Professor Charles Spence's Books

The Multisensory Driver

Implications for Ergonomic Car Interface Design

By: Dr Cristy Ho,Professor Charles Spence

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The Multisensory Driver

Implications for Ergonomic Car Interface Design

By: Dr Cristy Ho,Professor Charles Spence

Driver inattention has been identified as one of the leading causes for car accidents. The problem of distraction while driving is likely to worsen, partly due to increasingly complex in-car technologies. However, intelligent transport systems are being developed to assist drivers and to ensure a safe road environment. One approach to the design of ergonomic automobile systems is to integrate our understanding of the human information processing systems into the design process. This book aims to further the design of ergonomic multisensory interfaces using research from the fast-growing field of cognitive neuroscience. It focuses on two aspects of driver information-processing in particular: multisensory interactions and the spatial distribution of attention in driving. The Multisensory Driver provides interface design guidelines together with a detailed review of current cognitive neuroscience and behavioural research in multisensory human perception, which will help the development of ergonomic interfaces. The discussion on spatial attention is particularly relevant for car interface designers, but it will also appeal to cognitive psychologists interested in spatial attention and the applications of these theoretical research findings. Giving a detailed description of a cohesive series of psychophysical experiments on multisensory warning signals, conducted in both laboratory and simulator settings, this book provides an approach for those in the engineering discipline who wish to test their systems with human observers.

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162

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409485765

ISBN 13

9781409485766

The Bondsman's Burden

An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery

By: Jenny Bourne (Professor of Economics),Jenny Bourne Wahl

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The Bondsman's Burden

An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of Southern Slavery

By: Jenny Bourne (Professor of Economics),Jenny Bourne Wahl

Were slaves property or human beings under the law? In crafting answers to this question, Southern judges designed efficient laws that protected property rights and helped slavery remain economically viable. But, by preserving property rights, they sheltered the persons embodied by that property - the slaves themselves. Slave law therefore had unintended consequences: it generated rules that judges could apply to free persons, precedents that became the foundation for laws designed to protect ordinary Americans. The Bondsman's Burden, first published in 1998, provides a rigorous and compelling economic analysis of the common law of Southern slavery, inspecting thousands of legal disputes heard in Southern antebellum courts, disputes involving servants, employees, accident victims, animals, and other chattel property, as well as slaves. The common law, although it supported the institution of slavery, did not favor every individual slave owner who brought a grievance to court.

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302

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521521386

ISBN 13

9780521521383

The Prosciutto Sundial

Casting Light on an Ancient Roman Timepiece from the Villa Dei Papiri in Herculaneum

By: Christopher Charles Parslow,Robert Rich Professor of Latin Christopher Parslow

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The Prosciutto Sundial

Casting Light on an Ancient Roman Timepiece from the Villa Dei Papiri in Herculaneum

By: Christopher Charles Parslow,Robert Rich Professor of Latin Christopher Parslow

The Prosciutto Sundial is the first comprehensive study of the sundial in the shape of a miniature prosciutto from the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum from its rediscovery in 1755 to modern times. Drawing on contemporary correspondence and manuscripts, early philological and scientific assessments, and later published accounts, it catalogs the many attempts by scholars and lay people alike to understand how it functioned. It explains the significance of its context in the Villa and, through the results of empirical analysis using a 3D model, highlights the remarkable accuracy of this unique ancient timepiece.

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364

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197749380

ISBN 13

9780197749388

Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture

Inventions and Interventions

By: Professor Charles J Rzepka

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Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture

Inventions and Interventions

By: Professor Charles J Rzepka

Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet and Wordsworth's 'Michael' and his critical intervention into anachronistic new historicist readings of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "Tintern Abbey." Other Romantic period essays provide innovative interpretations of De Quincey's relation to theatre and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but also a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in his foreword, "this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt.

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308

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

140947609X

ISBN 13

9781409476092

Byron and the Discourses of History

By: Professor Carla Pomarè

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Byron and the Discourses of History

By: Professor Carla Pomarè

In her study of the relationship between Byron’s lifelong interest in historical matters and the development of history as a discipline, Carla Pomarè focuses on drama (the Venetian plays, The Deformed Transformed), verse narrative (The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa) and dramatic monologue (The Prophecy of Dante), calling attention to their interaction with historiographical and pseudo-historiographical texts ranging from monographs to dictionaries, collections of apophthegms, autobiographies and prophecies. This variety of discourses, Pomarè suggests, not only served as a source of the historical information Byron cherished, providing the subject matter for countless episodes in his works, but also and primarily supplied him with epistemological models. From them, Byron drew such trademark textual practices as his massive use of notes and paratexts, which satisfied his ingrained need for ‘authenticity’ - a sentiment expressed in his oft-quoted, ‘I hate things all fiction’. As Pomarè argues, Byron’s meticulous tracing of the process that links events, documents and historical representations ultimately answers his desire to retrieve what might be lost during the transmission of historical knowledge. Thus does he betray his preoccupation with the ideological uses of history writing, projecting his own discourses of history into the present of their composition.

