Exciting and provocative essays in a collection that is fun, entertaining, and deeply serious. In words and images that explore our environment, culture and architecture, that reflect on literary and artistic creation, mortality, mental health, depression, the North (as a place both real and imagined) and education, Imagined Spaces returns the essay to its original activity of having a go, trying and weighing something out, taking a risk.

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.

New Europe: Imagined Spaces traces the radical transformation of European places and spaces over the last two decades. Instead of the familiar 'schoolbook' map of a Europe of nation-states, the book unpacks the differing imaginations of European identity in recent years. Taking as its central problem the fluid nature of cultural and political identity, it moves firmly away from - and calls into question - the perspective of the nation-state as the primary source of imagined identity for Europeans. The book contributes to key debates, such as the emerging Europe of the Regions and the return of the city-state, examines the 'rebranding' of the nation-state and explores the impact of 'Europeanisation' on existing place identity. Emphasising mobility and movement, the chapters explore borderlands and travel, and also include a detailed discussion of the 'everyday life' of Europeans. Throughout, iconic images of contemporary Europe are invoked: Eurodisney, the Reichstag, Barcelona's Ramblas and the Bilbao Guggenheim, and the way in which mundane artefacts and practices such as football, walking, cars, food, passports and the Euro help construct identity is considered. New Europe: Imagined Spaces adopts a multidisciplinary approach to studying Europe, providing students with an exploration of contemporary European space and place identity.

Regionalism is a term that has been used to describe many different kinds of phenomena, including political, geographical, architectural, and literary. This collection examines "rhetorical regionalism," or the relationships we have to physical regions and the idea of regionality. Regional rhetorics are more than simply the fact of local conditions in certain spaces. They are the ways people produce feelings of belonging and discourses of normalcy within those spaces. The authors in this collection bypass familiar narratives of nationality and localism in order to imagine regions as interfaces that help us to negotiate everyday life. Regions are more than physical spaces, therefore. Regional rhetorics can provide different narratives in order to help us invent new kinds of connections to place and publics. They give us new descriptions of relationships, a power that merges together the tectonic (spatial) and the architectonic (discursive) impulses of rhetoric. The book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.

This book represents a narrative quest for a symbolic grounding to help leaders in times when stable social structures and institutions dissolve and disappear. Monika Kostera approaches this sense-making process through innovative research methods, collecting stories from participants and exploring plots and outcomes of an imagined meeting between two symbolic worlds: one of the internal and imaginative and the other of the external and corporate.