"Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition tells the story of African American sonnet influence: who wrote sonnets and when, who published sonnets, who praised and who opposed the form, who wrote about them critically, how sonnets were included in anthologies, how sonnets have been in and out of fashion, and how sonnet-writers contended with each other. The story of the sonnet's appeal to African American poets from the nineteenth century through the tumultuous twentieth and into the twenty-first, even as sonnet writing remained a vexed pursuit for black poets, for black poetry anthologizers, for Black Arts advocates, and for Black Studies academics, is rich and surprising. Scholarship on black sonnets is only beginning to catch up with the continued output of black sonnets over the past century and a half, particularly in the post-Black Art years. Historically, academic study of African American literature has focused on four concerns: the historical and economic conditions of production and publication of black literature; the political and cultural importance of black literature in America; genres of and trends in black literature; and the nature of the literature as reflective of the black experience. This literary history of African American sonnets engages with these concerns but also opens up a fifth conversation: auxiliary genealogies of influence for black aesthetic production that foreground form and that promote new conversations about form generally: how exactly it enables participation and protest, the overthrow and undermining of aesthetic expectation. Thus, Robbins uses the sonnet as a case study for exploring the broader literary history of African American literature, offering a thorough analysis of the contentious relationship of an old world poetic form to new world poetry"--

"Over the past two decades the study of social movements, revolution, democratization and other non-routine politics has flourished. And yet research on the topic remains highly fragmented, reflecting the influence of at least three traditional divisions. The first of these reflects the view that various forms of contention are distinct and should be studied independent of others. Separate literatures have developed around the study of social movements, revolutions and industrial conflict. A second approach to the study of political contention denies the possibility of general theory in deference to a grounding in the temporal and spatial particulars of any given episode of contention. The study of contentious politics are left to 'area specialists' and/or historians with a thorough knowledge of the time and place in question. Finally, overlaid on these two divisions are stylized theoretical traditions - structuralist, culturalist, and rationalist - that have developed largely in isolation from one another." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam021/2001016172.html.

A historical study, taking as its narrative focus the life, death and posthumous fate of Vasil Levski (1837-1873), arguably the major and only uncontested hero of the Bulgarian national pantheon. The main title refers to the "thick description" of the reburial controversy during the final phase of communist Bulgaria, which centered on the search for Levski's bones. The book gives a specific understanding also of the relationship between nationalism and religion in the post-communist period, by analyzing the recent canonization of Levski. The processes described, although with a chronological depth of almost two centuries, are still very much in the making, and the living archive expands not only in size but with the constant addition of surprising new forms they take. At another level, the book engages in a variety of general theoretical questions. It offers insights into the problems of history and memory: the question of public, social or collective memory; the nature of national memory in comparison to other types of memory; the variability of memory over time and social space; alternative memories; memory's techniques like commemorations, the mechanism of creating and transmitting memory.

'A rich and thoughtful book.' History 'A magnificent empirical resource accompanied by a subtle and powerful framework of interpretation...It is not often that historical scholarship is so effectively harnessed to the sociological imagination.' American Journal of Sociology 'This is a masterpiece of social movement analysis by an author at the peak of his analytical powers making full use of one of the most extensive evidence files available.' Mobilization Between 1750 and 1840 ordinary British people abandoned such time-honored forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favor of marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created - for the first time anywhere - mass participation in national politics. Charles Tilly is the first to address the depth and significance of the transformations in popular collective action during this period. The author elucidates four distinct phases in the transformation to mass political participation and identifies the forms and occasions for collective action that characterized and dominated each. He provides rich descriptions, not only of a wide variety of popular protests, but also of such influential figures as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Daniel O'Connell.

"An analysis of the major contentious events over the course of the past ten years"--Provided by publisher.

The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge.

Despite extensive theoretical debates over the utility of "political opportunities" as an explanation for the rise and success of social movements, there have been surprisingly few serious empirical tests. Contention in Context provides the most extensive effort to date to test the model, analyzing a range of important cases of revolutions and protest movements to identify the role of political opportunities in the rise of political contention. With evidence from more than fifty cases, this book explores the role of the state in protest, the frequent overemphasis on political opportunities in recent research, and the extent to which opportunity models ignore the cultural and emotional triggers for collective action. By examining new directions in the study of protest and contention, this book shows that although political opportunities can help explain the emergence of certain kinds of movements, a new strategic language can ultimately tell us far more.