Search results for ""Liverpool University Press""

Edward Lear wrote a well-known autobiographical poem that begins ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’ But how well do we really know him? On the one hand he is, in John Ashbery’s words, ‘one of the most popular poets who ever lived’; on the other hand he has often been overlooked or marginalized by scholars and in literary histories. James Williams’s account, the first book-length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity. Williams approaches Lear’s work thematically, tracing some of its most fundamental subjects and situations. Grounded in attentive close readings, Williams also connects Lear’s nonsense with his various other creative endeavours: as a zoological illustrator and landscape painter, a travel writer, and a prolific diarist and correspondent.

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Philip Larkin is one of the finest English poets of our time. His poetic personality – nostalgic, wry, melancholy, ironic, witty and haunting – has appealed to a far wider audience than that of literary specialists, while also winning the respect of leading critics and fellow poets. Lerner’s study relates poetry to Larkin’s life, and to the literary and social environment of post-war Britain; discusses the Larkin persona, and Larkin’s relation to literary criticism; and above all seeks to guide readers to a full appreciation of the power and subtlety of Larkin’s best poems.

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Basil Bunting (1900-1985) was an extraordinary if sometimes neglected poet. His late-flowering masterpiece Briggflatts (1965) jettisoned him into the pantheon of twentieth century greats and reminded his audience that the legacies of international modernism had not been entirely buried. Bunting showed that Anglo-American modernism was not incompatible with native traditions and Briggflatts is a powerful evocation of Northumbria, the poet’s cherished place of origin. Such dynamic regionalism struck a powerful note in the 1960s, his poetry proving an inspiration to younger poets. Bunting became a talismanic figure, his charismatic readings helping to galvanise the British Poetry Revival. Briggflatts rescued Bunting from literary neglect and prompted readers to return to his earlier writings which are also examined here.

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François Zanetti s’intéresse ici à une pratique médicale peu explorée par les historiens: l’utilisation de l’électricité. La transformation du fluide électrique en un médicament à part entière apparaît au milieu du XVIIIe siècle comme une nouveauté fascinante qui donne à voir les mystères et les merveilles de la nature. Remède employé dans le traitement de maladies chroniques ou nerveuses, suscitant espoirs et déceptions, l’électricité est associée aux bouleversements culturels et sociaux qui animent le monde médical et qui cristallisent les tensions sociales et politiques à la fin de l’Ancien Régime. Analysant de nombreux témoignages de médecins et de patients, François Zanetti montre comment l’électricité acquiert peu à peu sa légitimité, pour aboutir aux trois procédés devenus canoniques à la fin des années 1770 – le bain électrique, l’électrisation par étincelles et la commotion. Il souligne que l’électricité médicale, qui marque l’entrée des machines dans l’espace thérapeutique, réconcilie les philosophies naturelle et morale. Au temps de la sensibilité et des philanthropes, elle devient un traitement réservé aux pauvres. Elle témoigne aussi de l’autonomie des patients dans l’interprétation de leurs maux et dans la construction de leur itinéraire thérapeutique, entre médecine officielle et praticiens irréguliers.Dans une approche renouvelée de la médecine du XVIIIe siècle, François Zanetti met en relation des champs généralement envisagés de manière séparée, qui constituent la richesse et la complexité du monde des Lumières: recherches savantes des institutions académiques et des encyclopédies, préoccupations politiques des ministres et des administrations, et aspirations du peuple à l’amélioration des conditions de vie.

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The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or Battle of the Books as it was known in England, famously pitted the Ancients on the one side and the Moderns on the other. This book presents a new intellectual history of the dispute, in which authors explore its manifestations across Europe in the arts and sciences, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.By paying close attention to local institutional contexts for the Querelle, contributors yield a complex picture of the larger debate. In intellectual life, authors uncover how the debate affected the publication of antiquarian scholarship, and how it became part of discussions in London coffee houses and the periodical press. Authors also position the Low Countries as the true pivot for a modernistic realignment of intellectual method, with concomitant rather than centralised developments in England and France. The volume is particularly concerned with the realisation of the Querelle in the realm of artistic and technical practice. Marrying modern approaches with ancient sympathies was fraught with difficulties, as contributors attest in analyses on musical writing, painting and the ‘querelle du coloris’, architectural practice and medical rhetorics. Tracing the deeper cultural resonances of the dispute, authors conclude by revealing how it fostered a new tendency to cultural self-reflection throughout Europe. Together, these contributions demonstrate how the Querelle acted as a leading principle for the configuration of knowledge across the arts and sciences throughout the early modern period, and also emphasise the links between historical debates and our contemporary understanding of what it means to be ‘modern’.

