Non-Gifts

Jo-Ann Power's Treasures was celebrated as "a rare, special love story by a mega-talented author whose words shine with beauty and luminosity" (Kay E. Bendall, The Book Rack, Richmond, VA). In this sparkling sequel to her beloved romance, Jo-Ann Power returns to Victorian England in all its passion and propriety, as a spirited lady seeks the help of the nobleman she cannot afford to love.... A young girl's tragedy brought them togetherAs headmistress of The Farrell School for Young Ladies, Jessica Leighton-Curtis had buried her demons by devoting herself to her work...until one student's plight touches her personally. She sees glimmers of herself in Amanda Emory, a gifted young pianist despondent since a devastating riding accident. In an effort to reach her, Jess implores Randall Templeton, marquess of Ashford, to share his musical gifts and help heal Amanda. But Jess has never met a man as generous as Rand, a man who poses a threat, yet offers a promise.... Dark secrets kept them apart Randall Templeton agrees to see Amanda, becoming nearer and dearer to Jessica herself and unleashing the terrors locked in her shattered soul. Yet even as Jess yields to an intense desire, her memories whisper that she must not care for him. But Rand's gifts of trust and soulful love may be enough to help her bring her past to light....

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This book brings a new dimension to the critical debate about the complex relationship of Woolf to the marketplace and commodity culture through a focus on the gift economy at work in Woolf's writing, exploring the political subversiveness of the gift and its significance in her modernist aesthetics.

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This book brings a new dimension to the critical debate about the complex relationship of Woolf to the marketplace and commodity culture through a focus on the gift economy at work in Woolf's writing, exploring the political subversiveness of the gift and its significance in her modernist aesthetics.

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How do people communicate their romantic feelings? Gift giving is one way. Giving and receiving of gifts is a characteristic of intimate relationships. Gifts are a message, a form of communication with a tangible material object, about love, affection, or concern for the recipient. The "romantic gift" evokes a multitude of intertwined meanings: passion, intimacy, affection, persuasion, care, celebration, altruism, and nostalgia. They can also connote the negative images of obligation and reciprocity. Romantic gift giving may be practiced at rituals, during rites of passage, or for casual occasions, to affirm the continued importance of the romantic relationship. We may even romanticize the giving of gifts to the self, to nonhuman companions, and to others we do not know personally. If loving and giving are a practice, then romantic gift giving is a practice of loving with intimate—or would-be intimate—others.This book addresses gift giving among consumers attempting to express and construct romantic love. It lies at the intersection of consumption, markets, and culture. In societies shaped by the globalizing neo-liberal economic order, increasing wealth disparity, and a partially digitized social environment that they help to co-construct, it may be time to rethink romantic love. Gift giving is a key arena to do so, as gifts make love tangible and act as carriers of meaning as well as cultural symbols. In gift giving the meanings of romance are renewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed. Gifts, Romance, And Consumer Culture demonstrates a wide variety of scholarly work bearing on romantic gift giving using an interpretive consumer research perspective. The book introduces critical studies by scholars in this unfolding and new interdisciplinary field.

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This book takes a critical, grounded and ethnographic approach to elicit a deeper understanding of university volunteering. Anthropological theories of reciprocal gift exchange are used to re-visit some of the value-laden and at times conflicting ways of understanding volunteering as freely undertaken or coerced, altruistic or self-interested. It also explores how some of the changing uses and expectations of volunteering are related to the exercise of power and to the effect of social norms or structural constraints on agency. The book contains a detailed case study of a UK university, focusing on its relationships with local communities and voluntary organisations to illustrate the complex and culturally situated nature of volunteering and the gift. Joanna Puckering also draws on examples from countries such as the United States and Australia to address wider questions of why people do what they do, and why volunteering motives and outcomes attract differing interpretations. This volume will be relevant to scholars from anthropology, sociology and geography as well as those involved in the higher education and voluntary, corporate and social enterprise sectors.

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