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315

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472401352

ISBN 13

9781472401359

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times

By: Professor Martin Priestman

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The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times

By: Professor Martin Priestman

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin’s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin’s three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin’s poetry in terms of Darwin’s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin’s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman’s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman’s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ‘Romanticism’.

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478

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472419561

ISBN 13

9781472419569

Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art

Interpreting the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas

By: Professor Lisa M Rafanelli,Professor Erin E Benay

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Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art

Interpreting the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas

By: Professor Lisa M Rafanelli,Professor Erin E Benay

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief.

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305

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472444736

ISBN 13

9781472444738

A Journey to the East

Li Gui's a New Account of a Trip Around the Globe

By: Gui Li

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A Journey to the East

Li Gui's a New Account of a Trip Around the Globe

By: Gui Li

A record of China's first officially sanctioned eyewitness account of people and places around the world

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370

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472113542

ISBN 13

9780472113545

For the People?

Democratic Representation in America

By: Charles R Beitz,Edwards S Sandford Professor of Politics Charles R Beitz

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For the People?

Democratic Representation in America

By: Charles R Beitz,Edwards S Sandford Professor of Politics Charles R Beitz

Many observers of American politics believe that representative government, particularly in the Congress, is failing. This book examines the case for failure: what are the outward signs, and how do they reflect breaches of underlying norms of fair and effective representation? The book argues that good representation demands healthy competition between parties, but that in today's America, that competition has run off the rails.

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247

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197780431

ISBN 13

9780197780435

John Keats

A New Life

By: Nicholas Roe,Professor of English Literature Nicholas Roe

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John Keats

A New Life

By: Nicholas Roe,Professor of English Literature Nicholas Roe

Offers a biography of the nineteenth century poet, offering insights into the details of his early life in London, the torments that affected him, and the imaginative sources of his works.

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508

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300124651

ISBN 13

9780300124651

The Palladian Revival

Lord Burlington, His Villa and Garden at Chiswick

By: John Harris,Professor of Bioethics and Applied Philosophy Director of the Center for Social Ethics and Policy John Harris

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The Palladian Revival

Lord Burlington, His Villa and Garden at Chiswick

By: John Harris,Professor of Bioethics and Applied Philosophy Director of the Center for Social Ethics and Policy John Harris

In 1726, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, built an addition to his modest country house on the river Thames at Chiswick. The structure was a free standing villa, which is the subject of this book. The author explores the villa's architectural inspiration and the evolution of its design.

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314

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Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300059833

ISBN 13

9780300059830

The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

By: Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University

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The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

By: Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University

A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.

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294

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198024274

ISBN 13

9780198024279

National Identity and the Agrarian Republic

The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas between America and France (1750–1830)

By: Professor Manuela Albertone

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National Identity and the Agrarian Republic

The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas between America and France (1750–1830)

By: Professor Manuela Albertone

With a few exceptions, historiography has paid little attention to the impact of French economic thought during the American Revolution, focusing instead on the Revolution’s links with Britain. This book outlines how, from the mid-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century, the political and social dimension of French economic thought, and particularly of Physiocracy, spurred American Republicans to a radical shaping of American agrarian ideology. Such a perspective allows for a reconsideration of several questions that lie at the heart of contemporary historiographic debate: the connection between politics and economics; the meaning of republicanism; the foundations of representation; the role of Europe in the Atlantic world; and the interaction between national histories and global context. In particular, the research methodology adopted here makes it possible to reconstruct how American national identity, conceived as an expression of society in economic terms, emerged through a cosmopolitan way of thinking focused on the uniqueness of the new state.

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345

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472421388

ISBN 13

9781472421388

The Making of the Modern Self

Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-century England

By: Dror Wahrman,Ruth N Halls Professor of History Dror Wahrman

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The Making of the Modern Self

Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-century England

By: Dror Wahrman,Ruth N Halls Professor of History Dror Wahrman

Wahrman argues that toward the end of the 18th century there was a radical change in notions of self & personal identity - a sudden transformation that was a revolution in the understanding of selfhood & of identity categories including race, gender, & class.

