Law and Transcendence examines and develops the philosophy of British Philosopher Gillian Rose. By putting Rose's thought into critical dialogue with contemporary philosophers and religious thinkers, the author demonstrates the continuing importance of her work and the importance of critical engagement between philosophy and religious thought .
Family photography, a ubiquitous domestic tradition in the developed world, is now more popular than ever thanks to the development of digital photography. Once uploaded to PCs and other gadgets, photographs may be stored, deleted, put in albums, sent to relatives and friends, retouched, or put on display. Moreover, in recent years family photographs are more frequently appearing in public media: on posters, in newspapers and on the Internet, particularly in the wake of disasters like 9/11, and in cases of missing children. Here, case study material drawn from the UK offers a deeper understanding of both domestic family photographs and their public display. Recent work in material culture studies, geography, and anthropology is used to approach photographs as objects embedded in social practices, which produce specific social positions, relations and effects. Also explored are the complex economies of gifting and exchange amongst families, and the rich geographies of domestic and public spaces into which family photography offers an insight.
Family photography, a ubiquitous domestic tradition in the developed world, is now more popular than ever thanks to the development of digital photography. Once uploaded to PCs and other gadgets, photographs may be stored, deleted, put in albums, sent to relatives and friends, retouched, or put on display. Moreover, in recent years family photographs are more frequently appearing in public media: on posters, in newspapers and on the Internet, particularly in the wake of disasters like 9/11, and in cases of missing children. Here, case study material drawn from the UK offers a deeper understanding of both domestic family photographs and their public display. Recent work in material culture studies, geography, and anthropology is used to approach photographs as objects embedded in social practices, which produce specific social positions, relations and effects. Also explored are the complex economies of gifting and exchange amongst families, and the rich geographies of domestic and public spaces into which family photography offers an insight.
In his study of the Tangier expatriate community, Michael K. Walonen analyzes the representations of French and Spanish Colonial North Africa by Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Alfred Chester during the end of the colonial era and the earliest days of post-independence. The conceptualizations of space in these authors' descriptions of Tangier, Walonen shows, share common components: an attention to the transformative potential of the conflict sweeping the region; a record of the power relations that divided space along lines of gender and ethnicity, including the spatial impact of the widespread sexual commerce between Westerners and natives; a vision of the Maghreb as a land that can be dominated or imposed on as a kind of frontier space; an expression of anxieties about the specters of Cold War antagonisms; and an embrace of the underlying logic of the market to the culture of the Maghreb. Counterbalancing the depictions of Tangier by Westerners who sought to reconcile their nostalgia for the colonial order with their support of native demands for independent governance is Walonen's extended analysis of the contrasting sense of place found in the writings of native Moroccan authors such as Mohammed Choukri, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Anouar Majid. In its focus on Tangier and the larger Maghreb as a lived environment situated at a particular spatial and temporal crossroads, Walonen's study makes an important contribution to the fields of urban, transatlantic, and postcolonial studies.
The idea of 'flirting' with space is central to this book. Space is conceptualised as being in constant flux as we make our way through various contexts in our daily lives, and is considered in relation to encounters with complexities and flows of material culture. This book focuses on journeys, which are perceived as dynamic processes of contemporary life and its spaces, and how creativity happens in the inter-relations of space and journeys encourage creativity. Unravelled through a range of empirical case studies of journeys through and encountered with space, this book builds new critical syntheses of the intertwining of space and life. Based on investigations undertaken by the author over the past 20 years, it explores the mundane and the exotic, the 'lay' and the 'artistic', combining and inter-relating them in a diversity of time and expression, fleeting and surviving. Such investigations, using both visual and non-visual material, include examinations of allotment holding, the work of artists, caravanning and tourism, photography and parish maps. The analyses of such seemingly disparate subjects are linked together and build on each other to create a fascinating and original view of humanity's interaction with space. Included are fresh discussions of belonging, disorientation and the working of identity and play. The notion of 'gentle politics' is introduced.
An analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, covering the last years of Fascism. Not limiting herself to prisons, Nerenberg also explores military barracks, convents, and brothels as carceral homologues.