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Liverpool was a burgeoning trading centre and rapidly growing town in the early 18th century, developing into a thriving mercantile metropolis by the 19th century. The demand for new housing was high, and court housing largely filled that need. Court housing was a form of high-density back-to-back housing around courtyards. It provided homes to nearly half of Liverpool's working-class people by the mid 19th century. Contemporary descriptions highlight the cramped, dark and often damp conditions in these houses. This book uses a range of historical and archaeological evidence about courts to consider their development, life within them, and the measures eventually taken to rid Liverpool of them. This book considers courts and their impact on people's lives in Liverpool for over 250 years. This book features international parallels to courts as well as some of the people involved in investigating this type of housing, providing historical context to this fascinating aspect of Liverpool's past.

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Rome's first emperor, Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, has probably had the most lasting effect on history of all rulers of the classical world. This book focuses on his rise to power and on the ways in which he then maintained authority throughout his reign. It is often assumed that the close relationship between power and presentation, popularly known as 'spin', is a modern phenomenon. Augustus, however, emerges as consummate master of the political process, using propaganda to fashion his own historical legacy. Clark examines the importance of his chief political advisor Maecenas, the patron of Horace and Virgil; and of his military commander Agrippa. He also considers the contrasting fates of the main poets of Augustus' reign, Virgil and Ovid, and the public monuments that - as much as poetry -– served to shape his reputation.

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The Council of Constantinople of 553 (often called Constantinople II or the Fifth Ecumenical Council) has been described as ‘by far the most problematic of all the councils’, because it condemned two of the greatest biblical scholars and commentators of the patristic era – Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia – and because the pope of the day, Vigilius, first condemned the council and then confirmed its decisions only under duress. The present edition makes accessible to the modern reader the acts of the council, session by session, and the most important related documents, particularly those that reveal the shifting stance of Pope Vigilius, veering between heroic resistance and abject compliance. The accompanying commentary and substantial introduction provide a background narrative of developments since Chalcedon, a full analysis of the policy of the emperor Justinian (who summoned and dominated the council) and of the issues in the debate, and information on the complex history of both the text and the council’s reception. The editor argues that the work of the council deserves a more sympathetic evaluation that it has generally received in western Christendom, since it arguably clarified rather than distorted the message of Chalcedon and influenced the whole subsequent tradition of eastern Orthodoxy. In interpreting Chalcedon the conciliar acts provide a fascinating example of how a society – in this case the imperial Church of Byzantium – determines its identity by how it understands its past.

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Liverpool gained a unique and notorious reputation during the 19th century for being an abnormally violent and criminal place. ‘The Monster Evil’ intends to explore the historical foundations of this stigmatization: were the fears real or an invention of the Victorian newspapers? In answering such questions the book examines Liverpool’s violent crime and how effectively it was policed by the newly established constabulary through the use of local and national press reports, contemporary accounts and police records. In doing so issues relating to public acceptance and tolerance of violence and the police will be explored. All forms of criminal interpersonal violence are described and analysed in the context of the city; including notorious murders such as the Tithebarn-street kicking of 1874, the ‘wholesale poisonings’ by two sisters in 1883 and the killing of young children by other young children in 1855 and 1891. Everyday acts of violence in the home between family members, or in the street, whether as acts of robbery or as drunken unprovoked attacks on strangers or against the police, are also given prominence. An extract on police night shift duty by Liverpool’s foremost 19th-century journalist, Hugh Shimmin, is included. The book, which covers much of the Victorian period, is based on original and extensive research. Through an examination of a wide range of ‘typical’ case studies and news stories, which exemplify the various kinds of violent crime found in Liverpool, readers will find the book accessible, authoritative and surprising in its resonance with present day crime and its news coverage by the media.

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Nemesius’ treatise On the Nature of Man is an important text for historians of ancient thought, not only as a much-quarried source of evidence for earlier works now lost, but also as an indication of intellectual life in the late fourth century AD. The author was a Christian bishop; the subject is the nature of human beings and their place in the scheme of created things. The medical works of Galen and the philosophical writings of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonist Porphyry are all major influences on Nemesius; so too the controversial Christian Origen. On the Nature of Man provides the first kown compendium of theological anthropology with a Christian orientation and considerably influenced later Byzantine and medieval Latin philosophical theology.

