The application of mandatory rules in private international law of contracts is a controversial topic of growing international concern. Legislatures are increasingly intervening in private contracts in order to protect the economic interests of state, or the interests of vulnerable groups, such as consumers or employees. This thesis addresses two major contexts in which the application of mandatory rules arises, namely the restriction of party autonomy by the application of certain mandatory rules of a law, other than the chosen law, and the application of internationally mandatory rules of...

The author treats, in historical and philosophical terms, the contributions of the traditionally marginalized genre of detective fiction to epistemology: how detective fiction not only traces the progression of knowledge and its discovery, as has been the traditional model for understanding this genre, but, in fact, constructs it through narrative. Particular focus is on Colin Dexter, creator of the Inspector Morse character and series. This work also links detective fiction to more legitimate, accepted realms of literature and criticism: semiotics (the reading of clues, with the body as a...

The monograph aims for a comprehensive look at the history of -The Big Apple-, incorporating material that has come to light since the first edition of this work was published in 1991. The overall picture now is: Apples, always important, became especially so with the appearance of the Big Red Delicious Apple in Iowa, 1870 s. -The Big Apple- therefore came to refer to somebody or something very important. In 1920 an African-American stablehand in New Orleans mentioned in conversation: -We s goin to the big apple - (NYC racetracks as the big time in horseracing). Turf writer John J. Fitz...

This volume ranges widely even wildly over many speech and language disciplines and typologically diverse languages, demonstrating that the search for regularities traditionally at the forefront of linguistic work cannot afford to ignore close analysis of very particular, even idiosyncratic areas of language behaviour. This is illustrated especially in the relationship between phonetic detail and speaker characteristics, on the one hand, and between phonetic detail and phonological structure, on the other, while also including phonological analysis relevant to sound change and markedness...

The works of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bronte are saturated with spatial metaphors, their composition inevitably reflecting Victorian concepts of gender and the ideology of separate spheres . Questioning the binary interpretation of incarceration and flight, this study focuses on how, through a transgression of narrated, textual, and metaphorical spaces, the Brontes feminine protagonists show the ideological divide between male and female spaces to be more permeable than previously acknowledged. Applying the spatial concepts of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, this study...

The concept of national interest belongs among the most widely used and abused concepts in the foreign policy debate. This volume illustrates how the term can be used as a meaningful analytical tool. It introduces three criteria (relevance, domestic consensus, and external acceptance) which serve to identify national interest. The authors apply these criteria to Czech foreign policy making and provide some interesting findings concerning a country s possibilities to define and pursue its national interest. Since the authors use four different methodologies (case studies, discourse analysis,...

The author was awarded the Schmalenbach-Prize 2009 for this book.
The study assesses the effectiveness of restructuring strategies as managerial countermeasures in financial distress situations. Employing an international sample (USA, UK, Germany) of 151 listed manufacturing firms facing economic peril, it applies a comprehensive research approach incorporating financial, managerial, operational, and portfolio-restructuring strategies as well as the process of their execution. The empiricism combines financial data, press statements, and publications articulating restructuring...

Determining risk-adequate insurance premiums is a core issue in actuarial mathematics. This study is specifically concerned with identifying convenient partitions of (general) insurance collectives such that the resulting tariff classes are homogeneous to a maximum extent and on the other hand yet large enough to allow for the occurrence of the group balance concept and to end up with reliable estimates of the moments of the claim size distributions. Therefore, the author develops an innovative classification algorithm utilizing a multidimensional cluster approach combined with...

About half of the world s population is still at risk for contracting malaria, and the main disease burden is now in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). As a result of the activities of a number of new and powerful Global Health Initiatives, malaria morbidity and mortality has recently started to decrease and the idea of eradication has re-emerged. This book provides a comprehensive update on the recent developments of the epidemiology of malaria and of existing strategies and tools for malaria control and elimination in Africa, which is discussed in the context of the long global history of...

In the story of the three baseball umpires, two novice umpires compete in boasting how they respect -truth- and the way things -really- are. One says, -I call them the way I see them-; the other, trying to trump this remark, responds, -I call them the way they are-. Then enters the third, most seasoned umpire, saying, -They aren t, until I call them-.
This book deals with two widely argued issues in literature criticism today, performativity and subjectivity. How do people become who they are? What scripts do they follow when they -do- gender, race, and sexuality? Tying into speech act...