Scotland is a country of strong progressive traditions and could be a model for a renewed social democracy. Devolution has given it a chance to show what a small self-governing nation, within a wider British and European Union, can do. Yet the authors of this volume are disappointed by the lack of policy innovation since 1999. In an effort to relaunch the debate, they offer a range of ideas for new thinking and new policies for Scotland of the twenty-first century.
Whether independent or devolved, Scotland faces the same challenge: how to harness the energies of the nation and to combine...

This book has established itself as one of the most concise and authoritative guides to the institutional development of the European Union. Covering the evolution from the original European Communities to the Constitution for Europe, Youri Devuyst introduces the reader to the divisions and dilemmas that have resulted in today s European Union. In doing so, the book provides much-needed clarification of the principles and practice behind the Union s institutions, decision-making and external relations. This knowledge is of crucial importance in grasping not just the Union s way of doing...

This book enlarges the perspective of literary geography which tends to focus on the correspondence between the objective world the geographer addresses and its subjective rendering in art. Instead it considers how geography informs fresh aesthetic responses to space in contemporary Canadian literature, with specific attention to the writings of Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, Anne Michaels, Aritha van Herk, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch and Thomas Wharton. This broadening leads to a series of interrogations: what blanks in conventional landscape writing does physical geography fill, and how?...

Shame and Desire defines the contemporary cinematic experience in terms that go beyond the visual. Adopting an intersubjective perspective on film studies, the author maintains that the dialectical poles of subject and object, seeing and being seen no longer seem to be valid. We are now surrounded by images that look back at us provocatively, seductively, indifferently; and not only in movies, but also in art, television, the city, in chance encounters, and in our private relationships.
Taking her cue from Jean-Paul Sartre, the author shows how emotions exemplify the way in which...

The fast-growing body of postcolonial drama is progressively gaining its just recognition in the twentieth-century canon of English-language plays. From the vantage point of various samplings along the Trans-Pacific axis linking English Canada, Australia and New Zealand, this monograph seeks to document the significance of this emerging postcolonial theater. More specifically, it examines the myriad ways in which, over the last two decades, representative mainstream, ethnic and First Nations playwrights have dramatized Europe's Other in its multiple guises. In their efforts to match new...

Dans ce livre, des specialistes de disciplines diverses et de pays et de continents differents analysent ce qui est demeure implicite dans la creation et l adoption de symboles et de mythes d une Europe toujours en construction. La publication tend a evaluer le -deficit symbolique- presume de l Union europeenne et de l Europe et explore l histoire et la signification de certains mythes et symboles de l Europe d aujourd hui, comme le mythe de l enlevement d Europe, l hymne et le drapeau europeens, la representation du continent, de meme que le sens que les experts ou les Europeens attribuent a...

This book received a Toni Morrison Society Recognition Award
The complexity of African-American identities is a central concern in Toni Morrison s writing. Speaking of -the enormous layers of lives that black Americans] live, - she has commented that -If I examine those layers, I don t come up with simple statements.- Drawing on relevant areas of feminist, poststructuralist and race-related theory, this study explores aspects of that complexity, encompassing all eight of her novels to date, including Love (2003).
Opening with an exploration of The Bluest Eye...

The rising importance and continuous expansion of intellectual property protection quite naturally goes together with increasing concern about the legal and political foundations of such enhanced protection. Nowhere does the basic equation which underlies intellectual property, namely that the pursuit of short term private interest by the holders of such property will satisfy the public interest in the long term, become both more visible, but also questionable than at the crossroads between the grant and enforcement of exclusive rights with international trade. Catchphrases, such as patent...

Teachers often feel that they have to mount enormous hills in their daily work. Teaching can be demanding, distressing and even painful, but it can also be very rewarding, just as the climber who reaches the top can feel intrinsically satisfied. These facets and consequences of teachers work are apparent in the studies presented in this book.
Some studies report that teachers experience a diversity of stresses, while others find that teachers in general report work satisfaction and only moderate levels of work-related stress. There are various reasons as to why this might be, and this...

La rupture observee au debut des annees 90 dans la courbe du soutien public a l integration europeenne a pose avec acuite le probleme de la place de l opinion publique dans l ensemble du processus d integration.
L emergence de ce debat europeen ne saurait occulter le fait qu il se decline en fonction des situations nationales. Le choix a donc ete fait de proposer dans cet ouvrage un article par pays, en retenant une selection representative de chaque etape: l Allemagne, la Belgique, la France et l Italie parmi les six fondateurs; le Danemark et la Grande-Bretagne pour le premier...