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W. B. Yeats is one of the most important writers in English of the twentieth century, and the system of A Vision is generally recognized as fundamental to the power and achievement of his later poetry. Yet this strange mixture of esoteric geometry, lunar symbolism, and sweeping generalization has proven frustrating to generations of readers, who have found it obscure in both matter and presentation. This book helps readers to approach and understand the origins, structure, and implications of the system. Concentrating on the 1937 revised edition of A Vision, the treatment is divided into major topic areas with several levels: a general introduction to each topic; a fuller and deeper examination of that topic, drawing on A Vision's two versions and the manuscript background, and forming the bulk of each chapter; an examination of how the topic manifests in Yeats's literary work; full notes to explore conceptual and textual problems. The first three chapters examine the background and origins of A Vision; the central seven chapters look at the major elements involved in the system; the following four at the major processes of life and history. The main treatment ends with a summary and conclusion, and is supplemented by a glossary of terms and appendices.

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Recent discussion, academic publications and many of the national exhibitions relating to the Great War at sea have focussed on capital ships, Jutland and perhaps U-boats. Very little has been published about the crucial role played by fishermen, fishing vessels and coastal communities all round the British Isles. Yet fishermen and armed fishing craft were continually on the maritime front line throughout the conflict; they formed the backbone of the Auxiliary Patrol and were in constant action against-U-boats or engaged on unrelenting minesweeping duties. Approximately 3000 fishing vessels were requisitioned and armed by the Admiralty and more than 39,000 fishermen joined the Trawler Section of the Royal Naval Reserve. The class and cultural gap between working fishermen and many RN officers was enormous. This book examines the multifaceted role that fishermen and the fish trade played throughout the conflict. It examines the reasons why, in an age of dreadnoughts and other high-tech military equipment, so many fishermen and fishing vessels were called upon to play such a crucial role in the littoral war against mines and U-boats, not only around the British Isles but also off the coasts of various other theatres of war. It will analyse the nature of the fishing industry’s war-time involvement and also the contribution that non-belligerent fishing vessels continued to play in maintaining the beleaguered nation’s food supplies.

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Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022What Fire is about how to continue as catastrophe crawls in, when the climate crisis has its grip on us all, the internet has been shut down, and the buildings are burning up. What happens when the philosophers never arrive? What songs are still worth singing? In her third collection, Alice Miller takes a fierce, unflinching look at the world we live in, at what we have made, and whether it is possible to change.

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Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity.In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions.

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Through official maps, this book looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889-1934). Governmental policies, such as the creation of a mandatory national uniform educational system that will eventually include geography, combined with technological advances in the printing industry, to alter the look, exposure, reception, and distribution of government maps. The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space. Rail and automobiles made moving about the city and environs easier while increased industrialization moved factories and their workers further out into the Seine Department. During this time, maps transitioned from reflecting the past to documenting the present. With the advent of French urbanism after World War I, official mapped views of greater Paris abandoned privileging past achievements and began to mirror actual residential and industrial development as it pushed further out from the city centre. Finally, the government needed to plan for the future of greater Paris and official maps begin to show how the government viewed the direction of its capital city.

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In late December 1817, when attempting to name “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature,” John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” which he glossed as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the “poetical Character” Keats notes that “it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.

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This is the first full-length study of Irish Ribbonism. It traces the development of Ribbonism from its origins in the Defender movement of the 1790s until the latter part of the century when the remnants of the Ribbon tradition found solace in the quasi-constitutional affinities of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Placing Ribbonism firmly within Ireland’s long tradition of collective action and protest, this book shows that, owing to its diversity and adaptability, it shared similarities, but also stood apart from, the many rural redresser groups of the period and showed remarkable longevity not matched by its contemporaries. The book describes the wider context of Catholic struggles for improved standing, explores traditions and networks for association, and it describes external impressions. Drawing on rich archives in the form of state surveillance records, ‘show trial’ proceedings and press reportage, the book shows that Ribbonism was a sophisticated and durable underground network drawing together various strands of the rural and urban Catholic populace in Ireland and Britain. Ribbon Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Its Diaspora is a fascinating study that demonstrates Ribbonism operated more widely than previous studies have revealed.

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This book is the first academic study entirely devoted to Liverpool labouring-class poet and activist Edward Rushton (1756-1814), whose name was for a long time only associated with the foundation of the Royal School for the Blind in 1791. A former sailor, tavern keeper and editor of a paper, as of the turbulent 1790s Rushton owned a bookshop that was a hub of intense networking with many radical writers and intellectuals. His long-lasting, consistent commitment to the most pressing debates enflaming the Age of Revolution led him to question naval impressment and British repression in Ireland, the Napoleonic wars lacerating Europe and, most prominently, both the transatlantic traffic in human beings and the institution of slavery as such. A dedicated and unrelenting campaigner at the time of the dawning human rights discourse, Rushton was both a perceptive scrutinizer of the mechanisms of power and repression, and a remarkably complex poetic voice, fully consequent to his politics. In this book his work is the object of new and long-due critical enquiry, especially appropriate in the year that marks the bicentennial anniversary of his death. The opening up of eighteenth-century and Romantic studies to cross-disciplinary interchange allows for a more nuanced historical and critical investigation of previously erased or neglected individual and collective experiences. This expanding critical space, which highlights the systemic discursive interaction of culture, politics and society, constitutes the conceptual and methodological frame for what is intended as a comprehensive critical re-evaluation of the writer.