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432

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300102518

ISBN 13

9780300102512

Regaining Paradise

Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement

By: Standish Meacham,Professor Standish Meacham

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Regaining Paradise

Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement

By: Standish Meacham,Professor Standish Meacham

A consideration of the British social reform movement at the beginning of the 20th century, through the lens of the Garden City Movement. This was a plan to build new communities on open land to provide a healthy, aesthetically pleasing environment free from overcrowding and pollution.

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278

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Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300075723

ISBN 13

9780300075724

Max Beerbohm Caricatures

By: N. John Hall,Distinguished Professor of English Bronx Community College and the Graduate School N John Hall,Max Beerbohm

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Max Beerbohm Caricatures

By: N. John Hall,Distinguished Professor of English Bronx Community College and the Graduate School N John Hall,Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm, the foremost caricaturist of his day, was hailed by The Times in 1913 as the greatest of English comic artists, by Bernard Berenson as the English Goya, and by Edmund Wilson as the greatest...portrayer of personalities - in the history of art.

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256

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Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300072171

ISBN 13

9780300072174

A Decent Provision

Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949

By: Professor John Murphy

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A Decent Provision

Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949

By: Professor John Murphy

A Decent Provision is a narrative history of how and why Australia built a distinctive welfare regime in the period from the 1870s to 1949. At the beginning of this period, the Australian colonies were belligerently insisting they must not have a Poor Law, yet had reproduced many of the systems of charitable provision in Britain. By the start of the twentieth century, a combination of extended suffrage, basic wage regulation and the aged pension had led to a reputation as a 'social laboratory'. And yet half a century later, Australia was a 'welfare laggard' and the Labor Party's welfare state of the mid-1940s was a relatively modest and parsimonious construction. Models of welfare based on social insurance had been vigorously rejected, and the Australian system continued on a path of highly residual, targeted welfare payments. The book explains this curious and halting trajectory, showing how choices made in earlier decades constrained what could be done, and what could be imagined. Based on extensive new research from a variety of primary sources it makes a significant contribution to general historical debates, as well as to the field of comparative social policy.

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304

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409482138

ISBN 13

9781409482130

Babel and the Ivory Tower

The Scholar in the Age of Science

By: William David Shaw,Professor W David Shaw

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Babel and the Ivory Tower

The Scholar in the Age of Science

By: William David Shaw,Professor W David Shaw

Writing at the time of his retirement from an academia that after four decades has become unfamiliar, Shaw (English, U. of Toronto), says in a society where book learning is an anomaly, scholars must breach the citadel of computer wizards and technicians by combining their knowledge of books with the rebel's power to criticize authority, the prophet's power to renew tradition, and the poet's power to create a world that is no less true for being a vision. He insists that scientists, scholars, and professional practitioners must learn from each other. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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316

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802079989

ISBN 13

9780802079985

Strange and Secret Peoples : Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

By: Stern College for Women Carole G. Silver Professor of English

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Strange and Secret Peoples : Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

By: Stern College for Women Carole G. Silver Professor of English

Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings who have infiltrated both the literary and visual masterpieces and the minor works of the writers and painters of that era. Examining the period of 1798 to 1923, Strange and Secret Peoples focuses not only on such popular literary figures as Charles Dickens and William Butler Yeats, but on writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charlotte Mew; on artists as varied as mad Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; and on artifacts ranging from fossil skulls to photographs and vases. Silver demonstrates how beautiful and monstrous creatures--fairies and swan maidens, goblins and dwarfs, cretins and changelings, elementals and pygmies--simultaneously peopled the Victorian imagination and inhabited nineteenth-century science and belief. Her book reveals the astonishing complexity and fertility of the Victorian consciousness: its modernity and antiquity, its desire to naturalize the supernatural, its pervasive eroticism fused with sexual anxiety, and its drive for racial and imperial dominion.

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294

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198028466

ISBN 13

9780198028468

First Among Friends : George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism

George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism

By: H. Larry Ingle Professor of History University of Tennessee-Chattanooga

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First Among Friends : George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism

George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism

By: H. Larry Ingle Professor of History University of Tennessee-Chattanooga

In First Among Friends, the first scholarly biography of George Fox (1624-91), H. Larry Ingle examines the fascinating life of the reformation leader and founding organizer of the Religious Society of Friends, more popularly known today as the Quakers. Ingle places Fox within the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, Revolution, and Restoration, showing him and his band of "rude" disciples challenging the status quo, particularly during the Cromwellian Interregnum. Unlike leaders of similar groups, Fox responded to the conservatism of the Stuart restoration by facing down challenges from internal dissidents, and leading his followers to persevere until the 1689 Act of Toleration. It was this same sense of perseverance that helped the Quakers survive--the only religious sect of the era still existing today. Firmly grounded in primary sources and enriched with gripping detail, this well-written and original study reveals hitherto unknown sides of one who was clearly "First Among Friends.

