Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history.  According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah.  Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend.   Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation. 
      The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances,  and twentieth-century American cases.  The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different  locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” 
    These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend.  The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend.  The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the  belief system that Christians developed about Jews.
    This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

There is a compelling call to action for the educational field to develop fair and respectful practices that contribute to a brighter and more inclusive future. This comprehensive collection of case studies is designed to empower educators by providing them with the necessary pedagogical content knowledge, dispositions, and curricular insights to actively decolonize second/world language teaching in K–12 and university contexts. These authentic, problem-based cases shed light on the intricate dynamics present within diverse language learning settings, emphasizing the imperative for decolonizing and inclusive educational practices to support learning for all multilingual learners, including BIPOC, heritage language learners (HLL), SLIFE, refugees, and other L2 communities across ESL, SEI, World Language, Bilingual, and EAP settings. By encouraging readers to engage in critical reflection and praxis, this book fosters a transformative approach to language education that addresses historical injustices and promotes inclusive, anti-racist, and equitable learning environments for all students. 

In this book, readers will find: 

• practical tools and strategies for promoting awareness and reflexivity and for incorporating decolonizing and inclusive pedagogical practices.
• a rich array of viewpoints that encourages them to explore diverse perspectives within the realm of language education and decolonization. 
• authentic, problem-based case studies that prompt critical reflection and a practical application of theoretical concepts. 
• insights into navigating the evolving landscape of teaching, with a distinctive focus on decolonizing language education. 

This casebook is designed to broaden L2 teacher knowledge, thinking, and practice with regard to making language and learning accessible to all students. Language teachers are especially accountable for promoting socially just, inclusive, decolonizing, and multicultural pedagogical practices and curricula; at this critical juncture in history, this book is intended to raise language teachers’ awareness of the importance of critically examining and reflecting on the intersectionality of language education and inclusive pedagogical practices. Language teacher educators can use this text in their courses and workshops to build on and extend theoretical foundations, while making critical practical connections.
 
The 12 cases presented here cover a range of inclusive language teaching and learning issues that practitioners are likely to face in their respective teaching contexts. All the cases are based on real-life dilemmas faced by practitioners in the field and have been informed by discussions with pre-service and in-service student teachers. The cases represent a range of classroom contexts: K–12 ESL/sheltered English immersion, world language, and post-secondary EAP; private, charter, and public schools; and urban and suburban settings. The cases are accompanied by pre- and post-problem sets and in-class discussion questions.
 
This volume applies the case-based pedagogy often used in some fields to that of second language teacher education to encourage pre- and in-service teachers to grapple with the types of dilemmas and decisions teachers confront every day. The cases here are not  intended as exemplars of practice to be emulated or illustrations of existing theories; instead, they are problem-based narratives that resist clear-cut answers or solutions and remain open ended to stimulate further investigation and reflection. The goal is to mimic the complexity of the classroom where teachers confront a range of pedagogical and learning challenges, and the ensuing experience requires critical, real-time decisions that demand keen professional discernment. 

 

A Casebook on Corporate Renewal spans a variety of business areas relevant to corporate renewal and turnaround management. Corporate renewal, as a topic taught and discussed in business schools, has surged in the past decade. The cases in this book were selected to cover the knowledge and skills needed by successful turnaround managers, including ethical and legal issues; developing a plan of reorganization; and defining problems and their solutions, including strategic, financial, and operating issues.
 
The cases challenge students to actively engage in the decision-making process in order to learn how corporate renewal is practiced in real business settings. The Casebook is meant to accompany the third edition of Principles of Corporate Renewal by Harlan D. Platt, but it can be adopted separately or used with other management textbooks.

The Romans are famous for constructing aqueducts, canals, and dams. But their law is also a lasting, if less visible, monument to their attempts to control water. A Casebook on Roman Water Law presents an analytical collection of Roman sources for water rights. The Romans recognized water as a natural resource, a public good, and an economic commodity, and they grappled with these issues as they developed law to regulate water. Early in their history the Romans crafted laws and institutions to regulate water in both public and private contexts. In later eras they revised and adapted their law to fit changing economic, cultural, and physical environments of an empire that spanned the Mediterranean. Each case documents the role of law in this history, and the study questions engage with key issues in legal and environmental history, ancient and modern.

