Historicizing Theory

Download Historicizing Theory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791485684
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (914 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Historicizing Theory by : Peter C. Herman

Download or read book Historicizing Theory written by Peter C. Herman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historicizing Theory provides the first serious examination of contemporary theory in relation to the various twentieth-century historical and political contexts out of which it emerged. Theory—a broad category that is often used to encompass theoretical approaches as varied as deconstruction, New Historicism, and postcolonialism—has often been derided as a mere "relic" of the 1960s. In order to move beyond such a simplistic assessment, the essays in this volume examine such important figures as Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, and Edward Said, situating their work in a variety of contexts inside and outside of the 1960s, including World War II, the Holocaust, the Algerian civil war, and the canon wars of the 1980s. In bringing us face-to-face with the history of theory, Historicizing Theory recuperates history for theory and asks us to confront some of the central issues and problems in literary studies today.

Historicizing Fear

Download Historicizing Fear PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
ISBN 13 : 1646420039
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (464 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Historicizing Fear by : Travis D. Boyce

Download or read book Historicizing Fear written by Travis D. Boyce and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2020-02-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historicizing Fear is a historical interrogation of the use of fear as a tool to vilify and persecute groups and individuals from a global perspective, offering an unflinching look at racism, fearful framing, oppression, and marginalization across human history.The book examines fear and Othering from a historical context, providing a better understanding of how power and oppression is used in the present day. Contributors ground their work in the theory of Othering—the reductive action of labeling a person as someone who belongs to a subordinate social category defined as the Other—in relation to historical events, demonstrating that fear of the Other is universal, timeless, and interconnected. Chapters address the music of neo-Nazi white power groups, fear perpetuated through the social construct of black masculinity in a racially hegemonic society, the terror and racial cleansing in early twentieth-century Arkansas, the fear of drug-addicted Vietnam War veterans, the creation of fear by the Tang Dynasty, and more. Timely, provocative, and rigorously researched, Historicizing Fear shows how the Othering of members of different ethnic groups has been used to propagate fear and social tension, justify state violence, and prevent groups or individuals from gaining equality. Broadening the context of how fear of the Other can be used as a propaganda tool, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, anthropology, political science, popular culture, critical race issues, social justice, and ethnic studies, as well as the general reader concerned with the fearful framing prevalent in politics. Contributors: Quaylan Allen, Melanie Armstrong, Brecht De Smet, Kirsten Dyck, Adam C. Fong, Jeff Johnson, Łukasz Kamieński, Guy Lancaster, Henry Santos Metcalf, Julie M. Powell, Jelle Versieren

On Historicizing Epistemology

Download On Historicizing Epistemology PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 080477420X
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis On Historicizing Epistemology by : Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Download or read book On Historicizing Epistemology written by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-09 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time.

Handbook on Development and Social Change

Download Handbook on Development and Social Change PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1786431556
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (864 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Handbook on Development and Social Change by : G. Honor Fagan

Download or read book Handbook on Development and Social Change written by G. Honor Fagan and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides an accessible critical review of the complex issues surrounding development and social change today. With chapters from recognized experts, examining economic, political and social aspects, and covering key topics and developing regions, it goes beyond current theory and sets out the debates which will shape an approach better suited to the modern world.

The Excessive Subject

Download The Excessive Subject PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745659314
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (456 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Excessive Subject by : Molly Anne Rothenberg

Download or read book The Excessive Subject written by Molly Anne Rothenberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-24 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change, Molly Anne Rothenberg uncovers an innovative theory of social change implicit in the writings of radical social theorists, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through case studies of these writers' work, Rothenberg illuminates how this new theory calls into question currently accepted views of social practices, subject formation, democratic interaction, hegemony, political solidarity, revolutionary acts, and the ethics of alterity. Finding a common dissatisfaction with the dominant paradigms of social structures in the authors she discusses, Rothenberg goes on to show that each of these thinkers makes use of Lacan's investigations of the causality of subjectivity in an effort to find an alternative paradigm. Labeling this paradigm 'extimate causality', Rothenberg demonstrates how it produces a nondeterminacy, so that every subject bears some excess; paradoxically, this excess is what structures the social field itself. Whilst other theories of social change, subject formation, and political alliance invariably conceive of the elimination of this excess as necessary to their projects, the theory of extimate causality makes clear that it is ineradicable. To imagine otherwise is to be held hostage to a politics of fantasy. As she examines the importance as well as the limitations of theories that put extimate causality to work, Rothenberg reveals how the excess of the subject promises a new theory of social change. By bringing these prominent thinkers together for the first time in one volume, this landmark text will be sure to ignite debate among scholars in the field, as well as being an indispensable tool for students.