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420

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198024029

ISBN 13

9780198024026

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England : Medieval Modernism and the London Underground

Medieval Modernism and the London Underground

By: Davis Michael T. Saler Associate Professor of History University of California

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The Avant-Garde in Interwar England : Medieval Modernism and the London Underground

Medieval Modernism and the London Underground

By: Davis Michael T. Saler Associate Professor of History University of California

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public. Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design. This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.

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262

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198028121

ISBN 13

9780198028123

Beyond Hate

White Power and Popular Culture

By: Assoc Prof David J Leonard,Professor C Richard King

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Beyond Hate

White Power and Popular Culture

By: Assoc Prof David J Leonard,Professor C Richard King

Beyond Hate offers a critical ethnography of the virtual communities established and discursive networks activated through the online engagements of white separatists, white nationalists, and white supremacists with various popular cultural texts, including movies, music, television, sport, video games, and kitsch. Outlining the ways in which advocates of white power interpret popular cultural forms, and probing the emergent spaces of white power popular culture, it examines the paradoxical relationship that advocates of white supremacy have with popular culture, as they finding it to be an irresistible and repugnant reflection of social decay rooted in multiculturalism. Drawing on a range of new media sources, including websites, chat rooms, blogs and forums, this book explores the concerns expressed by advocates of white power, with regard to racial hierarchy and social order, the crisis of traditional American values, the perpetuation of liberal, feminist, elitist ideas, the degradation of the family and the fetishization of black men. What emerges is an understanding of the instruments of power in white supremacist discourses, in which a series of connections are drawn between popular culture, multiculturalism, sexual politics and state functions, all of which are seen to be working against white men. A richly illustrated study of the intersections of white power and popular culture in the contemporary U.S., and the use of use cyberspace by white supremacists as an imagined site of resistance, Beyond Hate will appeal to scholars of sociology and cultural studies with interests in race and ethnicity, popular culture and the discourses of the extreme right.

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201

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472427483

ISBN 13

9781472427489

Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South

Women, Specularity, and the Poetics of Subjectivity

By: Professor Claire Raymond

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Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South

Women, Specularity, and the Poetics of Subjectivity

By: Professor Claire Raymond

Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers and Zora Neale Hurston, Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography. Raymond explores the idea that a femininity constructed by the positioning of the feminine character as witness to sadistic acts is a phenomenon distinctly of the American South that is linked to the culture's history of racism.

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233

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409451054

ISBN 13

9781409451051

Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies

By: Professor Jennifer N Wunder

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Keats, Hermeticism, and the Secret Societies

By: Professor Jennifer N Wunder

Jennifer Wunder makes a strong case for the importance of hermeticism and the secret societies to an understanding of John Keats's poetry and his speculations about religious and philosophical questions. Although secret societies exercised enormous cultural influence during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they have received little attention from Romantic scholars. And yet, information about the societies permeated all aspects of Romantic culture. Groups such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons fascinated the reading public, and the market was flooded with articles, pamphlets, and books that discussed the societies's goals and hermetic philosophies, debated their influence, and drew on their mythologies for literary inspiration. Wunder recovers the common knowledge about the societies and offers readers a first look at the role they played in the writings of Romantic authors in general and Keats in particular. She argues that Keats was aware of the information available about the secret societies and employed hermetic terminology and imagery associated with these groups throughout his career. As she traces the influence of these secret societies on Keats's poetry and letters, she offers readers a new perspective not only on Keats's writings but also on scholarship treating his religious and philosophical beliefs. While scholars have tended either to consider Keats's aesthetic and religious speculations on their own terms or to adopt a more historical approach that rejects an emphasis on the spiritual for a materialist interpretation, Wunder offers us a middle way. Restoring Keats to a milieu characterized by simultaneously worldly and mythological propensities, she helps to explain if not fully reconcile the insights of both camps.

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222

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409474941

ISBN 13

9781409474944

Living Narrative

Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling

By: Elinor Ochs,Professor of Anthropology Elinor Ochs,Lisa Capps

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Living Narrative

Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling

By: Elinor Ochs,Professor of Anthropology Elinor Ochs,Lisa Capps

This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon--a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects of experience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative--as a genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities. Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on the variety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent last chapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to unfinished narratives, those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective--part humanities, part social science--their book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.

