James McAuley – författare

Key underlying themes include:

- the differences between traditional and alternative `sites of power' and what we mean by `political'

- the relationships between politics, society and how individuals become and remain engaged with politics

- the rapid transformations in contemporary social structures and their impact on social and political life

- the role of human agency and its significance to social and political action and movements

- contemporary cultural and social dislocations and their impact on some of the major contested areas of political life today.

Key features include:

- key concepts and issues

- key theorists and writers

- discussion questions

Comprehensive and accessible, An Introduction to Politics, State & Society is an essential text for all undergraduate students of politics, the contemporary state, power and political sociology.

James W McAuley is Professor of Political Sociology and Irish Studies in the School of Human and Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield

At the center of James McAuley’s new collection—the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected—is the sequence, “God’s Pattern,” meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or “pattern” still practiced in rural parishes of the poet’s native country, Ireland. Theme and treatment vary throughout the collection, from somber reflection on the fate of a drunk in a cheap hotel room, “Cantata for the Feast of St. Anonymous,” to the scathing Celtic-style satire, “The Gingriad.” McAuley is well regarded for his experiments with traditional forms and rhythms: examples included are blank-verse narratives and elegies, a Haiku sequence, sonnets, a variation on the topographical poetry of the seventeenth century, even a carmen figurata.

Meditations, With Distractions has the qualities that all good poetry should possess: depth, erudition, accessibility, a joy in the practice of language. Combine these qualities with McAuley’s humanity and humor, and the result is a collection that readers will come to enjoy and appreciate more and more with each successive reading.

The Shadow and the Flame is the sweeping and definitive history of the fight for Holocaust memory and the larger intellectual debates that raged around its memorial from the end of World War II to the present day.

In 1945, the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi camps ended the catastrophe that we now know as the Holocaust. Stunned by grief, survivors faced the task of not only forging new lives but also shaping how this cataclysm might be remembered by generations to come.

The Shadow and the Flame takes as its subject the fierce intellectual battle that ensued the first of its kind, and one that spanned decades and continents. Acclaimed historian James McAuley takes us into the minds and hearts of the individuals many well-known, others largely forgotten who waged that dispute in Europe, the United States, and Israel: from Hannah Arendt, whose reporting from the Eichmann trial enraged her fellow Jews; to Salo Baron, the era s preeminent Jewish historian who battled to protect the story of his people from the burden of tragedy; to Elie Wiesel, whose account of life at Auschwitz became the one the world chose to embrace, even as it alienated many of his peers.

McAuley transports us from Paris to New York, from the desecrated ghettos of Poland to the newly established state of Israel, as the event we now call the Holocaust made an uneasy transition into memory one that, far from being neatly resolved, weighs heavily upon the present. Bold, learned, monumental in its scope and infused with the energy and emotion of its principals, The Shadow and the Flames tells the dramatic account of the contentious process at once painful and shot through with urgency and consequence of crafting history in real time.