Books

Peter Cameron from the centre for petroleum, mineral law and policy has published two books recently.

Competition in Energy Markets: Law and Regulation in the European Union by Peter Cameron.
Oxford University Press: ISBN 0 19 8257770 8

This book is the result of several years' work by Professor Cameron on the establishment of a legal framework for a single integrated market in EU electricity and gas. While Britain has taken the lead in opening up its markets, leading to lower prices and many consumer benefits, there are several countries on the continent that have fought hard to stop the development of a similar competitive market over there. At present, a French-owned company supplies electricity to Number 10 Downing Street while no British company could do the same in France. Professor Cameron explains how the European Commission has set about trying to create a level playing field by introducing new legislation. In the 1990s it took almost seven years for the necessary laws to be adopted in a watered down form. Critics argue that a better way was to use existing Treaty provisions to force Governments to accept a measure of competition. Cameron refutes this argument. A review of these laws is now underway and this book will be read by many of the participants in the ongoing debate, as well as students who want an introduction to an important and very topical subject. However, Judge David Edward of the European Court of Justice writes in the Preface that "the book will also serve as a case-study of problems of governance in the twenty-first century".

Kyoto: From Principles to Practice by Peter Cameron.
Kluwer: ISBN 90 411 1689 3

This book is the result of an international research project Professor Cameron managed for the International Bar Association. He wrote the leading chapter and edited (with Dean Donald Zillman of Maine University) the collection of 17 chapters by scholars from 15 different countries. They focus on the legal and policy implications of implementing the so-called Kyoto Protocol to the UN Treaty on Climate Change, with particular emphasis on the energy industry as a major source of the emissions that cause global warming. Professor Cameron says: "For me the most interesting chapters were the ones from China and Nigeria. Basically, the Chinese argue that the industrialized nations should pay all the costs of reducing emissions since they caused them over the past 200 years. The Nigerians argue that this problem should have a lower priority than we are giving it, and instead we should focus attention on the social and economic impact of diseases such as aids".

The Bare Abundance by Professor G.J.F Dutton.
Bloodaxe Books: ISBN 1 852245 89 1

Our Emeritus professor G.J.F. Dutton is a man of many parts. Take science. Universities awarding him academic honours include Dundee, where he had established the now star-studded biochemistry department at the forefront of international research as early as the 1960s. His work discovered, isolated and characterised a novel tissue nucleotide and revealed its range of unsuspected enzymes. These clear the body of its own toxic products and environmental drugs, carcinogens or other pollutants. Crucially, such enzymes are low in foetus and newborn - explaining numerous deaths which are now avoidable.

Other lifelong explorations included mountaineering, solo wildwater swimming, and experimental 'gardening' and silviculture at an exposed high altitude. These pursuits have been well received in print and on radio and TV. He finds all this research closely linked and mutually compatible, part of a continuous spectrum of enquiry. By surfing that spectrum, he claims, you can move from something sought to something that happens, a scientist's keen eye increasingly sharing a poet's vision. He explored this in four books of verse, each awarded a Scottish Arts council prize or Poetry Book Society recommendation.

His latest book of verse is also PBS recommended. In it he travels these various enquiries. He writes to us: "Such cultural linking has always appeared to me inevitable, part of the learning process we were born for.

Geoff Ward, The Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present Polity by Professor Geoff Ward.
Blackwell Publishers: ISBN 0-7456-2622-X

In this lively and polemical study, Geoff Ward puts forward the bold claim that the founding documents of American identity are essentially literary. America was invented, not discovered, and it remains in thrall to the myth of an earthly Paradise. However, this is Paradise™, and American ideology imprisons as much as it inspires. The Writing of America shows the tension between these forces in a wide range of literary and other texts, from Puritan sermons and the Declaration of Independence, through nineteenth century classics by Hawthorne and Melville, to blues lyrics, cinema and the popular fiction of Stephen King. Alongside his provocative reassessments of the classics, Ward offers new material on lost or neglected figures such as George Lippard, whose Gothic shocker The Quaker City was the best-selling American novel prior to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and which Ward shows to be the ancestor of not only modern horror fiction, but the cinema of Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. The book concludes with an afterword on the effects that the events of September 11 have had on the study of American literature. This startling analysis of American literature and culture builds on Geoff Ward's earlier work to make this an essential guide to what Abraham Lincoln termed 'the last best hope of earth'.

George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism by Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton
Palgrave ISBN: 0 333 96381 4

This study argues that George Eliot's interest in Judaism, particularly Jewish myth and mysticism, influenced all of her fiction, not merely her 'Jewish novel', Daniel Deronda, her last work of fiction. The predominant critical perspective on George Eliot tends still to regard her fiction as belonging to a realist tradition, but this study calls this into question, perhaps more radically than any other study, by attempting to demonstrate that a cohesive mythic structure with its basis in Jewish mysticism is identifiable throughout her fiction, with the golem as both myth and metaphor being particularly significant. Despite George Eliot's consuming interest in all aspects of Judaism, she had no literal belief in it at a theological level any more than she believed in Christianity or any other metaphysical system. Jewish myth and mysticism, however, offered her the means of transcending the artistic limitations of realism by enabling the novel as a form to function not only in realist terms but also metaphorically and allegorically, unlike conventional realist fiction. This links her with certain modernist writers such as James Joyce and W. B. Yeats who also use myth and esoteric ideas primarily as an artistic means of building into their work layers of meaning and implication.

The book will appeal to those interested in Victorian fiction, the influence of Jewish thought on Victorian culture, and students of George Eliot in general.

Saleel Nurbhai is a former research student in English at the University. K. M. Newton is a Professor in the English department.

Next Page
Return to May 2002 Contact