You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Is there a 'history' of laughter? Or isn't laughter an anthropological constant rather and thus beyond history, a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens from cave man and cave woman to us? The contributors to this collection of essays believe that laughter does have a history and try to identify continuities and turning points of this history by studying a series of English texts, both canonical and non-canonical, from Anglosaxon to contemporary. As this is not another book on the history of the comic or of comedy it does not restrict itself to comic genres; some of the essays actually go out of their way to discover laughter at the margins of texts where one would not have e...
Thinking Northern offers new approaches to the processes of identity formation which are taking place in the diverse fields of cultural, economic and social activity in contemporary Britain. The essays collected in this volume discuss the changing physiognomy of Northern England and provide a mosaic of recent thought and new critical thinking about the textures of regional identity in Britain. Looking at the historical origin of Northern identities and at current attitudes to them, the book explores the way received mental images about the North are re-deployed and re-contained in the ever-changing socio-cultural set-up of society in Northern England. The contributors address representation of Northernness in such diverse fields as the music scene, multicultural spaces, the heritage industries, new architecture, the arts, literature and film.
The classic conception of human transcendental consciousness assumes its self-supporting existential status within the horizon of life-world, nature and earth. Yet this assumed absoluteness does not entail the nature of its powers, neither their constitutive force. This latter call for an existential source reaching beyond the generative life-world network. Transcendental consciousness, having lost its absolute status (its point of reference) it is the role of the logos to lay down the harmonious positioning in the cosmic sphere of the all, establishing an original foundation of phenomenology in the primogenital ontopoiesis of life.
Formerly known by its subtitle “Internationale Zeitschriftenschau für Bibelwissenschaft und Grenzgebiete”, the International Review of Biblical Studies has served the scholarly community ever since its inception in the early 1950’s. Each annual volume includes approximately 2,000 abstracts and summaries of articles and books that deal with the Bible and related literature, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pseudepigrapha, Non-canonical gospels, and ancient Near Eastern writings. The abstracts – which may be in English, German, or French - are arranged thematically under headings such as e.g. “Genesis”, “Matthew”, “Greek language”, “text and textual criticism”, “exegetical methods and approaches”, “biblical theology”, “social and religious institutions”, “biblical personalities”, “history of Israel and early Judaism”, and so on. The articles and books that are abstracted and reviewed are collected annually by an international team of collaborators from over 300 of the most important periodicals and book series in the fields covered.
Taking into account the destructive powers of globalization, Making Worlds considers the interconnectedness of the world in the early modern period. This collection examines the interdisciplinary phenomenon of making worlds, with essays from scholars of history, literary studies, theatre and performance, art history, and anthropology. The volume advances questions about the history of globalization by focusing on how the expansion of global transit offered possibilities for interactions that included the testing of local identities through inventive experimentation with new and various forms of culture. Case studies show how the imposition of European economic, religious, political, and military models on other parts of the world unleashed unprecedented forces of invention as institutionalized powers came up against the creativity of peoples, cultural practices, materials, and techniques of making. In doing so, Making Worlds offers an important rethinking of how early globalization inconsistently generated ongoing dynamics of making, unmaking, and remaking worlds.
This book analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth-century. The contributors address issues such as subjectivity, performance, voice, narrative time, character development and genre, placing their readings of early modern prose texts within the diachronic frame of the overall topic. Individual chapters will treat texts from a variety of genres, offering analyses of individual texts in the context of changes and developments within literary forms. The book in its entirety will cover a period of approximately 350 years, from 1370 to 1720.
This work compares the experiences of unpaid family carers in three different welfare systems. It investigates the inter-relatedness of the personal and the social and how individual lives are shaped by different social systems.
Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England explores a seldom-studied trove of English veterinary manuals, illuminating how the daily care of horses they describe reshapes our understanding of equine representation in the popular romance of late medieval England. A saint removes a horse’s leg the more easily to shoe him; a wild horse transforms spur wounds into the self-healing practice of bleeding; a messenger calculates time through his horse’s body. Such are the rich and conflicted visions of horse/human connection in the period. Exploring this imagined relation, Francine McGregor reveals a cultural undercurrent in which medieval England is so reliant on equine bodies that human anxieties, desires, and very orientation in daily life are often figured through them. This book illuminates the complex and contradictory yearnings shaping medieval perceptions of the horse, the self, and the identities born of their affinity.
The title of this volume indicates more than a referential relationship: Representing Religious Pluralization entails not just the various ways in which the historical processes of pluralization were reflected in texts and other cultural artefacts, but also, crucially, the cultural work that spawned these processes. Reflecting, driving, shaping and subverting religious systems, representation becomes a divisive force in Reformation Europe as religious pluralization erupts in a contest over how to conceive, to symbolize and to perform religious belief. The essays in this book offer a broad range of perspectives on the pluralizing effects of cultural representation as well as on the various attempts at containing them.
Victims and Perpetrators What form does the dialogue about the family past during the Nazi period take in families of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and in families of Nazi perpetrators and bystanders? What impact does the past of the first generation, and their own way of dealing with it have on the lives of their children and grandchildren? What are the differences between the dialogue about the family past and the Holocaust in families of Nazi perpetrators and in families of Holocaust survivors? This book examines these questions on the basis of selected case studies.