The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic : Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative¦nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic¦challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic¦literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet¦argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general,¦is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when¦judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits.¦Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern¦with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended¦to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while¦slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum¦works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through¦suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman,¦and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and¦sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the¦century. Focusing on The Fall of the House of Usher, The Marble¦Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and The Yellow Wallpaper,¦Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further¦enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same¦time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance¦and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted¦to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to¦fascinate and disturb.

The Social Politics of Fatherhood in Spain and France: a Comparative Analysis of Parental Leave and Shared Residence

The Social Politics of Fatherhood in Spain and France: A Comparative Analysis of Parental Leave and Shared Residence The article provides a comparative analysis of policy developments on leaves for fathers and joint custody in Spain and France in the last decade. These two types of measures have been selected because they are both widely recognised as main instruments to promote new fathering styles and consequently more gender equality in the European Union. While the rhetoric of choice has been developed in both countries in relation to maternal employment and childcare, with better results in France than in Spain, it remains to be seen to what extent choice will also be extended to fathers. Keywords: Fatherhood. Family. Comparative social policy. Parental leave. Joint custody.

Where and how family members spend time at home? A quantitative analysis of the observational tracking on the everyday lives of Italian families

This paper examines a dataset that derives from an observational tracking, in order to analyze where and how middle-class working families spend time at home. We use an ethnographic approach to study the everyday lives of Italian dual-income middle-class families, with the aim to analyze quantitatively the use of home spaces and the types of activities of family members on weekday afternoons and evenings. The different analyses (multiple correspondence analysis, agglomerative hierarchical cluster, discriminant analysis) show how particular spaces and activities in these spaces are dominated by certain family members. We suggest a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies as useful tools to explore in detail the everyday lives of families, and to understand how family members use the domestic spaces. In particular, we consider relevant the use of quantitative analyses to examine ethnographic data, especially in connection with the methodological reflexivity among researchers

Corruption in building the image of politics in television news broadcasts

This work analyses the political news of eight Spanish television channels in order to see what image is built of politics, and particularly how the news of corruption affects the image of politics in Spanish news broadcasts. Different cases of corruption such as Gürtel, Palma Arena and those associated with judge Baltasar Garzón in his final stage in office, occupy part of the study. A new methodology is therefore proposed that enables the quality of the political information emitted from inside and outside the political content of the news programmes to be observed. Particular attention is paid to the news broadcasts of Televisión Española and Cuatro as those which offer a more balanced view of politics, and channels such as La Sexta, which give priority to a narrative construction of politics in the news programmes around causes of corruption.

Net Neutrality and other challenges for the future of the Internet. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Internet, Law & Politics. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, 11-12 July, 2011

Peer-reviewed

The Same, but Different: Central Banks, Regulatory Agencies, and the Politics of Delegation to Independent Authorities

Independent regulatory agencies are the institutional foundations of the regulatory state that, during the past 15 years, has gained prominence throughout Europe. This article studies the rise of independent authorities in European countries by comparing regulatory agencies and central banks. Delegation to independent central banks and to independent regulatory agencies is similar in many respects. In both cases, agents are deliberately made independent from political principals through a specific institutional design. Moreover, it has been argued that delegation to both central banks and regulatory agencies is linked to the need for policy-makers to improve the credibility of policy commitments, to the wish of incumbent politicians to tie the hands of future majorities, and to the extent to which the institutional contexts safeguard policy stability. Through an analysis of the formal independence of central banks and regulatory agencies in Western Europe, this article identifies an empirical puzzle that casts doubts on the accuracy of current explanations. Veto players and the uncertainty of incumbent policy-makers in respect to their re-election prospects matter for delegation to both central banks and regulatory agencies, but in opposite ways. Making sense of these anomalies is necessary to achieve a better understanding of delegation to independent authorities.