Robert Pogue Harrison's Books

Forests

The Shadow of Civilization

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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Forests

The Shadow of Civilization

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

In this wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western thought, Robert Pogue Harrison enriches our understanding not only of the forest's place in the cultural imagination of the West, but also of the ecological dilemmas that now confront us so urgently. Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth. "Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review "Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review

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305

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226318052

ISBN 13

9780226318059

Juvenescence

A Cultural History of Our Age

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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Juvenescence

A Cultural History of Our Age

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

How old are we, those of us who belong to the postwar era? By many measures, both evolutionary and cultural, we are older than ever. But we are also getting startlingly youngeryounger in looks, attire, behavior, mentality, desires. We belong, Robert Harrison says, to an age of juvenescence. "Juvenescence "is about the ways in which the spirits of youth and age have coexisted and shaped each other, both in individuals and culture, from the time of antiquity to the present. It is also a book that asks what it means for the future when youth gains the upper hand to the unprecedented degree it has today. Our way of aging, Harrison argues, resembles thethe scientific concept of "neoteny"the retention of immature characteristics into adulthood. We mature, but with a still tenacious youthfulness, driving drives toward innovation rather than reflection, genius rather than wisdom. At its best, human maturity has its source in the youth it brings to fruition. And yet our protracted youth, Harrison suggests, is a luxury that can be supported only by our elders and the institutions they build. Although Harrison believes, echoing Stephen Jay Gould, that our genius as a species lies in our collective reluctance to grow up, he argues that we are today in a phase of radical juvenalization that allows no space for the kind of wisdom that builds upon the past.

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232

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022617199X

ISBN 13

9780226171999

Gardens

An Essay on the Human Condition

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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Gardens

An Essay on the Human Condition

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt - all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.

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382

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ReadHowYouWant.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

1459606264

ISBN 13

9781459606265

The Dominion of the Dead

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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The Dominion of the Dead

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us. This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn. The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

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224

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226317927

ISBN 13

9780226317922

The Dominion of the Dead

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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The Dominion of the Dead

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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224

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226317927

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9780226317922

Juvenescence

A Cultural History of Our Age

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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Juvenescence

A Cultural History of Our Age

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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232

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022617199X

ISBN 13

9780226171999

Gardens

An Essay on the Human Condition

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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Gardens

An Essay on the Human Condition

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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382

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ReadHowYouWant.com

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ISBN 10

1459606264

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9781459606265

The New PhD

How to Build a Better Graduate Education

By: Leonard Cassuto,Robert Weisbuch

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The New PhD

How to Build a Better Graduate Education

By: Leonard Cassuto,Robert Weisbuch

By fixing the PhD, we can benefit the entire educational system and the life of our society along with it.

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Page Count

409

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

142143976X

ISBN 13

9781421439761

Forests

The Shadow of Civilization

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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Forests

The Shadow of Civilization

By: Robert Pogue Harrison

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305

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226318052

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9780226318059

The Ecological Eugene O'Neill

Nature's Veiled Purpose in the Plays

By: Robert Baker-White

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The Ecological Eugene O'Neill

Nature's Veiled Purpose in the Plays

By: Robert Baker-White

The dramas of Eugene O'Neill--often called America's first "serious" playwright--exhibit an imagining of the natural world that enlivens the plays and marks the boundaries of the characters' fates. O'Neill's figures move within purposefully animated natural environments--ocean, dense forest, desert plains, the rocky soil of New England. This new approach to O'Neill's dramas explores these ecological settings as crucial to his characters' ability to carry out their conscious and unconscious desires. O'Neill's career is covered, from his youthful one-acts, to the middle years experimental dramas, to the mature tragedies of his late period. Special attention is paid to the connection of ecology and theological quest, and to O'Neill's persistent evocation of an exotic, natural "other." Combining an ecocritical approach with an examination of Classical and philosophical influences on the playwright's creative process, the author reveals a new, less hermetic O'Neill.

