Anthem European Studies – serie

Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in current gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside of their cultural and historical contexts.

Qualifications systems are useful tools for modernising education and training. This publication focuses on the reality of policy development in different countries. After reminding the reader that education and training systems, and therefore qualifications systems, are always closely integrated with a country’s social and cultural priorities, this volume shows that there is evidence from a range of countries that learning can be enhanced by developing the recognition of learning through qualifications and by defining qualifications levels.

This book explores an important, emergent issue: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

Via an ethnographic study of the community festivals of Siena Province in central Italy, ‘Festivals, Affect and Identity’ investigates the affective and fluid aspects of reality to establish an integrated perspective on issues of continuity and rupture, tradition and modernity, and nature and culture. Offering an illustration of the explanatory power of continental philosophy, this text demonstrates the accessibility of highly abstract critical theory when examined in relation to specific events and their detailed analysis.

‘The Voice of the People’ presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the European folk revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and focuses on two key practices of antiquarianism: the role that collecting and editing played in the formation of ethnological study in the European academy; and the business of publishing and editing, which produced many ‘folkloric’ texts of dubious authenticity. The volume also presents new readings of various genres, including the epic, song, tale and novel, and contributes to the study of several crucial European literary figures. Above all, it investigates the great anonymous authors of the European folk tradition – in narrative and lyric art – and their relation to the cultural movements and imagined identities of the peoples of the emerging nineteenth-century European nation.

The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period as writers embraced ‘modernity’ and incorporated new technologies, fashions and inventions into their work. Focusing on cultural areas such as exhibitions, transport, food, dress and photography, ‘Changing France’ shows how apparently trivial aspects of modern life provided Second Empire writers with a versatile means of thinking about deeper issues. This volume brings literature and material culture together to reveal how writing itself changed as writers recognised the extraordinarily rich possibilities of expression opened up to them by the changing material world.

This timely book offers a unique insight into the individual and collective experiences of movement and resettlement among Russian migrants 'returning' to the Russian Federation over the period 1991–2002. Moya Flynn uses different levels of analysis (local, regional, national and global) to open up fresh perspectives on the nature of the Russian migration regime and government migration policy. The book offers the first in-depth examination of non-governmental development in the area of migration in post-Soviet Russia and provides new understandings of the experience of migration and resettlement at the individual level, specifically through an exploration of understandings of 'home' and 'homeland' and a focus on the role of migrant networks.

For most of its history Europe was a thoroughly average part of the world: poor, uncouth, technologically and culturally backward. By contrast, China was always far richer, more sophisticated and advanced. Yet it was Europe that first became modern, and by the nineteenth century China was struggling to catch up. This book explains why. Why did Europe succeed and why was China left behind? The answer, as we will see, does not only solve a long-standing historical puzzle, it also provides an explanation of the contemporary success of East Asia, and it shows what is wrong with current theories of development and modernization.

This book explores an important, emergent issue: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

There has never been a more important time to understand Russia's relationship with Europe and it is the subsequent sense of unease both in Russia and Europe which provides the focus for this investigation and which will make it of use to specialist and general readers alike.