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366

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674041593

ISBN 13

9780674041592

How Congress Evolves : Social Bases of Institutional Change

Social Bases of Institutional Change

By: Berkeley Nelson W. Polsby Heller Professor of Political Science University of California

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How Congress Evolves : Social Bases of Institutional Change

Social Bases of Institutional Change

By: Berkeley Nelson W. Polsby Heller Professor of Political Science University of California

From the end of the New Deal until quite recently, the U.S. House of Representatives was dominated by a conservative coalition that thwarted the Democratic majority and prevented the enactment of measures proposed by a succession of liberal Presidents. Today Presidents aren't necessarily liberal and the House of Representatives is not necessarily the graveyard of presidential proposals. What happened? Congress evolved. It all began with airconditioning. In this entertaining tale of one of our most august institutions, Nelson Polsby describes how the Democratic majority finally succeeded in overcoming the conservative coalition, changing the House. The evolution required among other things, the disappearance of Dixiecrats from the House Democratic caucus. Dixiecrats were replaced by the rise of the Republican party in the south. The Republican party in southern states was strengthened by an influx of migrants from the north, who came south to settle after the introduction of residential air conditioning, which made the climate more tolerable to Northerners. This evolutionary process led to the House's liberalization and concluded with the House's later transformation into an arena of sharp partisanship, visible among both Democrats and Republicans. A fascinating read by one of our most influential political scientists, How Congress Evolves breathes new life into the dusty corners of institutional history, and offers a unique explanation for important transformations in the congressional environment.

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273

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Oxford University Press, USA

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ISBN 10

0198036655

ISBN 13

9780198036654

Independent Agencies in the United States

Law, Structure, and Politics

By: Professor Marshall J. Breger,Professor Gary J. Edles

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Independent Agencies in the United States

Law, Structure, and Politics

By: Professor Marshall J. Breger,Professor Gary J. Edles

It is essential for anyone involved in law, politics, and government to comprehend the workings of the federal independent regulatory agencies of the United States. Occasionally referred to as the "headless fourth branch of government," these agencies do not fit neatly within any of the three constitutional branches. Their members are appointed for terms that typically exceed those of the President, and cannot be removed from office in the absence of some sort of malfeasance or misconduct. They wield enormous power over the private sector. Independent Agencies in the United States provides a full-length study of the structure and workings of federal independent regulatory agencies in the US, focusing on traditional multi-member agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Trade Commission. It recognizes that the changing kaleidoscope of modern life has led Congress to create innovative and idiosyncratic administrative structures including government corporations, government sponsored enterprises governance, public-private partnerships, systems for "contracting out," self-regulation and incorporation by reference of private standards. In the process, Breger and Edles analyze the general conflict between political accountability and agency independence. They provide a unique comparative review of the internal operations of US agencies and offer contrasts between US, EU, and certain UK independent agencies. Included is a first-of-its-kind appendix describing the powers and procedures of the more than 35 independent US federal agencies, with each supplemented by a selective bibliography.

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578

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

0199350558

ISBN 13

9780199350551

Paris-Edinburgh

Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque

By: Professor Siân Reynolds

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Paris-Edinburgh

Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque

By: Professor Siân Reynolds

By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was widely acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, the home of avant-garde music and art, symbolist literature and bohemian culture. Edinburgh, by contrast, may still be thought of as a rather staid city of lawyers and Presbyterian ministers, academics and doctors. While its great days as a centre for the European Enlightenment may have been behind it, however, late Victorian Edinburgh was becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, with its own avant-garde, that corresponded with a renewed Scottish national consciousness. While Morningside was never going to be Montparnasse, the period known as the Belle Epoque was a time in both French and Scottish society when there were stirrings of non-conformity, which often clashed with a still powerful establishment. And in this respect, French bourgeois society could be as resistant to change as the suburbs of Edinburgh. With travel and communication becoming ever easier, a growing number of international contacts developed that allowed such new and radical cultural ideas to flourish. In a series of linked essays, based on research into contemporary archives, documents and publications in both countries, as well as on new developments in cultural research, this book explores an unexpected dimension of Scottish history, while also revealing the Scottish contribution to French history. In a broader sense, and particularly as regards gender, it considers what is meant by 'modern' or 'radical' in this period, without imposing any single model. In so doing, it seeks not to treat Paris-Edinburgh links in isolation, or to exaggerate them, but to use them to provide a fresh perspective on the internationalism of the Belle Epoque.

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246

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Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

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ISBN 10

140947996X

ISBN 13

9781409479963

Book's by Professor Charles Spence

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