Hermeneutics, History and Memory

Download Hermeneutics, History and Memory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134261632
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (342 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Hermeneutics, History and Memory by : Philip Gardner

Download or read book Hermeneutics, History and Memory written by Philip Gardner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel contribution to topical academic debate, seeing the sceptical challenge as an opportunity for reflection on history’s key processes and practices.

Art and Interpretation

Download Art and Interpretation PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Broadview Press
ISBN 13 : 155111190X
Total Pages : 609 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (511 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Art and Interpretation by : Eric Dayton

Download or read book Art and Interpretation written by Eric Dayton and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 1999-02-02 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art and Interpretation is a comprehensive anthology of readings on aesthetics. Its aim is to present fundamental philosophical issues in such a way as to create a common vocabulary for those from diverse backgrounds to communicate meaningfully about aesthetic issues. To that end, the editor has provided selections from a wide variety of challenging works in aesthetic theory, both classical and modern. The approach is often cross-disciplinary. Within the discipline of philosophy it seeks to balance readings from the analytic tradition with continental European, hermeneutical postmodern (including deconstructionist), and feminist readings. The anthology is thus broadly conceived, but by grouping the readings into sections such as ‘Expression and Aesthetic object,’ ‘Psychology and Interpretation,’ ‘Marxist Theory,’ and ‘Culture, Gender, and Difference,’ it aims as well to provide depth of coverage for each topic or issue. The book opens with a historical section containing substantial selections from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Shelley and Nietzsche; these readings introduce themes that recur and are developed in the remainder of the anthology.

Ian Watt

Download Ian Watt PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019255851X
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Ian Watt by : Marina MacKay

Download or read book Ian Watt written by Marina MacKay and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before his masterpiece The Rise of the Novel made him one of the most influential post-war British literary critics, Ian Watt was a soldier, a prisoner of war of the Japanese, and a forced labourer on the notorious Burma-Thailand Railway. Both an intellectual biography and an intellectual history of the mid-century, this book reconstructs Watt's wartime world: these were harrowing years of mass death, deprivation, and terror, but also ones in which communities and institutions were improvised under the starkest of emergency conditions. Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic argues that many of our foundational stories about the novel—about the novel's origins and development, and about the social, moral, and psychological work that the novel accomplishes—can be traced to the crises of the Second World War and its aftermath.

Trilogies as Cultural Analysis

Download Trilogies as Cultural Analysis PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527519112
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (275 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Trilogies as Cultural Analysis by : Gregory Stephens

Download or read book Trilogies as Cultural Analysis written by Gregory Stephens and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a “big picture” view of three universal themes, as seen in literary representations: sea-crossing tales, human-animal relations, and (late) father-son relationships. Seen in triptych, these writings demonstrate how passing between worlds and across cultures has become the normative human condition. Authors analyzed within a hemispheric and post-national frame include works by Ernest Hemingway, J.M. Coetzee’s late Jesus novels, and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. Fusing literary criticism, communication studies, and literary nonfiction within a writing studies framework, Trilogies argues for the inclusion in our writing of personal, institutional, and disciplinary perspectives. The book invites readers to re-imagine writing and communication styles. How can we envision and communicate the representations of between-world experiences that are all around us? What kinds of writing and communication styles can travel beyond our “bubbles,” engage General Education students, and gain a hearing in the public sphere?