In the turbulent period between 1870 and 1930, the contours on modernity were taking shape, especially the connections between technology, politics and aesthetics. The trilogy The Nihilist Order traces the genealogy of the nihilist-totalitarian syndrome. Until now, nihilism and totalitarianism were considered opposites: one an orderless state of affairs, the other a strict regimented order. On closer scrutiny, however, a surprising affinity can be found between these two concepts that dominated the history of the first half of the twentieth century. Starting with Nietzsche's philosophy, this book traces the development of an intellectual school characterised by the paradoxical dual purpose of a wish to destroy, coupled with a strong desire to create imposing structures. This explosive combination of nihilist leanings together with a craving for totalitarianism was an ideal of philosophers, cultural critics, political theorists, engineers, architects and aesthetes long before it materialised in flesh and blood, not only in technology, but also in fascism, Nazism, bolshevism and radical European political movements. Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, the Italian Futurists, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Ernst Jünger were all well-known intellectual and cultural figures. Here they are seen and understood in a different light, as creators of a modern political mythology that became a source of inspiration for belligerent ideological camps. Among the ideas propagated by this school, and later adopted by totalitarian regimes, were historical nihilism, a revolt against the rationalistic and universalistic pretensions of the Enlightenment, an affirmation of the dynamism of modern life, and the replacement of the traditional Judeo-Christian values of good and evil by other dualities such as authenticity and decadence. Concurrently there took place affirmation of the technological era, the creation of a 'new man' and a violent order, and the birth of a new political style in place of traditional world-views. When channelled into the political sphere, these aesthetic nihilist ideas paved the way for the rise of totalitarianism.
The American Geographical Society was the pre-eminent geographical society in the nineteenth-century U.S. This book explores how geographical knowledge and practices took shape as a civic enterprise, under the leadership of Charles P. Daly, AGS president for 35 years (1864-1899). The ideals and programmatic interests of the AGS link to broad institutional, societal, and spatial contexts that drove interest in geography itself in the post-Civil War period, and also link to Charles Daly's personal role as New York civic leader, scholar, revered New York judge, and especially, popularizer of geography. Daly's leadership in a number of civic and social reform causes resonated closely with his work as geographer, such as his influence in tenement housing and street sanitation reform in New York City. Others of his projects served commercial interests, including in American railroad development and colonization of the African Congo. Daly was also New York's most influential access point to the Arctic in the latter nineteenth century. Through telling the story of the nineteenth-century AGS and Charles Daly, this book provides a critical appraisal of the role of particular actors, institutions, and practices involved in the development and promotion of geography in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. that is long overdue.
In her compelling book, Ann C. Colley examines the shift away from the cult of the sublime that characterized the early part of the nineteenth century to the less reverential perspective from which the Victorians regarded mountain landscapes. And what a multifaceted perspective it was, as unprecedented numbers of the Victorian middle and professional classes took themselves off on mountaineering holidays so commonplace that the editors of Punch sarcastically reported that the route to the summit of Mont Blanc was to be carpeted. In Part One, Colley mines diaries and letters to interrogate how everyday tourists and climbers both responded to and undercut ideas about the sublime, showing how technological advances like the telescope transformed mountains into theatrical spaces where tourists thrilled to the sight of struggling climbers; almost inevitably, these distant performances were eventually reenacted at exhibitions and on the London stage. Colley's examination of the Alpine Club archives, periodicals, and other primary resources offers a more complicated and inclusive picture of female mountaineering as she documents the strong presence of women on successful expeditions in the latter half of the century. In Part Two, Colley turns to John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose writings about the Alps reflect their feelings about their Romantic heritage and shed light on their ideas about perception, metaphor, and literary style. Colley concludes by offering insights into the ways in which expeditions to the Himalayas affected people's sense of the sublime, arguing that these individuals were motivated as much by the glory of Empire as by aesthetic sensibility. Her ambitious book is an astute exploration of nationalism, as well as theories of gender, spectacle, and the technicalities of glacial movement that were intruding on what before had seemed inviolable.
In Political Voice, Aidan McGarry examines the agency of marginalised people, emphasizing the processes through which different communities around the world articulate their political voices. McGarry develops an innovative concept of political voice around three elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. This conceptualization is illustrated through contemporary case studies of two persecuted and silenced groups: LGBTIQ activists in India and Roma mobilization in Europe.