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Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this ‘national sin’ by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the ‘Middle Passage’, and the Caribbean plantation. For the first time, this collection brings together localised case studies of Britain’s history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. These essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examine how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain.

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One of the most enduring tropes of modern Irish history is the MOPE thesis, the idea that the Irish were the Most Oppressed People Ever. Political oppression, forced emigration and endemic poverty have been central to the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland. This volume problematises the assumption of generalised misery and suggests the many different, and often surprising, ways in which Irish people sought out, expressed and wrote about happiness. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, this volume considers the emerging field of the history of emotion and what a history of happiness in Ireland might look like. During the nineteenth century the concept of happiness denoted a degree of luck or good fortune, but equally was associated with the positive feelings produced from living a good and moral life. Happiness could be found in achieving wealth, fame or political success, but also in the relief of lulling a crying baby to sleep. Reading happiness in historical context indicates more than a simple expression of contentment. In personal correspondence, diaries and novels, the expression of happiness was laden with the expectations of audience and author and informed by cultural ideas about what one could or should be happy about. This volume explores how the idea of happiness shaped social, literary, architectural and aesthetic aspirations across the century. CONTRIBUTORS: Ian d'Alton, Shannon Devlin, Anne Dolan, Simon Gallaher, Paul Huddie, Kerron Ó Luain, David McCready, Ciara Thompson, Andrew Tierney, Kristina Varade, Mai Yatani

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The coup d'etat of July 1936 split Spain in two, shaping a chessboard of terror, misery and death that would put an end to the Republic and give sustenance to dictatorship. In the rebel territory, Franco's soldiers were often not convinced followers, but mere pawns forced to fight for the future of a Spain in which the only element of cohesion would be fear. The experience of the Spanish Civil War is defined by how the dictator placed citizens before a terrible dilemma: become executioners or die. This experience was not confined to Spain alone. A transnational analysis, hitherto never undertaken, puts the Spanish war experience in the context of the political and military dramas of the first half of the 20th century. Issues of recruitment, terror, and propaganda dominate analysis. But deeper social and indeed psychological issues are equally important in understanding how dictatorship can shape society for the worse, and indeed come to be regarded by the majority as the norm. Special attention is paid to military ethos at all levels of the armed forces. Francos Soldiers, originally published to acclaim in Spain, provides a unique literary platform that better allows the Spanish Civil War experience to be understood in a wide historical context, thus furthering and encouraging international debate. Published in collaboration with the Department of International History, London School of Economics.

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For the modern world Greek tragedy is represented almost entirely by those plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides whose texts have been preserved since they were first produced in the fifth century BC. From that period and the next two hundred years more than eighty other tragic poets are known from biographical and production data, play-titles, mythical subject-matter, and remnants of their works quoted by other ancient writers or rediscovered in papyrus texts. This edition includes all the remnants of tragedies that can be identified with these other poets, with English translations, related historical information, detailed explanatory notes and bibliographies. Volume 1 includes some twenty 5th-century poets, notably Phrynichus, Aristarchus, Ion, Achaeus, Sophocles’ son Iophon, Agathon and the doubtful cases of Neophron (author of a Medea supposedly imitated by Euripides) and Critias (possibly author of three other tragedies attributed to Euripides). Volume 2 will include the 4th- and 3rd-century tragedians and some anonymous material derived from ancient sources or rediscovered papyrus texts.Remnants of these poets’ satyr-plays are included in a separate Aris & Phillips Classical Texts volume, Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, edited by Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard (2013).

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Green issues are rising rapidly up the agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean as governments struggle to reconcile the demands of globalization with the quest for equitable and sustainable growth. This second volume of Environmental Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean reveals how the region is becoming a laboratory of change – and a source of inspiration in global affairs – as states, multilateral agencies and the private sector seek sustainable solutions to its pressing problems. This volume explains the roles institutions, policies and political actors play in green policymaking and builds on the introduction to the historical, political and economic context in which they have evolved provided in Volume I. It examines how democratization in the 1980s gave new space to environmental and indigenous activists, and surveys the ideas inspiring them to forge a new kind of politics. As institutional change has become a defining feature of political development throughout this region, new environmental ministries and agencies have established new standards of regulation and enforcement. Policymakers are advancing innovative ways to tackle complex environmental problems and constitutions, laws and treaties are enshrining new green rights that increasingly assertive courts are upholding. Together, both volumes of Environmental Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean provide the framework for a modular course on this essential topic, with each chapter structured to be the basis of a single teaching unit. Using tables, boxes and maps to support the student, the two volumes offer an accessible way of understanding the background and context of environmental politics in the region as well as theoretical debates and key developments.