This casebook aims to cross historical and disciplinary boundaries by making the primary evidence for Roman water rights accessible to students and researchers. Cases are presented in both original Latin and English translation. To prepare for study of the cases, each chapter opens with an overview of its topic while the introduction presents the evidence for water rights and contextualizes them within historical and conceptual frameworks.
 

Covering a period of more than one hundred years of work by renowned folklorists, these enlightening essays explore the timeless tale of Cinderella. In addition to the most famous versions of the story (Basile’s Pentamerone, Perrault’s Cendrillon, and the Grimm’s Aschenputtel), this casebook includes articles on other versions of the tale from Russian, English, Chinese, Greek and French folklore. The volume concludes with several interpretive essays, including a psychoanalytic view from Dundes and a critique of the popularization of Cinderella in America.

“Folklorists, scholars of children’s literature, and feminists should appreciate particularly the wide scope of this collection .  .  .  now in paperback with an updated Bibliographical Addendum. . . . Most helpful are the two-page introductions to each variant and to each essay which include a brief overview of the historical times as well as suggested additional sources for more discussion.”—Danny Rochman, Folklore Forum

“A milestone, a near complete source of primary and secondary materials.  .  .  .  The selected analytical writing include definitive classic and new discoveries, covering the whole range of methodological modes and theoretical perspectives from early forms and typology to myth-ritual, social-historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical readings.  The annotated bibliography is most helpful, illuminating, and comprehensive, encompassing publications in other Western languages and works by Asianists.”—Chieko Mulhern, Asian Folklore Studies

“One can imagine several dimensions on which psychoanalysts might find such a collection interesting: as examples of applied psychoanalysis, in relation to philosophical and cultural examination of imaginative material, in relation to child development, and in the correlations between folktales of a particular culture and individual histories.”—Kerry Kelly Novick, Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Originating more than 2500 years ago, cockfighting is one of the oldest documented sports in the world.  It has continued to flourish despite bans against it in many countries.  In The Cockfight: A Casebook, folklorist Alan Dundes brings together a diverse array of writing on this male-dominated ritual.
    Vivid descriptions of cockfights from Puerto Rico, Tahiti, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, and the Philippines complement critical commentaries, from the fourth-century reflections of St. Augustine to contemporary anthropological and psychoanalytic interpretations.  The various essays discuss the intricate rules of the cockfight, the ethical question of pitting two equally matched roosters in a fight to the death, the emotional involvement of cockfighters and fans, and the sexual implications of the sport.  The result is an enlightening collection for anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, and psychologists, as well as followers of this ancient blood sport.

The evil eye—the power to inflict illness, damage to property, or even death simply by gazing at or praising someone—is among the most pervasive and powerful folk beliefs in the Indo-European and Semitic world.  It is also one of the oldest, judging from its appearance in the Bible and in Sumerian texts five thousand years old.  Remnants of the superstition persist today when we drink toasts, tip waiters, and bless sneezers.  To avert the evil eye, Muslim women wear veils, baseball players avoid mentioning a no-hitter in progress, and traditional Jews say their business or health is "not bad" (rather than "good").
    Though by no means universal, the evil eye continues to be a major factor in the behavior of millions of people living in the Mediterranean and Arab countries, as well as among immigrants to the Americas.  This widespread superstition has attracted the attention of many scholars, and the twenty-one essays gathered in this book represent research from diverse perspectives:  anthropology, classics, folklore studies, ophthalmology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and religious studies.  Some essays are fascinating reports of beliefs about the evil eye, from India and Iran to Scotland and Slovak-American communities; others analyze the origin, function, and cultural significance of this folk belief from ancient times to the present day.  Editor Alan Dundes concludes the volume by proffering a comprehensive theoretical explanation of the evil eye.
     Anyone who has ever knocked on wood to ward off misfortune will enjoy this generous sampling of evil eye scholarship, and may never see the world through the same eyes again.