In this thought-provoking and original contribution, Deborah P. Dixon cautions against the exhaustion of feminist geopolitics as a critique of both a classical and a critical geopolitics, and points instead to how feminist imaginaries of Self, Other and Earth allow for all manner of work to be undertaken. Importantly, one of the things they provide for is a reservoir of concerns, thoughts and practices that can be reappropriated to flesh out what a feminist geopolitics can be. While providing a much-needed, sustained interjection that draws out achievements to date, the book thus gestures forward to productive lines of inquiry and method. Grounded via a series of globally diverse case studies that traverse time as well as space, Feminist Geopolitics feels for the borders of geopolitical thought and practice by navigating four complex and corporeally-aware objects of analysis, namely flesh, bone, touch and abhorrence.
Arendt Contra Sociology re-assesses the relationship between Hannah Arendt's work and the theoretical foundations of sociology, bringing her insights to bear on key themes within contemporary theoretical sociology. Departing from the view of Arendt as a political theorist who sought to rescue politics from society, and political theory from the social sciences, this book re-examines her distinctions between labour, fabrication and action as a theory of the fundamental ontology of human societies, revisiting her criticism of the tendency of many sociological paradigms to conflate the activity of fabrication with that of action.
The A-Z Guide to Modern Social and Political Theories is a companion volume to the already published A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. It ranges widely through the social sciences and related areas to identify thinkers who have had a major impact on the development of modern social and political theory and given clear, accessible summaries of their work. While the accent is on the later twentieth century, several up-and-coming theorists are included to ensure a contemporary edge to the volume, classic names in the field from the earlier twentieth century are not neglected, and the collection also delves back into the nineteenth century for such founding figures of the social sciences as Marx and Comte. The volume is therefore both up-to-date and mindful of the sources of modern debates.
While the phenomenon of embodied knowledge is becoming integrated into the social sciences, critical geography, and feminist research agendas it continues to be largely ignored by agro-food scholars. This book helps fill this void by inserting into the food literature living, feeling, sensing bodies and will be of interest to food scholars as well as those more generally interested in the phenomenon known as embodied realism. This book is about the materializations of food politics; "materializations", in this case, referring to our embodied, sensuous, and physical connectivities to food production and consumption. It is through these materializations, argues Carolan, that we know food (and the food system more generally), others and ourselves.
This book offers a mature assessment of themes preoccupying David Martin over some fifty years, complementing his book On Secularization. Deploying secularisation as an omnibus word bringing many dimensions into play, Martin argues that the boundaries of the concept of secularisation must not be redefined simply to cover aberrant cases, as when the focus was more on America as an exception rather than on Europe as an exception to the 'furiously religious' character of the rest of the world. Particular themes of focus include the dialectic of Christianity and secularization, the relation of Christianity to multiple enlightenments and modes of modernity, the enigmas of East Germany and Eastern Europe, and the rise of the transnational religious voluntary association, including Pentecostalism, as that feeds into vast religious changes in the developing world. Doubts are cast on the idea that religion has ever been privatised and has lately renetered the public realm. The rest of the book deals with the relation of the Christian repertoire to the nexus of religion and politics, including democracy and violence and sharply criticises polemical assertions of a special relation of religion to violence, and explores the contributions of 'cognitive science' to the debate
The period from the late eighteenth century until about 1840 coincided with major changes in educational theories and practices, especially for girls, and this book uses needlework maps and globes to chart a broader discussion of women's geographic education. In this light, map samplers and embroidered globes represent a transition in women's education from 'accomplishments' in the eighteenth century to challenging geographic education and conventional map drawing in schools and academies of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well. Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history and the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well.
The explosive combination of nihilist leanings together with a craving for totalitarianism was an ideal of philosophers, cultural critics, political theorists, engineers, architects and aesthetes long before it materialised in flesh and blood, not only in technology, but also in fascism, Nazism, bolshevism and radical European political movements. "The Nihilist Order", originally published in three hardcover volumes and now published in a consolidated paperback edition with an encompassing new Introduction, inspired excellent review endorsements, both amongst the academic and public spheres -- and has been heralded as a great achievement in European intellectual and cultural history.