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Introducing Tectonics, Rock Structures and Mountain Belts is written to explain the key concepts of tectonics and rock structures to students and to the interested non-specialist, especially those without a strong mathematical background. The study and understanding of geological structures has traditionally been guided by the rigorous application of mathematics and physics but, in this book, Graham Park has avoided mathematical equations altogether and has reduced the geometry to the minimum necessary. The application of plate tectonic theory has revolutionised structural geology by giving the study of rock structures a context in which they can be explained. Since the large-scale movements of the plates ultimately control smaller-scale structures, the study of tectonics is the key to understanding the latter. The reader is thus introduced to large-scale Earth structure and the theory of plate tectonics before dealing with geological structures such as faults and folds. Studies by structural geologists of the movement history of rock masses relative to each other, as revealed by the study of fault systems and shear zones, has helped to integrate rock structures with plate tectonics and this has been emphasised in the book. One of the most exciting aspects of geology is the study of the great mountain ranges, orogenic belts. The final three chapters of the book explain how knowledge of plate tectonic theory, geological structures and the processes of deformation may be employed to understand these orogenic belts. hilst excessive use of terminology is avoided, all technical terms are in a Glossary and, as with all books in this series, the text is illustrated profusely.

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Schools become increasingly complex organisations and, as their role in socialising young people is recognised, the task of leading the school community is receiving greater attention than ever before.School Leadership summarises current thinking about leadership in schools and suggests ways forward. School leadership is set in its social context. Is leadership associated with function within a bureaucratically ordered hierarchy, is it widely shared across communities or is it both? The school is considered both as an institution of the state and as an agency of democratic values. Ideas as to who the leaders are and what leadership involves are recast. The authors' recent experience with Headship preparation and development is discussed and analysed. Set in the Scottish experience this book provides examples of general issues facing many schools and school leaders across the world. School Leadership is required reading for head teachers, education administrators and for those aspiring to leadership roles in schools.This is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of a book that has been a key resource for School Leadership programmes since publication of the first edition in 2003.

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The Chronicon Paschale is one of the major constituents of the Byzantine chronographic tradition covering the late antique period.

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The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles makes accessible to a wide public sources vital for the reconstruction of events in the first Islamic century, covering the period which ends with the unsuccessful Arab siege of Constantinople, an event which both modern historians and Syriac chronographers see as making a decisive caesura in history. The general introduction enables a newcomer to the field to establish his bearings before tackling the texts.

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After Shakespeare the most famous British author in Europe, in Britain Byron was for years either neglected, or a victim of the myth of his own personality. Now he is read and studied both for his complex politics and as a forerunner of many of the ideas and techniques more usually associated with post-modernism. Bone tackles the critical problems both of the populism of much of Byron’s early work, and conversely of the sophisticated comedy of Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement. He argues that for all its contradictoriness Byron’s poetic mind develops organically, and that the scintillating technique of the late works grow out of the profoundly modern world-view, relativistic and secular, which had developed through his early years. Byron’s writing are seen as a vital area for post-ideological and new found criticism.

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Browning has been identified as the greatest nineteenth century poet of human psychology, but the category most popular in his own time defined him as a poet of 'the grotesque'. In this book, John Woolford undertakes to specify the precise meaning and scope of this term, in the process placing him in a major aesthetic tradition running from the Romantic Sublime through to modern concepts and theorisations of the grotesque, such as the Bakhtinian. This study subsumes the other major critical discourse fertilised by his work, the 'dramatic monologue', but adds to that other notable features of it, such as its lucid language, and what has impeded his full appreciation hitherto, its difficulty. The study seeks, not to excuse but to explain and celebrate the intellectual white heat at which he worked, and to position all aspects of his output within a unified theory of its significance. Browning was arguably the cleverest of the English poets, but he was more than that: contemporary comparisons of him with Chaucer and Shakespeare are not misplaced.

