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The EU's Transformative Power by Heather Grabbe
Palgrave Macmillan
Price: $60.16
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The EU's Transformative Power: Europeanization through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe
Between 1989 and 2004, the EU's conditionality for membership transformed Central and East Europe. The EU had enormous potential power over the whole range of domestic politics in the candidate countries. However, the EU was able to use that power at a few key points in the process leading to their accession. The EU's long-term influence worked primarily through soft power and through voluntary rather than coercive means. During the membership preparations, the EU built many different routes of influence into the candidate countries' domestic policy-making through 'Europeanization'. The Central and East Europeans voluntarily took on the Union's norms and methods, guided by the European Commission, in a massive transfer of policies and institutions. However, the EU missed important opportunities to effect change as well. The EU's Transformative Power explores in detail how the EU used its influence to control the movement of people across Europe, through both coercive use of conditionality and voluntary methods of Europeanization.
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Into the Heart of European Poetry by John Taylor
Transaction Publishers
Price: $49.95
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John Taylor’s brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia.
While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the “thing-in-itself,” metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is as indispensable as it is engaging.
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Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe by Kevin McDermott , Matthew Stibbe
Berg Publishers
Price: $29.95
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Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule
The history of Eastern Europe during the Cold War is one punctuated by protest and rebellion. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe covers these flashpoints from the Stalin-Tito split of 1948 to the dramatic collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.Covering East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and Romania, the authors provide comprehensive critical analysis of the varying forms of dissent in the East European socialist states. They take a comparative approach and show how the different movements affected one another. Incorporating archival material only accessible since 1989, they discuss issues such as the diverse manifestations of non-conformity among different strata of the population, the complex relationship between Moscow and the national Communist Parties, the loosening of Soviet control after 1985, and everyday resistance to state authority.This book offers a firm grounding in the tumultuous decades of communist rule, which is essential to understanding the contemporary politics of Eastern Europe.
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Discourse and Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe by Aleksandra Galasinska and Michal Krzyzanowski
Palgrave Macmillan
Price: $85.00
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This interdisciplinary volume explores the discursive construction of post-1989 social change in Central and Eastern Europe. Encompassing a set of national case studies on countries such as Czech Republic, former East-Germany, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia or other Balkan states, the volume explores processes of post-communist transformation from the point of view of accelerating and unique dynamics of linguistic and discursive practices. Highlighting the micro-macro link, those practices are examined within – as well as at the cross-section of – the public domain (in politics, media, religion or civil society) and the private sphere (within individual experiences of post-communism). Providing in-depth, systematic analysis of discourse in different situations, contributions to the volume analyse diverse forms of social, political, cultural, economic or institutional transformation in post-communist contexts. The analysis points to several differences and similarities between ways in which discourse influences the unprecedented social change across Central and Eastern Europe.
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