You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Fat: such a little word evokes big responses. While ‘fat’ describes the size and shape of bodies, our negative reactions to corpulent bodies also depend on something tangible and tactile; as this book argues, there is more to fat than meets the eye. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life offers a historical reflection on how fat has been perceived and imagined in the West since antiquity. Featuring fascinating historical accounts, philosophical, religious and cultural arguments, including discussions of status, gender and race, the book digs deep into the past for the roots of our current notions and prejudices. Three central themes emerge: how we have perceived and imagined obesity over the centuries; how fat as a substance has elicited disgust and how it evokes perceptions of animality; but also how it has been associated with vitality and fertility. By exploring the complex ways in which fat, fatness and fattening have been perceived over time, this book provides rich insights into the stuff our stereotypes are made of.
What does it mean to be a man? To be manly? How has this changed throughout history? This text examines the manly stereotype, which stresses courage and athletic comportment, which from the 18th century onwards became representative of normative modern society.
Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.
Friedrich Nietzsche's descent into madness prevented him from achieving his dream of seeing Paris, but his philosophical alter-ego Zarathustra took the City of Light by storm, raising sharp debates among the political and cultural avant-garde about the very foundations of modern philosophy, social thought and political life. This intellectual history reveals Nietzsche's impact upon the French life of the mind and clarifies the crisis in European thought that foreshadowed and helped bring about World War I.
French Masculinities makes a valuable contribution to gender studies by presenting, for the first time, a comprehensive and critical overview of ideas of how virilité has been imagined in France from the Eighteenth century to the present. Incorporating insights of cultural and social historians as well as specialists in film and literature, this collection approaches masculinities in a complex and interdisciplinary manner that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
This book explores a vital though long-neglected clash between republicans and Catholics that rocked fin-de-siècle France. At its heart was a mysterious and shocking crime. In Lille in 1899, the body of twelve-year-old Gaston Foveaux was discovered in a school run by a Catholic congregation, the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. When his teacher, Frère Flamidien, was charged with sexual assault and murder, a local crime became a national scandal. The Flamidien Affair shows that masculinity was a critical site of contest in the War of Two Frances pitting republicans against Catholics. For republicans, Flamidien’s vow of chastity as well as his overwrought behaviour during the investigation made him the target of suspicion; Catholics in turn constructed a rival vision of masculinity to exonerate the accused brother. Both sides drew on the Dreyfus Affair to make their case.
Without our consent and often without our knowledge, the government can constantly monitor many of our daily activities, using closed circuit TV, global positioning systems, and a wide array of other sophisticated technologies. With just a few keystrokes, records containing our financial information, phone and e-mail logs, and sometimes even our medical histories can be readily accessed by law enforcement officials. As Christopher Slobogin explains in Privacy at Risk, these intrusive acts of surveillance are subject to very little regulation. Applying the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, Slobogin argues that courts should prod legislatures into enacting more meaningful protection against government overreaching. In setting forth a comprehensive framework meant to preserve rights guaranteed by the Constitution without compromising the government’s ability to investigate criminal acts, Slobogin offers a balanced regulatory regime that should intrigue everyone concerned about privacy rights in the digital age.
On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the "superstitious" view of God held by most atheists and agnostics and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity. There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade -- Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular -- nor for many conventional believers. --Résumé de l'éditeur.
An official guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer describes the mythology and influences behind the monsters, ghouls, and characters through interviews with the creators and details of the episodes.
"A reassessment of the Third Republic as the first long-term successful French experiment with a democratic republic. Born of violent revolution against church, monarchy, and aristocracy, it was fraught with contradictions between the universalism of human rights and the practical need to deny certain categories of people the rights of citizenship"--Provided by publisher.