The Practice of Cultural Studies

Download The Practice of Cultural Studies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 1848605145
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (486 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Practice of Cultural Studies by : Richard Johnson

Download or read book The Practice of Cultural Studies written by Richard Johnson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-04-14 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `This is a tour de force... It combines luminous discussion of the core conceptual issues of cultural studies, with a hard-headed, practical sense of how research in the field gets done. The result is a seriously smart, comprehensive survey of the whole terrain of cultural studies itself. This is a book on methods which readers will be able to make their own; and which -- uniquely in the genre -- will keep them buzzing′ - Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London ′The Practice of Cultural Studies is an original introduction to the field. It offers a sophisticated "how-to" guide to doing research in cultural studies. From the difficulties of formulating a problem to the unique articulations of specific methodologies in cultural studies, students will find this book both useful and challenging′ - Professor Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina What is distinctive about cultural research? How does one do Cultural Studies? Unlike many other disciplines, cultural studies has not been explict about the nature of its practice. This book aims to redress the balance in favour of those who are studying culture by providing a comprehensive guide to researching and writing. Based on the methods course at Nottingham Trent and addressed to advanced undergraduates, Masters Level students and those just commencing a PhD, this book aims to provide an overview of specific research traditions in cultural studies, whilst also situating those traditions in their historical context. The Practice of Cultural Studies: · Identifies the main methods of researching culture · Demonstrates how theory can inform and enable the practice of research · Explores the ways in which research practices and methods both produce and are produced by knowledge · Looks at the implications of the ′cultural turn′ for disciplines other than cultural studies The Practice of Cultural Studies will be an essential text for students of cultural studies and a useful guide to others studying culture in a range of disciplinary contexts across the humanities and social sciences.

Critical International Theory

Download Critical International Theory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192556606
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Critical International Theory by : Richard Devetak

Download or read book Critical International Theory written by Richard Devetak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory's prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. . In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory's reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

Mappings

Download Mappings PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400822572
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Mappings by : Susan Stanford Friedman

Download or read book Mappings written by Susan Stanford Friedman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-19 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims. Throughout, Friedman adapts current cultural theory from global and transnational studies, anthropology, and geography to challenge modes of thought that exaggerate the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. The author promotes a transnational and heterogeneous feminism, which, she maintains, can replace the proliferation of feminisms based on difference. She argues for a feminist geopolitical literacy that goes beyond fundamentalist identity politics and absolutist poststructuralist theory, and she continually focuses the reader's attention on those locations where differences are negotiated and transformed. Pervading the book is a concern with narrative: the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about the politically explosive question of identity. Drawing freely on modernist novels, contemporary film, popular fiction, poetry, and mass media, the work features narratives of such writers and filmmakers as Gish Jen, Julie Dash, June Jordon, James Joyce, Gloria Anzald%a, Neil Jordon, Virginia Woolf, Mira Nair, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, and Irena Klepfisz. Defending the pioneering role of academic feminists in the knowledge revolution, this work draws on a wide variety of twentieth-century cultural expressions to address theoretical issues in postmodern feminism.

Reaganism in Literary Theory

Download Reaganism in Literary Theory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Anthem Press
ISBN 13 : 1785272799
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (852 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reaganism in Literary Theory by : Jeremiah Bowen

Download or read book Reaganism in Literary Theory written by Jeremiah Bowen and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reaganism is a discourse of devotion and disqualification, combining a neoliberal negative theology of the market with a neoconservative demonization of opponents. Reagan’s personality cult shelters the aggressivity of a war of all against all by representing the market as a moralistic standard of perfection, a representation of goodness and freedom. In literary theory and criticism, a homologous valuative system centered itself on the canon, representing culture as a study of perfection. Paul de Man argued for the displacement of this positive moralistic reference, but his proposals ultimately replace it with a negative moralistic reference to literariness. De Man’s premises have been perpetuated in subsequent theory by persistent misrecognitions of dialectic as suspicious hermeneutics, of materialism as reference to materiality, and of demands for democratic equity as identity politics. Tracing this motivated reasoning through misreadings of Eve Sedgwick’s critique of conspiracy theory and Edward Said’s “secular criticism,” we are led back to the unexamined premises of Paul de Man’s negative moralism and the opportunistic competition of academic careerism.

Policing Literary Theory

Download Policing Literary Theory PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 900435851X
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Policing Literary Theory by :

Download or read book Policing Literary Theory written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present age of omnipresent terrorism is also an era of ever-expanding policing. What is the meaning — and the consequences — of this situation for literature and literary criticism? Policing Literary Theory attempts to answer these questions presenting intriguing and critical analyses of the interplays between police/policing and literature/literary criticism in a variety of linguistic milieus and literary traditions: American, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and others. The volume explores the mechanisms of formulation of knowledge about literature, theory, or culture in general in the post-Foucauldian surveillance society. Topics include North Korean dictatorship, spy narratives, censorship in literature and scholarship, Russian and Soviet authoritarianism, Eastern European cultures during communism, and Kafka’s work. Contributors: Vladimir Biti, Reingard Nethersole, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, Sowon Park, Marko Juvan, Kyohei Norimatsu, Péter Hajdu, Norio Sakanaka, John Zilcosky, Yvonne Howell, and Takayuki Yokota-Murakami.

