Published this week

? = Review forthcoming

ART AND DESIGN

- Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History

By Robert Finlay, professor of history, University of Arkansas. University of California Press, £24.95. ISBN 9780520244689

Finlay tells the story of how porcelain became a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of artistic symbols, themes and designs across vast distances and illustrates how it became deeply intertwined with religion, economics, politics and social identity.

CHEMISTRY

- From Atoms to Molecules: Studies in the History of Chemistry from the 19th Century

By Colin A. Russell, emeritus professor of the history of science and technology, The Open University. Ashgate, £70.00. ISBN 9780754668558

Russell surveys the history of organic chemistry, which arose out of early speculations about the construction of chemical compounds and, in particular, their electrochemical nature.

GENERAL SCIENCE

? On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science

By David Goodstein, Frank J. Gilloon distinguished teaching and service professor in physics, California Institute of Technology. Princeton University Press, £15.95. ISBN 9780691139661

Goodstein looks at real-life cases in which fraud was committed or alleged, explaining what constitutes scientific misconduct and what doesn't, and providing readers with the ethical foundations needed to discern and avoid fraud wherever it may arise.

HISTORY

- A King's Ransom: The Life of Charles Theveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandalmonger and Master-Spy

By Simon Burrows, professor of modern European history, University of Leeds. Continuum, £20.00. ISBN 9780826419897

Burrows' biography of Morande, the blackmailer of Louis XV and his mistress Madame Du Barry and an archetypical "Grub Street" hack, offers a chance to examine some of the most important issues of French history and revolution.

- Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914

By Catherine Mills, lecturer in history, University of Stirling. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 9780754660873

Mills explores the emergence and growth of state responsibility for safer and healthier working practices in British mining and the responses of labour and industry to expanding regulation and control.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

- Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching

Edited by Mari Carmen Campoy-Cubillo, head of the department of English studies; Begona Belles-Fortuno, lecturer; and Maria Lluisa Gea-Valor, lecturer, all at Universitat Jaume I. Continuum, £75.00. ISBN 9781847065377

This volume explores different ways to apply corpus-based and corpus-informed approaches to English-language teaching.

LAW

- Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England

By Dennis R. Klinck, associate professor in law, McGill University. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 9780754667742

Klinck tackles the difficult subject of the place of conscience in the development of English law, illuminating what is meant by describing the Court of Chancery as a "court of conscience".

- Anti-Social Behaviour Orders: A Culture of Control?

By Jane Donoghue, lecturer in law, University of Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230594449

Donoghue challenges the dominant academic view of ASBOs as erroneous tools of social control, and offers an alternative perspective on antisocial behaviour management that argues that ASBOs are capable of enabling a positive process of engagement among local authorities, housing professionals and residents.

LITERATURE

- European Romanticism: A Reader

Edited by Stephen Prickett, Regius professor emeritus of English, University of Glasgow. Continuum, £195.00. ISBN 9781441117649

This anthology places British Romanticism in a European context, showing how ideas and writers are interconnected across national and linguistic boundaries, and offers a new intellectual map of Romanticism, including key texts in English and their original language.

- Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

By Brendon Nicholls, lecturer in African literatures and cultures, University of Leeds. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754658252

This is a study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. Nicholls argues that the mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project, but that his fiction also creates transgressive spaces for women.

- English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485-1603

By Joshua Phillips, assistant professor of English, University of Memphis. Ashgate, £55.00. ISBN 9780754665984

Focusing on Tudor prose fiction from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur through the works of Sir Philip Sidney and Thomas Nashe, Phillips explores the concept of collective agency and the extensive impact it had on English Renaissance culture.

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

- Creating Preschool Television: A Story of Commerce, Creativity and Curriculum

By Jeanette Steemers, professor of media and communications, University of Westminster. Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00. ISBN 9780230574403

Steemers examines the industry interests behind preschool television, and how commercial, creative and curricular priorities shape and inform what is produced.

- Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation

By Simon Cross, senior lecturer in media and cultural studies, Nottingham Trent University. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230005310

Cross draws on social and cultural histories of madness, history of art and popular journalism to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of historical and contemporary media representations of madness.

MUSIC

- Shostakovich in Dialogue: Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7

By Judith Kuhn, lecturer in music, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 9780754664062

Kuhn examines each quartet's historical and biographical context with attention to cultural questions being discussed at the time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history, and offers a critical discussion of the quartet's architectural and harmonic features.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- Time and Becoming in Nietzsche's Thought

By Robin Small, professor of philosophy of education, University of Auckland. Continuum, £65.00. ISBN 9781441189653

In this monograph, Small reveals Nietzsche as a major contributor to our thinking about temporality and its significance for human life.

- When Our World Became Christian

By Paul Veyne, honorary professor of history, College de France. Polity, £55.00 and £17.99. ISBN 9780745644981 and 4998

Veyne looks at how Christianity, a "masterpiece of religious invention", managed, between AD300 and 400, to impose itself on the whole of the Western world.

POLITICS

- Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments

By David Coates, Worrell chair of Anglo-American studies, Wake Forest University. Continuum, £14.99. ISBN 9781441126931

Coates presents the conservative and liberal arguments on eight key American policy issues: trickle-down economics, welfare, social security, healthcare, immigration control, religion, the war in Iraq and economic prosperity.

- Presidential Campaign Communication

By Craig Allen Smith, professor of communication, North Carolina State University. Polity, £55.00 and £19.99. ISBN 9780745646084 and 6091

Allen Smith aims to help readers understand more fully the ways that the people of the US use the process of human communication to select their presidents.

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Film Studies

Cinema at the Periphery

Edited by Dina Iordanova, professor of film studies, David Martin-Jones, senior lecturer in film studies, both at the University of St Andrews, and Belén Vidal, lecturer in film studies, King¹s College London Wayne State University Press, £24.95 ISBN 9780814333884 Focusing on case studies of filmmaking from peripheral cultures, like Palestinian ³stateless² cinema or Australian Aboriginal films, this volume highlights the interrelationship between production modes, circulation channels and narratives of histories and identities.

Literary Studies

Lady Macbeth in America: From the Stage to the White House By Gay Smith, professor emeritus in theatre, Wesleyan University, Connecticut Palgrave Macmillan, £52.50 ISBN 9780230622883 This book examines the symbolic migration of Shakespeare¹s Lady Macbeth in American culture, from her onstage origins to the White House.

Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures By Julie Husband, associate professor of English, University of Northern Iowa Palgrave Macmillan, £52.50 ISBN 9780230621480 This book examines the relationship between anti-slavery texts and emerging representations of ³free labour² in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Business & Economics

Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform Outsourcing By Kate Vitasek, researcher in executive education, University of Tennessee, Mike Ledyard, programme faculty at Vested Outsourcing, and Karl Manrodt, associate professor of logistics at Georgia Southern University Palgrave Macmillan, £30.00 ISBN 9780230623170 Progressive companies and university programmes have recently begun to rethink outsourcing models. Here, the authors have created a model that aims to improve outsourcing procedures in the same way Six Sigma and Lean improved production processes in the 1980s and 1990s.