attention is paid to the origins and nature of Ireland's dangerous potato dependency. Although introduced into Ireland as a cultivated plant, the potato nevertheless had the impact of an invasive species, disrupting and reorganizing Irish agriculture. Drawing upon ecology and systems theory, this study provides a detailed account of the intricacies of Ireland's potato economy built upon an unstable and unsustainable monoculture that became a cybernetic trap. When almost the whole potato crop failed in the fall of 1846, what began as an ecological disaster quickly became a political one. Hampered by long-standing prejudice and Anglo-Irish tensions, the British government's various attempts to deal with the humanitarian crisis were muddled by competing economic and social goals. Among these was the idea that the Famine represented an "e;opportunity"e; to purge Ireland of fragmented land holding and potato dependency by encouraging an English-type market-driven agriculture. Changes did occur, but the government's imperial dreams eventually ran up against Irish realities.This book provides readers with a unique, in-depth understanding of the background to the Irish Famine and a detailed account of the crisis, as well as the immediate and long-term results of the catastrophe. In addition to ecological and agriculture factors, this work shows how cultural, economic and political influences shaped British attitudes and policies. Although Britain's policies reflected anti-Irish prejudices, it was not the "e;Irish people"e; who were the victims of the Famine, but rather the Irish poor. By the mid-1840s, Great Britain was an emerging, middle-class democracy imbued with a faith in free markets and a deep suspicion of the poor, English as well as Irish. The Government's response to the Irish Famine reflects the problems democracies often have setting aside class and racial prejudice in order to deal with humanitarian crises.

Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning and numerous new sources, this book fills the analytical gap caused by the research focus on either macro- or micro-level issues through analysing how everyday Chinese had reacted to and influenced the numerous changes in China from 1964 to 2000.

The changes triggered by the global financial crisis in 2008, the immigration flows and the covid-19 pandemic in contemporary societies have transformed the way individuals communicate, create content, and 'consume' publicly available information. Consequently, political, societal, and financial pressures have led to alternative forms of media practice and representations and disrupted the core relationships and dynamics between politics, journalism, and society. In this context, several challenges emerge which are related to deeper social and cultural changes. Such challenges influence political communication and its relationship with the media and further impact the boundaries between private and public domains. Some of these challenges also constitute a direct challenge to democratic values and in some cases work against the preservation and strengthening of democracy. Moreover, all these developments are taking place at a time where democracy itself and its 'chronic diseases' are under criticism by new forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. This edited book examines the key challenges in political discourse and journalistic practice in times of crises. It focuses on European paradigms and links political rhetoric and media challenges with the societal, political, and financial crises from 2008 until the present.

This book will be the first book that systematically analyzes the different waves of consumer nationalism in China, the types of its nationalistic consumer actions, and the critical impact of the new wave which has increased the possibility of a consumer base that could turn hostile at any moment.

This anthology explores the relationships and interdependencies between literary production and distinctions of taste by examining how the material aspects of literary texts, such as the cover, binding, typography, and paper stock, reflect or even determine their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, the industrialization of printing made possible a wide range of cheap formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, and paperbacks, which made literature available to a mass reading public. The increased demand for new content effectively lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in a tremendous expansion of popular or trivial fiction. These developments were often perceived as a threat to traditional literary institutions, which increasingly relied on material distinctions as a way of preserving their cultural authority, and some publishers even attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusivity by creating deluxe editions that were designed to preserve the privileged status of so-called "highbrow" texts. In many cases, the distinctions between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" taste actually had little to do with the content of the texts themselves, as books more often functioned as markers of socioeconomic status, like clothing or home décor. At the risk of being provocative, one might even go so far as to say that the concept of literary taste was more closely related to fashion sense than critical judgment. The anthology seeks to address this claim by examining how the tensions between consumerism and prestige reflect fundamental historical changes with regard to the development of technology, literacy, and social power.