The Pythagorean Life is the most extensive surviving source on Pythagoreanism, and has wider interest as an account of the religious aspirations of late antiquity. "...admirably clear translation and sensible introduction"—The Classical Review
This book presents the case for belief in both creation and evolution at the same time as rejecting creationism. Issues of meaning supply the context of inquiry; the book defends the meaningfulness of language about God, and also relates belief in both creation and evolution to the meaning of life. Meaning, it claims, can be found in consciously adopting the role of steward of the planetary biosphere, and thus of the fruits of creation. Distinctive features include a sustained case for a realist understanding of language about God; a contemporary defence of some of the arguments for belief in God and in creation; a sifting of different versions of Darwinism and their implications for religious belief; a Darwinian account of the relation of predation and other apparent evils to creation; a new presentation of the argument, from the world's value to the purposiveness of evolution; and discussions of whether or not meaning itself evolves, and of religious and secular bases for belief in stewardship.
Child well-being, which covers everything from family relationships to their material well-being, is now increasingly being talked about in policy and practice nationally and internationally. However, a lack of clarity remains about what the idea really means and how it can help children. This book brings together contributions from international experts in order to define child well-being and to further understand how it can improve children's lives. Issues covered include how the idea is being used in government policy and practice in the UK and USA, how children can contribute to the understanding of child well-being, recent advances in the exploration of indicators and measures of well-being, and the importance of context in making comparisons. A concluding chapter explores whether child well-being is a useful concept in understanding children's lives, whether it positively contributes to policy and practice, and the value of international comparisons. This edited collection is essential reading for all those involved in understanding children's lives and who have responsibility for improving them, including practitioners, policymakers, students and academics.
Drawing on a three-year multidisciplinary study of children of divorced parents, the authors, leading academics in their fields, present a much-needed guide to understanding the experience of children who are experiencing parental separation. This book provides an in-depth account of how children are actively involved in the process of divorce and how they shape that experience. The topics discussed include how children find out that their parents are separating; how children tell other people about what is happening to them and their family; how parent-child relationships change after separation and ways in which children adapt and cope during and immediately after their parents' divorce. The authors show what children want and need to know as the process of divorce unfolds and how professionals can respond appropriately to help them to understand and adjust to their changing circumstances. Divorcing Children addresses the weaknesses of current legislation in family justice and suggests ways of improving the skills and knowledge of all professionals who work with children during this difficult period in children's lives.
Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as * George Orwell * William Golding * Angela Carter * Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo * Hanif Kureishi * Marina Warner * Maggie Gee Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.
Using historical and feminist psycho-linguistic studies as a base, Ty explores some of the complexities encountered in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith
Culling genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose-fiction, this study extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain’s fall from imperial power after 1640. Drawing on recent developments in gender theory, Masculine Virtue shows how the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court generated new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.
Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies how authors and filmmakers meet the gaze of the dominant culture and respond to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies. Ty does not survey Asian Canadian and Asian America literature, but presents readings of selected texts that actively engage with issues of otherness, visibility, and identification. Many of them, she says, are in the process of working out how larger issues of representation, power, and history affect Asian North American subjectivity. Parts of the work have been published previously.
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.
At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas-specifically evolution and ecology-new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.
Throughout her works, Mary Wollstonecraft interrogates and represents the connected network of theater, culture, and self-representation, in what Lisa Plummer Crafton argues is a conscious appropriation of theater in its literal, cultural, and figurative dimensions. Situating Wollstonecraft within early Romantic debates about theatricality, she explores Wollstonecraft's appropriation of, immersion in, and contributions to these debates within the contexts of philosophical arguments about the utility of theater and spectacle; the political discourse of the French Revolution; juridical transcripts of treason and civil divorce trials; and the spectacle of the female actress in performance, as typified by Sarah Siddons and her compelling connections to Wollstonecraft on and off stage. As she considers Wollstonecraft's contributions to competing notions of the theatrical, from the writer's earliest literary reviews and translations through her histories, correspondence, nonfiction, and novels, Crafton traces the trajectory of Wollstonecraft's conscious appropriation of the trope and her emphasis on theatricality's transgressive potential for self-invention. Crafton's book, the first wide-ranging study of theatricality in the works of Wollstonecraft, is an important contribution to current reconsiderations of the earlier received wisdom about Romantic anti-theatricality, to historicist revisions of the performance and theory of Sarah Siddons, and to theories of spectacle and gender.
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.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.