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To this day, the commentaries on the Bible and Talmud written by the eleventh-century scholar known as Rashi remain unsurpassed. His influence on Jewish thinking was, and still is, significant. His commentary on the Pentateuch was the first Hebrew book to be printed, giving rise to hundreds of supercommentaries. Christian scholars, too, have relied heavily on his explanations of biblical texts. In this volume Avraham Grossman presents a masterly survey of the social and cultural background to Rashi’s work and pulls together the strands of information available on his life, his personality, his reputation during his lifetime, and his influence as a teacher. He discusses each of his main commentaries in turn, including such aspects as his sources, his interpretative method, his innovations, and his style and language. Attention is also given to his halakhic monographs, responsa, and liturgical poems. Despite Rashi’s importance as a scholar and the vast literature published about him, two central questions remain essentially unanswered: what was Rashi’s world-view, and was he a conservative or a revolutionary? Professor Grossman considers these points at length, and his in-depth analysis of Rashi’s world-view—particularly his understanding of Jewish uniqueness, Jewish values, and Jewish society—leads to conclusions that are likely to stimulate much debate.

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Mysticism, which transcends the boundaries of time and space and refers to a reality not grasped by means of ordinary human cognition, is one of the central sources of inspiration of religious thought. It is an attempt to decode the mystery of divine existence by penetrating to the depths of consciousness through language, memory, myth, and symbolism. Delving deep into the psyche, mystics strive to redeem perceived reality from its immediate meaning. Mystical texts constitute a history of this religious creativity, of man’s attempt to reveal the divine structure underlying the chaos of reality and thereby endow life with hope and purpose. By offering an alternative perspective on the world that gives expression to yearnings for freedom and change, mysticism engenders new modes of authority and leadership; as such it plays a decisive role in moulding religious and social history. For all these reasons, the mystical corpus deserves study and discussion in the framework of cultural criticism and research. This study is a lyrical exposition of the Jewish mystical phenomenon. It is based on a close reading of the hundreds of volumes written by Jewish mystics and incorporates mystical testimonies drawn from the different countries and cultural environments in which Jews have lived. Rachel Elior’s purpose is to present, as accurately as possible, the meanings of the mystical works as they were perceived by their creators and readers. At the same time, she contextualizes them within the boundaries of the religion, culture, language, and spiritual and historical circumstances in which the destiny of the Jewish people has evolved. The author succeeds in drawing the reader into a mystical world. With great intensity, she conveys the richness of the mystical experience in discovering the infinity of meaning embedded in the sacred text; teasing out the recurring themes, she explains the multivalent symbols. Using copious extracts from Jewish mystical sources, she illustrates the varieties of the mystical experience from antiquity to the twentieth century. She succeeds in eloquently conveying how mystics try to decipher reality by penetrating beyond its apparent boundaries: how they experience spiritual powers symbolically, imaginatively, or visually; how hidden truths are revealed in visions or dreams, in an epiphany or as ‘lightning’; how they are ‘engraved’ in the mind or illuminate in the soul. Most of the texts she draws on are written in very obscure language, but the skilful translations communicate the mystical experiences vividly and make it easy for the reader to understand how Elior uses them to explain the relationship between the revealed world and the hidden world and between the mystical world and the traditional religious world, with all the social and religious tensions this has caused.

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Changing the Immutable focuses on how segments of Orthodox society have taken upon themselves to rewrite the past, by covering up and literally cutting out that which does not fit in with their contemporary world-view. For reasons ranging from theological considerations to internal religious politics to changing religious standards, such Jewish self-censorship abounds, and Marc Shapiro discusses examples from each category, In a number of cases the original text is shown alongside how it looked after it was censored, together with an explanation of what made the text problematic and how the issue was resolved. The author considers how some Orthodox historiography sees truth as entirely instrumental. Drawing on the words of leading rabbis, particularly from the haredi world, he shows that what is important is not historical truth, but a 'truth' that leads to observance and faith in the sages. He concludes with a discussion of the concept of truth in the Jewish tradition, and when this truth can be altered. Changing the Immutable also reflects on the paradox of a society that regards itself as traditional, but at the same time is uncomfortable with much of the inherited tradition and thus feels the need to create an idealized view of the past. It considers this practice in context, showing the precedents for this in Jewish history dating back to talmudic times. Since the subjects of censorship have included such figures as Maimonides, Bahya ibn Pakuda, Rashi, Naphtali Herz Wessely, Moses Mendelssohn, the Hatam Sofer, Samson Raphael Hirsch, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, A. I. Kook, and J. B. Soloveitchik, as well as issues such as Zionism, biblical interpretation, and attitudes to women and gentiles, Changing the Immutable also serves as a study in Jewish intellectual history and how the ideas of one era do not always find favour with future generations.

