Based on a fifteen year longitudinal cross-cultural analysis on the role of the body in identity construction process around the world, this analysis provides readers with a comparative theoretical exploration of piercing and other forms of body modification that international communities of defiance use to express their identity.

This edition of Shakespeare s The Merchant of Venice reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by four sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations designed to facilitate many different approaches to Shakespeare s play and the early modern culture out of which the play emerges.

The second half offers a selection of Mao's writings - including such seminal pieces as "On the New Democracy" and selections from the "Little Red Book" - and writings about Mao and his legacy by both his contemporaries and modern scholars.

The chapters in this volume analyse issues relating to political governance, national identity, economic development and regional security that have preoccupied the states of South Asia in the fifty years following independence.

In 72 B.C., in the heart of Rome's Mediterranean empire, a slave named Spartacus ignited one of the most violent episodes of slave resistance in the history of the Roman Empire - indeed in the world annals of slavery.

Amid the battle for American independence and the struggle to invent a federal government, American Revolutionary leaders and intellectuals sought also to create a culture that would unify a territory of immense regional, ethnic, and religious diversity.

This book provides readers with the first survey of social conditions since the opening of the borders between China and mainland Southeast Asia in the early 1990s, which saw radical changes in the economic policies of the various states involved, in particular, China, Vietnam, and Laos.

This is a lively study of the autobiographical instinct in a variety of 16th and 17th century modes of writing in English, from letters and memoirs to pastoral, polemic and street ballads. The book's central concern is how "selves" are "betrayed" in texts, particularly in the centuries before the autobiography was a recognized genre.

A decade ago, playwright dissident Vaclav Havel led an almost bloodless revolution against Czechoslovakia's hardline communist regime. In the years that followed, the country split apart into two independent Czech and Slovak states, each taking radically different paths to reform. This book examines the core issues at work in the last decade, focusing on the political, economic, and philosophical underpinnings of the reform process.

Policy-makers in Pittsburgh, Birmingham and Rotterdam are confronted with rapidly changing social and economic environments.