Historicizing Modernists

Download Historicizing Modernists PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350215066
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Historicizing Modernists by : Matthew Feldman

Download or read book Historicizing Modernists written by Matthew Feldman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focussing upon both canonical figures such as Woolf, Eliot, Pound, and Stein and emergent themes such as Christian modernism, intermedial modernism, queer Harlem Renaissance, this volume brings together previously unseen materials, from various archives, to bear upon cutting-edge interpretation of modernism. It provides an overview of approaches to modernism via the employment of various types of primary source material: correspondence, manuscripts and drafts, memoirs and production notes, reading notes and marginalia, and all manner of useful contextualising sources like news reports or judicial records. While having much to say to literary criticism more broadly, this volume is closely focused upon key modernist figures and emergent themes in light of the discipline's 'archival turn' – termed in a unifying introduction 'achivalism'. An essential ingredient separating the above, recent tendency from a much older and better-established new historicism, in modernist studies at least, is that 'the literary canon' remains an important starting point. Whereas new historicism 'is interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents' and tends toward a 'parallel study of literature and non-literary texts', archival criticism tends toward recognised, oftentimes canonical or critically-lauded, writers, presented in Part 1. Sidestepping the vicissitudes of canon formation, manuscript scholars tend to gravitate toward leading modernist authors: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Part of the reason is obvious: known authors frequently leave behind sizeable literary estates, which are then acquired by research centres. A second section then applies the same empirical methodology to key or emergent themes in the study of modernism, including queer modernism; spatial modernism; little magazines (and online finding aids structuring them); and the role of faith and/or emotions in the construction of 'modernism' as we know it.

Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History

Download Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443869147
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History by : Nishevita J. Murthy

Download or read book Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History written by Nishevita J. Murthy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History brings together two authors, Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk, not frequently studied in comparison. By focusing on their non/fictional works to present a unique study of the methods and concepts of representation, Murthy uses contemporary historical novels to examine fictional depictions of reality, and provides a fresh perspective on representation studies in literature. Written in an accessible style, and tapping into fields as varied as literary and critical theory, the historical novel, postmodernism, and historiography, Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History considers the ways in which reality, as discourse, confronts a text-external reality, and how this confrontation affects the autonomy of the fictional space – topics that remain persistently problematic areas within literary studies. Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, and Pamuk’s My Name is Red and Snow, with their topical concerns and methods of representation, promise a rewarding comparative study. This book provides an early critical framework for these four works, placing them within the rubric of the postmodernist historical novel, as creative works that also comment on the process of literary writing through their recreation of historical pasts. In this respect, Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History promises to be an engaging read in literary criticism and historiography, as well as a handy companion for Eco and Pamuk enthusiasts.

Translation in Systems

Download Translation in Systems PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317642244
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Translation in Systems by : Theo Hermans

Download or read book Translation in Systems written by Theo Hermans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of systems has helped revolutionize translation studies since the 1970s. As a key part of many descriptive approaches, it has broken with the prescriptive focus on what translation should be, encouraging researchers to ask what translation does in specific cultural settings. From his privileged position as a direct participant in these developments, Theo Hermans explains how contemporary descriptive approaches came about, what the basic ideas were, and how those ideas have evolved over time. His discussion addresses the fundamental problems of translation norms, equivalence, polysystems and social systems, covering not only the work of Levý, Holmes, Even-Zohar, Toury, Lefevere, Lambert, Van Leuven-Zwart, Dhulst and others, but also giving special attention to recent contributions derived from Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann. An added focus on practical questions of how to investigate translation (problems of definition, description, assessment of readerships, etc.) makes this book essential reading for graduate students and indeed any researchers in the field. Hermans' account of descriptive translation studies is both informed and critical. At the same time, he demonstrates the strength of the basic concepts, which have shown considerable vitality in their evolution and adaptation to the debates of the present day.