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The Venerable Bede composed On the Nature of Things (De natura rerum) and On Times (De temporibus) at the outset of his career, about AD 703. Bede fashioned himself as a teacher to his people and his age, and these two short works show him selecting, editing, and clarifying a mass of difficult and sometimes dangerous material. He insisted that his reader understand the mathematical and physical basis of time, and though he was dependent on his textual sources, he also included observations of his own. But Bede was also a Christian exegete who thought deeply and earnestly about how salvation-history connected to natural history and the history of the peoples of the earth. To comprehend his religious mentality, we have to take on board his views on “science” —— and vice versa. On the Nature of Things is a survey of cosmology. Starting with Creation and the universe as a whole, Bede reads the cosmos downwards from the heavens, through the atmosphere, to the oceans and rivers of earth. This order (recapitulating the four elements or fire, air, water and earth) was derived from his main source, Isidore of Seville’s On the Nature of Things. However, Bede separated out Isidore’s chapters on time, and dealt with them in On Times. On Times, like its “second, revised and enlarged edition” The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione), works upwards from the smallest units of time, through the day and night, the week, month and year, to the world-ages. Bede’s innovation is to introduce a practical manual of Easter reckoning, or computus, into this survey. Hidden beneath the matter-of-fact surface of the work is an intense polemic about the correct principles for determining the date of Easter —— principles which in Bede’s view are bound up with both the integrity of nature as God’s creation, and the theological significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. In these works Bede re-united cosmology and time-reckoning to form a unified science of computus that would become the framework for Carolingian and Scholastic basic scientific education.

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Following the appointment of its first aristocratic Grand Masters in the 1720s and in the wake of its connections to the scientific Enlightenment, 'Free and Accepted' Masonry became part of Britain's national profile and the largest and most influential of Britain's extensive clubs and societies. The organisation did not evolve naturally from the mediaeval guilds and religious orders that pre-dated it but was reconfigured radically by a largely self-appointed inner core at London's most influential lodge, the Horn Tavern. Freemasonry became a vehicle for the expression of their philosophical and political views, and the 'Craft' attracted an aspirational membership across the upper middling and gentry. Through an examination of previously unexplored primary documentation, Foundations contributes to an understanding of contemporary English political and social culture and explores how Freemasonry became a mechanism that promoted the interests of the Hanoverian establishment and connected the metropolitan and provincial elites. The book explores social networks centred on the aristocracy, parliament, the learned and professional societies, and the magistracy, and provides pen portraits of the key individuals who spread the Masonic message. Foundations and Schism (Sussex Academic, 2013), have been described as 'the most important books on English Freemasonry published in recent times', providing 'a precise, social context for the invention of English Freemasonry'. Berman's analysis throws a new and original light on the formation and development of what rapidly became a national and international phenomenon.

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Created by the team of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, and starring Marling in the role of Prairie Johnston, the Netflix Originals series The OA (2016–19) is a generically ambiguous, and ambitious, vehicle for exploring a variety of themes, chief among them identity, belief and the nature and construction of reality. Prairie claims that she has learned the secret of inter-dimensional travel after a near-death experience and subsequent imprisonment at the hands of a deranged scientist obsessed with that phenomenon – but is she a potentially unreliable narrator, a sincere one or, finally, a metafictional character playing a version of herself in a fictional drama?This Constellation discusses The OA’s thematic concerns in the context of the creators’ earlier collaborations and in terms of influences on it, such as the work of David Lynch, particularly the TV series Twin Peaks (1990–2017) and the films Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), and comparable texts such as the Netflix Originals series Sense8 (2015–18) and Maniac (2018); the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K Dick. The discussion will be supported by sources from the fields of media and social theory, including the work of Jean Baudrillard, Steven Shaviro, Jodi Dean, Mark Fisher and Shoshana Zuboff. Negative criticisms of The OA will also be addressed, such as accusations of superficiality, which will be considered alongside the themes of deception, manipulation and artificiality identifiable in The OA specifically, and in Marling and Batmanglij’s wider oeuvre.

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These canons (or rules) for church organization and life and Christian morals issued at a council held in Constantinople in 691/2 form the foundation of Byzantine Canon Law. They show an intense concern to restore the proper discipline of clerical life after the chaos brought about by the Arab invasions. The rules for the laity show a concern to secure obedience to the Church’s rules about marriage, proper respect for sacred space, and the suppression of customs of pagan origin. Particular interest attaches to the canons that express disapproval of certain customs of the Western Church and of the Armenian Church. Was this an attempt to impose Byzantine hegemony, or simply a revulsion at customs that seemed wrong? The Byzantine emperor tried repeatedly to get the Pope to give the new canons the stamp of his approval; his failure marks an important stage in the mounting divergence between the Greek and the Roman Churches. The translation is accompanied by full annotation, while the introduction sets the council in its historical context, in both the history of the early medieval world and the development of Eastern Canon Law.

