Anthony Welch - Böcker

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, InspiringThe epic is an ancient and universal form of artistic expression. Storytellers around the globe have long told of heroes who are touched by greatness and gain lasting fame.In this Very Short Introduction, Anthony Welch places the Western epic canon alongside traditional heroic poetry from Asia, Africa, and the Near East. Tracing shared themes and practices that unite the world's epic literature, Welch examines the roles that epic poets serve in society and how epic storytelling differs from other narrative forms. Ranging widely from Gilgamesh to Derek Walcotts Omeros, the author acquaints readers with some of the world's greatest literary works and asks why the epic holds such power over our imaginations. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the oral cultures of their ancestors. Welch shows how the period’s writers imagined lost civilizations built on speech and song—from Homeric Greece and Celtic Britain to the Americas—and struggled to reconcile this oral inheritance with an early modern culture of the book. Welch’s wide-ranging study offers a new perspective on Renaissance Europe’s epic literature and its troubled relationship with antiquity.

This is the first book to systematically chart and comparatively assess the trend towards private higher education in South East Asia. Caught between conflicting imperatives of spiralling demand, and limited resources, the balance between public and private higher education systems in South East, South, and East Asia has shifted markedly.The author’s detailed case studies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Viet Nam discuss and analyse significant policy issues and touch on key debates surrounding globalisation, including economic globalisation and structural adjustment, and the pressures of cultural globalisation, particularly the role of the English language. Debates surrounding the role of higher education in the ‘knowledge economy’, GATS and cross border trade in educational services are also treated, including the rise of offshore campuses in countries such as Malaysia and Viet Nam. What is argued is that we are witnessing not merely a changing balance between public and private sectors, but a blurring of borders between them, with public HEIs now often behaving more like private, for-profit institutions. The book charts and illustrates these trends, posing questions about their meaning, including issues of transparency, equity, and what the reforms might mean for traditional conceptions of public good in higher education.

This is the first book to systematically chart and comparatively assess the trend towards private higher education in South East Asia. Caught between conflicting imperatives of spiralling demand, and limited resources, the balance between public and private higher education systems in South East, South, and East Asia has shifted markedly.The author’s detailed case studies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Viet Nam discuss and analyse significant policy issues and touch on key debates surrounding globalisation, including economic globalisation and structural adjustment, and the pressures of cultural globalisation, particularly the role of the English language. Debates surrounding the role of higher education in the ‘knowledge economy’, GATS and cross border trade in educational services are also treated, including the rise of offshore campuses in countries such as Malaysia and Viet Nam. What is argued is that we are witnessing not merely a changing balance between public and private sectors, but a blurring of borders between them, with public HEIs now often behaving more like private, for-profit institutions. The book charts and illustrates these trends, posing questions about their meaning, including issues of transparency, equity, and what the reforms might mean for traditional conceptions of public good in higher education.

In 1671, Ambrosio Bembo, a young nobleman bored with everyday life in Venice, decided to broaden his knowledge of the world through travel. That August he set off on a remarkable, occasionally hazardous, four-year voyage to Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the Portuguese colonies of western India. His journal, now translated into English for the first time, is the most important new European travel account of western Asia to be published in the past hundred years. It opens an extraordinary perspective on the Near East and India at a time when few Europeans traveled to these lands. Keenly observed and engagingly written, Bembo's vivid account is filled with a high sense of adventure and curiosity and provides intriguing descriptions of people, landscapes, food, fashion, architecture, customs, cities, commerce, and more. Presented here with the original illustrations and with a rich introduction and annotations, this lively and important historical document is at last available to scholars, students, and armchair travelers alike.

This book contains papers around the theme of Tradition, Modernity and Post-modernity in education from an international perspective. The Introduction examines this theme, drawing largely upon the literature in Comparative Education. Succeeding chapters illustrate that traditional, modern and even post-modern elements, or tensions between them, often exist within the same educational system. Cases are drawn from many parts of the world, and add up to a fascinating insight into the dynamic world of education.

Originally published in 1992. This work provides insight into comparative and international education work in Australia and New Zealand, where an emerging local style may be developing into a full blown national approach. The 14 essays address issues such as education in third-world Asia, sexism, and culture and power. There is recurring focus on ethics in research, education development, the role of international agencies, inequality, legitimacy and the link between comparative education and education practice. This a great reflection on the field as a whole, with contributions mostly from one area of the world but with a complete international spread of consideration.

Originally published in 1992. This work provides insight into comparative and international education work in Australia and New Zealand, where an emerging local style may be developing into a full blown national approach. The 14 essays address issues such as education in third-world Asia, sexism, and culture and power. There is recurring focus on ethics in research, education development, the role of international agencies, inequality, legitimacy and the link between comparative education and education practice. This a great reflection on the field as a whole, with contributions mostly from one area of the world but with a complete international spread of consideration.

What does it mean to be an academic in the twenty first century? Clearly, there is no one answer to this question, as the diversity evident in the following chapters reveals. Elite research universities often tend to join with others of their kind, so that a professor from an elite US institution may well undertake a Japanese sabbatical (if at all) at the University of Tokyo, a UK semester at Oxford or Cambridge, or an Australian semester at the University of Sydney, or perhaps Melbourne. At each, they can expect to have at their disposal well-stocked libraries, replete with requisite books, journals and databases, (many now available electronically), as well as highly regarded specialist peers in their research areas, with whom they can discuss their work in detail. How can this academic lifeworld be compared with that of a member of the South East Asian professoriate, for example, or many in Latin America and Africa, where inadequate wages often necessitate taking on a second job, often at a lower quality private institution (which, however, likely offers better remuneration), and/or perhaps conducting a small business on the side (Welch 2003, Tipton, Jarvis and Welch 2003), and where the lack of basic infrastructure, as well as research training, means that teaching, and perhaps some administration, is perhaps the limit of one’s activities? The story of differentiation, however, is not limited todifferences between elite institutions in OECD countries and more modest institutions elsewhere.

What does it mean to be an academic in the twenty first century? Clearly, there is no one answer to this question, as the diversity evident in the following chapters reveals. Elite research universities often tend to join with others of their kind, so that a professor from an elite US institution may well undertake a Japanese sabbatical (if at all) at the University of Tokyo, a UK semester at Oxford or Cambridge, or an Australian semester at the University of Sydney, or perhaps Melbourne. At each, they can expect to have at their disposal well-stocked libraries, replete with requisite books, journals and databases, (many now available electronically), as well as highly regarded specialist peers in their research areas, with whom they can discuss their work in detail. How can this academic lifeworld be compared with that of a member of the South East Asian professoriate, for example, or many in Latin America and Africa, where inadequate wages often necessitate taking on a second job, often at a lower quality private institution (which, however, likely offers better remuneration), and/or perhaps conducting a small business on the side (Welch 2003, Tipton, Jarvis and Welch 2003), and where the lack of basic infrastructure, as well as research training, means that teaching, and perhaps some administration, is perhaps the limit of one’s activities? The story of differentiation, however, is not limited todifferences between elite institutions in OECD countries and more modest institutions elsewhere.

It problematizes international comparisons of quality, and analyses the benefits of a zone of ideas and metrics in a common language – promoting international mobility, efficiency, collaboration - but also the costs which are rarely borne equally across countries, languages and cultures.