Open Access Books

Characteristic for all contributions to the Wiener Jahrbuch in 2010 is the presentation of latest research findings with the help of methodological refinements. Thus Assaf Pinkus suggests a new interdisciplinary approach for trecento painting, which brings the viewer's perceptions into an analysis of image creation. Milena Bartlová, on the other hand, addresses the little considered subject of the iconoclasm of Bohemian Hussites. An important finding is that Hussitism was unable to give up the image in its medieval function, since the printed book - which could have taken over the communicative qualities of the image - had not yet been invented. Giovan Battista Fidanza also deals with a little considered subject - namely Michelangelo as wood carver. He is able to demonstrate convincingly that Michelangelo applied prefabricated blocks of limewood in the assemblage of his wooden crucifixes. The four subsequent articles are dedicated to Baroque art. Eckhart Leuschner defines the Baroque allegory as a constant and internationally standardised deployment of formal and semantic possibilities. At the centre of Kristoffer Neville's contribution is an early version of Fischer von Erlach's Entwurff einer historischen Architectur, with the help of which the creative process of Fischer's main architectural-theoretical work is reconstructed. In the complicated memoria programme of the state sarcophagus finished for Franz Stephan and Maria Theresia in 1754 in the crypt of the Vienna Capuchin Church, Werner Telesko identifies both Antique and Christian strands of tradition. Werner Hofmann, meanwhile, recognises the 1711 endowment decree for Lothar Franz von Schönborn as an inofficial foundation source for Schloss Pommersfelden and traces a 'hypertext' within the decree, which represents the key for the building's iconography. The amateur drawings of the Habsburgs from the 19th century are comprehended by Kerstin Merkel as autonomous non-verbal sources and integrated with historical information. Iris Wien, by contrast, sets two self-portraits of Andy Wahrhol within his known oeuvre and convincingly suggests an interpretation as Medusa. In the last four contributions to the volume, the Memorabilia, important contemporary historical documents for the history of the Vienna School are published and made accessible. Alexandra Caruso edits the memoirs of Erica Tietze Conrat. The letters of Wilde, presented by Károly Kókai, provide insights into events within the circles of Vienna art history at that time. Evonne Levy publishes for the first time a selection of letters written by Hans Sedlmayr to Meyer Schapiro in the period 1930-35. Charles Hope succeeds in portraying in convincing complexity the scholarly range of Sir Ernst Gombrich.

This book presents a systematic account of the relationship between political parties and deliberative democracy. It shows which parties prefer deliberation, how intra-party deliberation takes place in practice beyond theoretical models and general descriptions, and how political elites and party members perceive deliberative democracy. Specifically, the book answers how party characteristics influence the use of deliberation by political parties, why intra-party deliberation differs in its use and functioning across parties, and how politicians and party members see deliberation. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of party politics, deliberative democracy, democratic innovations, political theory, and, more broadly, comparative politics.

When rock star Bono told Oprah Winfrey that America is an ideal that is supposed to be contagious, the talk show host was moved to tears. Such an imagined America, rather than the nation-state USA, is the topic of Fabricating the Absolute Fake. Pop and politics become intertwined, as Hollywood, television, and celebrities spread the American Dream around the world. Using concepts such as the absolute fake and karaoke Americanism, the book examines this global mediation as well as the way America is appropriated in pop culture produced outside of the USA, as demonstrated by such diverse cultural icons as the Elvis-inspired crooner Lee Towers and the Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B. This revised and extended edition includes a new chapter on Barack Obama and Michael Jackson as global celebrities and a new afterword on teaching American pop culture.

Die Musik des 20. und bisherigen 21. Jahrhunderts ist geprägt von einer nie dagewesenen Komplexität kompositorischer Ansätze, die mit dem Aufbrechen der herkömmlichen Dur-Moll-Tonalität begann und mit den multimedialen Möglichkeiten des neuen Jahrhunderts noch lange nicht zu Ende ist. Auch die vor allem nach 1950 eingetretene fundamentale Wandlung ästhetischer Positionen aufgrund gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche hat ihre Spuren in der Musik hinterlassen. Der Begriff der Musik entwickelte sich im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts zu einem vielschichtigen Topos pluraler Musiken, basierend u.a. auf neuen kompositorischen Mitteln, interkulturellen Begegnungen, unterschiedlichen medialen Zugängen und nicht zuletzt einem Wandel ästhetischer Rezeptionsmechanismen. Im vorliegenden Band werden Referate zu diesem Themenkomplex aus der Rubrik „Freie Referate“ des 15. Internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, der vom 4.–8. September 2012 in Göttingen unter dem Motto „Musik | Musiken. Strukturen und Prozesse“ stattfand, zusammengefasst. Das Panorama reicht dabei von Fragen nach einer kompositorischen Spätstilistik, kulturellen Austauschprozessen, musikalischen Grenzerfahrungen und intermedialen Exotismen bis hin zu multimedialen Klanginstallationen und Musiktheaterkompositionen und dem damit verbundenen Aufbrechen tradierter Gattungsgefüge.

