Search results for ""Author John Watkins""

Communist Albania was unlike any other European nation. It was a 'hermit state' ruled by a dictator, Enver Hoxha, who presided over a repressive Stalinist regime. When John Watkins visited Albania in the late 1980s, he saw peasants toiling in the fields and enormous state-owned factories scarred the landscape. In 1991, the old regime was overthrown. Hoxha's statues were pulled down and his books burned. But reminders of his Albania were everywhere: in the monotonous apartment blocks and derelict factories; in the old collective farms and irrigation channels; in the thousands of bunkers that still dotted the landscape. But how much deeper did Hoxha's influence go? What marks had he left on the political system and on the nation's psyche? To answer these questions, the author returned to the places he had visited in the 1980s. He started in Shkoder and travelled south through Durres and Tirana to Sarande. He had taken photos on those first tours. He wanted to find the exact spots where he had taken them, so he could use them as a barometer of change. But the real power of the images lay not just in their evocation of the past, but in the connections they allowed him to make in the present. Through the photos, he was able to talk to Albanians from different generations and walks of life. For those born after 1991, they were revelatory, images of a world they knew little about. For older people, they were a key that unlocked memories, both good and bad. These exchanges, together with eyewitness research over thirty years, have given the author an in-depth insight into how Albanians are coping with the transition from dictatorship to an often-chaotic free market economy. As Albania emerges as a modern democratic state, this book reveals that it is still struggling with the legacy of its traumatic past. 'Enver Hoxha's Long Shadow,' a colourful account of this enigmatic country's landscapes and people, is essential reading for anyone wanting a fuller understanding of contemporary Albania.

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The Renaissance jurist Alberico Gentili once quipped that, just like comedies, all wars end in a marriage. In medieval and early modern Europe, marriage treaties were a perennial feature of the diplomatic landscape. When one ruler decided to make peace with his enemy, the two parties often sealed their settlement with marriages between their respective families. In After Lavinia, John Watkins traces the history of the practice, focusing on the unusually close relationship between diplomacy and literary production in Western Europe from antiquity through the seventeenth century, when marriage began to lose its effectiveness and prestige as a tool of diplomacy.Watkins begins with Virgil's foundational myth of the marriage between the Trojan hero Aeneas and the Latin princess, an account that formed the basis for numerous medieval and Renaissance celebrations of dynastic marriages by courtly poets and propagandists. In the book's second half, he follows the slow decline of diplomatic marriage as both a tool of statecraft and a literary subject, exploring the skepticism and suspicion with which it was viewed in the works of Spenser and Shakespeare. Watkins argues that the plays of Corneille and Racine signal the passing of an international order that had once accorded women a place of unique dignity and respect.

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In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London-based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and cross-dressers. Through parallel discussions of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, Levin and Watkins argue that Shakespeare's centrality to English national consciousness is inseparable from his creation of the foreign as a category asserting dangerous affinities between England's internal minorities and its competitors within an increasingly fraught European mercantile system. As a women's historian, Levin is particularly interested in Shakespeare's responses to marginalized sectors of English society. As a scholar of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies, Watkins situates Shakespeare in the context of broadly European historical movements. Together Levin and Watkins narrate the emergence of the foreign as portable category that might be applied both to "strangers" from other countries and to native-born English men and women, such as religious dissidents, who resisted conformity to an increasingly narrow sense of English identity. Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds will appeal to historians, literary scholars, theater specialists, and anyone interested in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

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Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product.The definitive toxicology text for students and early-career professionals—updated and revised to address new research and methodsFor more than 45 years, Casarett and Doull’s Toxicology has set the standard for providing thorough, academic, and authoritative information in clear and engaging ways. Focusing only on what you need to know and written on a level you can easily understand, it provides a concise yet comprehensive look at the science and clinical field of medical toxicology. This new edition builds on the wide success of previous editions, with extensive updates that make the book more clinically relevant to students and beginners in toxicology, pharmacology, pharmacy, and environmental sciences. Chapter-ending self-assessment Q&As and other features make the learning process more effective and efficient.

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