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Mathematics for Civil Engineers provides a concise introduction to the fundamental concepts of mathematics that are closely related to civil engineering. By using an informal and theorem-free approach with more than 150 step-by-step examples, all the key mathematical concepts and techniques are introduced. Thus users of this textbook will gain the basic knowledge and understanding required for their work. Exercises are included In each chapter to give readers the opportunity to apply their new knowledge; the answers to these dozens of exercises are provided at the end of the book.Topics include functions, trigonometrical functions, equations, polynomials, vectors and matrices, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, tensors, differentiation, integration, advanced calculus such as double integrals and special integrals, complex numbers, differential equations, Fourier series and transforms, Laplace transforms, probability and statistics, curve-fitting and linear regression. Advanced topics include partial differential equations and integral equations, root-finding algorithms for nonlinear equations, numerical methods for solving differential equations, optimization and nonlinear optimization.Mathematics for Civil Engineers allows undergraduates and civil engineers to develop a necessary, essential, knowledge of engineering mathematics. Many of the worked examples are chosen to reflect situations and problems in civil engineering practise. Examples include moment of inertia, second moment of area, beam buckling, harmonic motion and forced harmonic motion, elasticity, transfer function, waves and heat transfer, maximization and minimization and many others. All these topics and examples will help readers to gain more insight and to build sufficient confidence in applying engineering mathematics for problem solving in real engineering situations. This book may also be useful for practitioners in other engineering disciplines to improve their basic mathematical skills.

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This early thirteenth-century West Midlands guide for women recluses is not only one of the major works of early Middle English prose, but is also a key document for the development of medieval spirituality. It reflects the 'democratization' of religious experience which was one of the outcomes of the 'Medieval Reformation'. Drawing on new kinds of pastoral literature designed to appeal to a more general audience, the insight, wit and charm of 'Ancrene Wisse' led to its adaptation for other readers, both religious and lay, and it continued in use until the end of the Middle Ages. This annotated translation, based on the text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, incorporates the most recent research on 'Ancrene Wisse''s contemporary context and offers an accessible, up-to-date introduction for both scholars and students.

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Informed by critical race theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and anthropological studies, this book examines multiple forms of racial discrimination in Jamaica and how they were talked about and experienced from the end of the First World War until the demise of democratic socialism in the 1980s. It also pays attention to practices devoid of racial content but which equally helped to sustain a society stratified by race and colour, such as voting qualifications. Case studies on the labour market, education, the family and legal system, among other areas, demonstrate the extent to which race and colour shaped social relations in the island in the decades preceding and following independence and argue that racial discrimination was a public secret – everybody knew it took place but few dared to openly discuss or criticise it. The book ends with an examination of race and colour in contemporary Jamaica to show that race and colour have lost little of their power since independence and offers some suggestions to overcome the silence on race to facilitate equality of opportunity for all.

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In contrast to recent theories of the ‘global’ Latin American novel, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela’s literary isolation. The latter results from factors including the legacy of the Boom and historically low levels of emigration from Venezuela. Grounded in theories of metafiction and intertextuality, the book provides a close reading of eight novels published between 2004 (the year in which the first Minister for Culture was appointed) and 2012 (the last full year of President Chávez’s life), relating these novels to the context of their production. Each chapter explores a way in which these novels reflect on writing, from the protagonists as readers and writers in different contexts, through appearances from real life writers, to experiments with style and popular culture, and finally questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. This literary analysis complements overarching studies of the Bolivarian Revolution by offering an insight into how Bolivarian policies and practices affect people on an individual, emotional and creative level. In this context, self-reflexive narratives afford their writers a form of political agency.

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Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”

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This bilingual edition presents Luis Vélez de Guevara’s 1613 play La Serrana de la Vera (The Mountain Girl from La Vera) for the first time ever in English translation. This long-forgotten tragedy has come back into focus in recent years because of its extraordinary protagonist, Gila, a peasant girl who calls herself a man, takes fierce pride in doing things men do, and falls in love with Queen Isabel. Her betrayal by an army captain who she has humiliated leads to lawlessness, violence and tragedy. Dramatized by the playwright as an heroic rebel, Gila has been variously described as feminist, homosexual, bisexual, lesbian, transsexual, hybrid, queer, and transgender. Highly relevant today, The Mountain Girl from La Vera is also a great piece of theatre, full of dramatic confrontations, colourful vignettes, striking moments of music and spectacle, and plentiful comic relief. This bilingual edition presents the entirety of the play, annotated, along with a Critical Introduction by the translator that contextualizes the work.

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