Between the 1940s and 1970s, approxiately three million people left the Appalachian mountains in search of jobs in Midwest urban areas, such as Cincinnati, Chicago, and Detroit. Unfortunately, about a third of these people were forced into a life of long-term underclass dwellers. Struggling with questions of identity, rootlessness, and cultural negation, these people were given the name of “urban Appalachians.” Published in 1987, Too Few Tomorrows addresses some of the pressing questions regarding urban Appalachians and their story of migration to city life.

"Embodied Archive focuses on perceptions of disability and racial difference in Mexico’s early post-revolutionary period, from the 1920s to the 1940s. In this period, Mexican state-sponsored institutions charged with the education and health of the population sought to strengthen and improve the future of the nation, and to forge a more racially homogeneous sense of collective identity and history. Influenced by regional and global movements in eugenics and hygiene, Mexican educators, writers, physicians, and statesmen argued for the widespread physical and cognitive testing and categorization of schoolchildren, so as to produce an accurate and complete picture of “the Mexican child,” and to carefully monitor and control forms of unwanted difference, including disability and racialized characteristics. Differences were not generally marked for eradication—as would be the case in eugenics movements in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe—but instead represented possible influences from a historically distant or immediate reproductive past, or served as warnings of potential danger haunting individual or collective futures. Weaving between the historical context of Mexico’s post-revolutionary period and our present-day world, Embodied Archive approaches literary and archival documents that include anti-alcohol and hygiene campaigns; projects in school architecture and psychopedagogy; biotypological studies of urban schoolchildren and indigenous populations; and literary approaches to futuristic utopias or violent pasts. It focuses in particular on the way disability is represented indirectly through factors that may have caused it in the past or may cause it in the future, or through perceptions and measurements that cannot fully capture it. In engaging with these narratives, the book proposes an archival encounter, a witnessing of past injustices and their implications for the disability of our present and future."

The volume, dedicated to the 44th International Conference of the Italian Union for Drawing, investigates the theme of ‘Transitions’, which particularly effectively represents our time and the current condition of the discipline of Drawing. The term, beyond its generic meaning of an intermediate stage in a process in which a condition changes from one state to another, has always been used in various fields, from music to geophysics. In fact, the disciplines of drawing have always been confronted with themes and issues relating to transitions from one condition to another. The history of representation tells us of transformations, even epochal ones, relating to ‘drawing’, with all that such transitions entail: suffice it to think of the evolution of forms of representation, of instrumental apparatuses, of the mutability of supports, of the analogical-digital transition underway, of the new modes of communication on platforms, of the hypertrophic offer of images also on the net that confirms Guy Debord’s intuitions relating to the new spectacularisation of society. Similarly, representation triggers transitions in the prefiguration and communication of design, the anticipation and foreshadowing of future events.The challenges posed by the digital pose open questions whose scope can only be glimpsed, such as the relationship between drawing and the act of modelling, and the construction of new paradigms of visual language and communication. ‘Transitions’, almost implicitly, points to possible futures, the evolution of technique and the search for new modes of expression; at the same time, however, it can suggest silences and reflections in a process of connection between history, theory, criticism and construction.

The essay studies the maps produced in the 15th and early 16th centuries by Venice and other states with reference to water management, exploitation of agricultural resources, administrative organization, border control and war strategies. It also considers the extraordinary maps of Southern Italy produced by the Aragonese government between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (known only thanks to their 18th-century copies), which bring out a grandiose and organic general plan of topographic survey by compass and astronomical observations.

One of the most beautiful films of Italian cinematic Neorealism, Giovanna, a real pearl by Gillo Pontecorvo dated 1955, is almost completely unknown to the public. Entirely filmed in Prato, inside an old factory, now dismantled, and fully interpreted by workers and employees of the various textile companies of the city, the film tells the struggle of the workers to defend their jobs against the thirst for profits of the bosses and also against their own husbands who want them to stay at home to look after the children. It is not only a magnificent document of industrial archaeology, but also and above all the portrait of a new woman, modern and ancient at the same time.

This book examines how the thinking towards international relations of political leaders, researchers, the media and the public is fundamentally metaphorical in nature: the abstract and far away constantly made concrete and familiar through the imaginative rationality of metaphors. It delves into ten competing structural metaphors: international relations as natural selection, as family dynamics, as balancing operations, as building and constructing, as games and play, as business and trade, as journeys and paths, as musical performances, as health or sickness and as puzzles and riddles. Drawing attention to the important role of metaphors in grasping this field and providing explanations for its events and motives for its actors, this study will appeal to scholars and students of International Relations and World Politics. For experts on metaphor theory or cognitive linguistics, this book will offer practical examples and speculate on the concrete consequences of adopting different metaphorical schemes.