Alan Dundes continues his exploration of well-loved fairy tales with this casebook on one of the best-known of them all: Little Red Riding Hood.
Following versions of the tale by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the essays by an international group of scholars provide an impressive cross-section of theoretical approaches.

Social science research often yields conflicting results: Does juvenile delinquent rehabilitation work? Is teenage pregnancy prevention effective? In an effort to improve the value of research for shaping social policy, social scientists are increasingly employing a powerful technique called meta-analysis. By systematically pulling together findings of a particular research problem, meta-analysis allows researchers to synthesize the results of multiple studies and detect statistically significant patterns among them. Meta-Analysis for Explanation brings exemplary illustrations of research synthesis together with expert discussion of the use of meta-analytic techniques. The emphasis throughout is on the explanatory applications of meta-analysis, a quality that makes this casebook distinct from other treatments of this methodology. The book features four detailed case studies by Betsy Jane Becker, Elizabeth C. Devine, Mark W. Lipsey, and William R. Shadish, Jr. These are offered as meta-analyses that seek both to answer the descriptive questions to which research synthesis is traditionally directed in the health and social sciences, and also to explore how a more systematic method of explanation might enhance the policy yield of research reviews. To accompany these cases, a group of the field's leading scholars has written several more general chapters that discuss the history of research synthesis, the use of meta-analysis and its value for scientific explanation, and the practical issues and challenges facing researchers who want to try this new technique. As a practical resource, Meta-Analysis for Explanation guides social scientists to greater levels of sophistication in their efforts to synthesize the results of social research. "This is an important book...[it is] another step in the continuing exploration of the wider implications and powers of meta-analytic methods." —Contemporary Psychology

Like the McCarthy era of the 1950s, there is a strong current of paranoid social thought as the end of the century approaches. Conspiracy theories abound, not only in extremist ideologies and groups, but in commerce, science, and economics-arenas where a paranoid style is least expected. A curiosity about paranoia at its most reasonable is at the root of this volume.

Some pieces develop conversations that reveal the post-Cold War situations of countries such as Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and the United States where conspiratorial explanations of national dramas seem to make sense. Other pieces tackle paranoia as a style of debate in such diverse realms as science, psychotherapy, and popular entertainment, where conspiracy theories emerge as a compelling way to address the inadequacies of rational expertise and organization in the face of immense changes that undermine them. Like all of the volumes in the Late Edition series, Paranoia Within Reason offers a provocative challenge to our ways of understanding the ongoing watershed changes that face us.

The term “cyberpunk” entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde.

By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture.

What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age.
A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art.

Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman

Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

For centuries, many Indo-European peoples have sung a poignant ballad about the tragic sacrifice of a female victim to ensure the successful completion of an important undertaking, such as the construction of a building, bridge, or well. The legend, and its many regional and stylistic variations throughout Eastern Europe and India, provides material for an original and engaging casebook of interpretations by folklorists, anthropologists, scholars of comparative religion, and literary critics.
    Alan Dundes brings together eighteen essays on this classic ballad, each introduced by his headnotes. Some contributors offer competing nationalistic claims concerning the ballad’s origin, claims now in dispute because of previously overlooked South Asian versions; Ruth Mandel examines gender and power issues in the ballad; Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble presents a structuralist reading; Krstivoj Kotur proposes a Christian interpretation; Mircea Eliade advocates a myth-ritual reading of blood sacrifices with cosmogonic connections in the Romanian text; and other readings explore female victimization and heroism by seeing the ballad’s theme as a metaphor for marriage, a male-constructed trap seriously restricting women’s freedom and mobility. Dundes concludes the collection with his own feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations of the ballad, followed by suggestions for further reading.
    By emphasizing the ballad’s variant forms in diverse cultural contexts, analyzed from different disciplinary perspectives, this volume asks students of folklore to be aware of the multiplicity of approaches available to them in researching folk narrative.