The open access book aims to show the readers novel, relevant and reproducible power of synergistic collaborations between European research groups and stakeholders with the objective to synthesize the existing knowledge and expertise about fire management and hazard and defining a concerted research agenda that promotes an integrated approach to create fire-resilient landscapes, taking into account biological, biochemical and physical, but also socio-economic, historical, geographical, sociological, perception and policy constraints. This is an urgent societal need due to the expected further intensification and geographical spreading of wildfire regimes under Global Change. Fire has been part of the Earth's System for the last 400 million years, and humans are the sole species that controls and manages fire. We have used fire for over a million years, both, as hunter-gatherers managing the landscape with fire and as farmers using fire as a low-cost, efficient and ecological tool for clearing and maintaining the productivity of the land. Fire has been highlighted as the most influential element in the development of human societies. The increase in prolonged dry and hot periods observed in many regions of the world is exacerbating the risk of fire. The causes of increased fire risk are not only linked to climate change but are also a consequence of economic and social changes and political decisions. Over the past few decades, many countries’ rural areas have seen significant depopulation and a reduction in land management as residents moved to cities or even other countries in search of work. The resulting rural depopulation has led to revegetation of the abandoned agricultural land, which favors fire spread. The enhanced risk of fires is moving beyond the capacity of even the best-funded wildland firefighting teams and therefore calls for the development of new approaches to fire management that are key nowadays at different scales. Instead of focusing primarily on increasing firefighting capabilities, a more effective approach is needed that focuses on long-term fire prevention through vegetation management by reducing fuel load or managing fuel type and fuel continuity at a landscape level. FIRElinks (COST Action CA18135) is developing the EU-spanning network of scientists and practitioners involved in forest fire research and land management with backgrounds such as fire dynamics, fire risk management, fire effects on vegetation, fauna, soil and water and socio-economic, historical, geographical, political perception and land management approaches. Among the different Working Groups, number 5 is aimed to connect communities from different scientific and geographic backgrounds, allowing the discussion of different experiences and the emergence of new approaches to fire research, human management, regional issues and socio-economic aspects.

Reginald McKenna has never been the subject of scholarly attention. This was partly due to his own preference for appearing at the periphery of events even when ostensibly at the centre, and the absence of a significant collection of private papers. This new book redresses the neglect of this major statesmen and financier partly through the natural advance of historical research, and partly by the discoveries of missing archival material. McKenna's role is now illuminated by his own reflections, and by the correspondence of friends and colleagues, including Asquith, Churchill, Keynes, Baldwin, Bonar Law, MacDonald, and Chamberlain. McKenna's presence at the hub of political life in the first half of the century is now clear: in the radical Liberal governments of 1905–16, where he acted as a lightning conductor for the party; during the war, where he served as the Prime Minister's deputy and the principal voice for restraint in the conduct of the war; and as chairman of the world's largest bank, where until his death in office aged eighty, he prompted progressive policies to deal with the issues of war debt, trade, mass unemployment, and the return to gold.

Transnational perspectives on Christian Democrats in exile This book focuses on the political exile of Catholic Christian Democrats during the global twentieth century, from the end of the First World War to the end of the Cold War. Transcending the common national approach, the present volume puts transnational perspectives at center stage and in doing so aspires to be a genuinely global and longitudinal study. Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century includes chapters on continental European exile in the United Kingdom and North America through 1945; on Spanish exile following the Civil War (1936–39), throughout the Franco dictatorship; on East-Central European exile from the defeat of Nazi Germany and the establishment of Communist rule (1944–48) through the end of the Cold War; and Latin American exile following the 1973 Chilean coup. Encompassing Europe (both East and West), Latin America, and the United States, Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century places the diasporas of twentieth-century Christian Democracy within broader, global debates on political exile and migration. Contributors: Paolo Acanfora (University of Rome La Sapienza), Leyre Arrieta (University of Deusto), Gemma Caballer (University of Barcelona), Justinas Dementavičius (Vilnius University), Joaquín Fermandois (Catholic University of Chile / San Sebastián University), Élodie Giraudier (Harvard University), Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (City University of New York), Katalin Kádár Lynn (Independent Scholar), Wolfram Kaiser (University of Portsmouth), Piotr H. Kosicki (University of Maryland), Sławomir Łukasiewicz (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin), Christopher Stroot (University of California San Diego) This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

"This outlook provides a focused assessment of the state of public capital in the major European countries and identifies areas where public investment could contribute more to stable and sustainable growth. A European Public Investment Outlook brings together contributions from a range of international authors from diverse intellectual and professional backgrounds, providing a valuable resource for the policy-making community in Europe to feed their discussion on public investment. The volume both offers sector-specific advice and highlights larger areas which should be prioritized in the policy debate (from transport to social capital, R&D and the environment). The outlook is structured into two parts: the chapters of Part I respectively explore public investment trends in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Europe as a whole, and illuminate how the legacy of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis is one of insufficient public investment. Part II investigates some areas into which resources could be channelled to reverse the recent trend and provide European economies with an adequate public capital stock. The essays in this outlook collectively foster a broad approach to and definition of public investment, that is today more relevant than ever. Offering up a timely and clear case for the elimination of bias against investment in European fiscal rules, this outlook is a welcome contribution to the European debate, aimed both at policy makers and general readers"

Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval English studies, Dating Beowulf: studies in intimacy playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. This volume presents an argument for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice versa, while offering a riposte to anti-feminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, feminist criticism, literary theory, Old English literature, and medieval studies alike. To this end, the chapters embody a range of critical approaches, from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to Actor-Network theory, all organized into clusters that articulate new modes of intimacy with the poem.