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235

Publisher

McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

0786498757

ISBN 13

9780786498758

Trials

Of Antigone and Jesus

By: William Robert

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Trials

Of Antigone and Jesus

By: William Robert

What does it mean to be called "human"? How does this nomination affect or effect what it means to be called "divine"? This book responds to these related questions in intertwined explorations of the passionate trials-examinations, tests, and ordeals-of Antigone and Jesus. Impelled by her love of the impossible, Antigone crosses uncrossable boundaries, transgresses norms of kinship and mortality, confounds distinctions of nature and culture, and, in the process, unearths and critiques the sexism implicit in humanism. Antigone thus disrupts humanist traditions stretching from Sophocles to Martin Heidegger-traditions that would render her subhuman or inhuman. She survives these exclusions and engenders a new mode of humanity, one that destabilizes classic oppositions of life and death and affirms mortal finitude in the face of the future's unforeseeability. This new mode of humanity offers a new way of considering Jesus, whom Christianity identifies as human and divine. Building on his reading of Antigone, the author, through a close reading of Mark's gospel focused on Jesus' cry of abandonment from the cross, shows that to refigure humanity is also to refigure divinity and their relation. In the first extended treatment of Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus in English, the author draws on the theoretical insights of Jacques Derrida and Nancy to propose an innovative account of Jesus' humanity and divinity-one that can contribute to religious understandings of embodiment and prayer and can open avenues of inquiry into tragedy, sexual difference, posthumanism, and politics. By pairing Antigone and Jesus and engaging the work of Judith Butler, Simone Weil, Jean-Louis Chr tien, and Dominique Janicaud, this book constructively participates in interdisciplinary conversations at the nexus of religious, philosophical, literary, and gender studies.

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170

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823231658

ISBN 13

9780823231652

The Space Within

Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture

By: Robert McCarter

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The Space Within

Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture

By: Robert McCarter

Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture wasn’t what a building looks like on the day it opens but what it is like to live inside it thirty years later. In this book, architect and critic Robert McCarter persuasively argues that interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work after it has been built. McCarter reveals that we can’t really know a piece of architecture without inhabiting its spaces, and we need to counter our contemporary obsession with exterior views and forms with a renewed appreciation for interiors. He explores how interior space has been integral to the development of modern architecture from the late 1800s to today, and he examines how architects have engaged interior space and its experiences in their design processes, fundamentally transforming traditional approaches to composition. Eloquently placing us within a host of interior spaces, he opens up new ways of thinking about architecture and what its goals are and should be.

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178

Publisher

Reaktion Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1780237073

ISBN 13

9781780237077

In the Way of Nature

Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt

By: Robert Boschman

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In the Way of Nature

Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt

By: Robert Boschman

Exploring the connections between nature and culture, this volume discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994). Though only Bradstreet was born outside North America, each poet is shown to grapple with the ways that European civilization was transformed on the new continent. The author's analysis highlights the interconnected themes of travel, geography, cartography and wildness.

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237

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McFarland

Published Date

ISBN 10

0786433566

ISBN 13

9780786433568

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

By: Robert Macfarlane

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Underland: A Deep Time Journey

By: Robert Macfarlane

National Bestseller • New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" • NPR "Favorite Books of 2019" • Guardian "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award "Mesmerizing…Underland is a portal of light in dark times." —Terry Tempest Williams, New York Times Book Review In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time—from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come—Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

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373

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393242153

ISBN 13

9780393242157

The Wild Places

By: Robert Macfarlane

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The Wild Places

By: Robert Macfarlane

From the author of The Old Ways and Underland, an "eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface." --Bill McKibben Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

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353

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1440638659

ISBN 13

9781440638657

Andrea and Sylvester

Challenging Marriage Taboos and the Road to a Same-Sex Marriage Decision

By: Robert V. Dodge

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Andrea and Sylvester

Challenging Marriage Taboos and the Road to a Same-Sex Marriage Decision

By: Robert V. Dodge

In 1941 a young couple met and fell in love; but one of them was considered Black while the other was considered White. Laws against intermarriage between races had been upheld by every court in the United States since Reconstruction, after the Civil War. Andrea and Sylvester - a Mexican-American woman and an African-American man - challenged these laws and won, and their success inspired changes that ended that taboo. When same-sex marriage became a pressing issue, their case was the precedent that first persuaded the courts to allow it. Thus Andrea and Sylvester can be credited with successfully challenging a second marriage taboo. Dodge sets the scene for their personal drama and traces how their example helped establish the momentum toward more liberal marriage laws throughout the United States, culminating with the 2015 Supreme Court's decision to allow same-sex marriage. This is the story of a couple that has received too little attention for the impact they have had on society and law. Andrea, a Mexican girl, met Sylvester, a Black man, working on an assembly line during World War Two. Both were second-generation Los Angeles residents who suffered from discrimination in a city dominated by white superiority and the center of the eugenics movement. This book discusses their case and factors that led to the court decision. Their victory broke the logjam on racial intermarriage, and states began eliminating their prohibitions. After 19 years, the U.S. Supreme Court declared all laws prohibiting interracial marriage invalid. Andrea and Sylvester were soon dating and in love. When they went to get a marriage license, their application was rejected. A quirk in California law declared Mexicans "White" for certain purposes. They challenged the constitutionality of laws preventing marriages between races, though no case had been successful since the 1800s. This book discusses their case and factors that led to the court decision. Their victory broke the logjam on racial intermarriage, and states began eliminating their prohibitions. After 19 years the U.S. Supreme Court declared all laws prohibiting interracial marriage invalid. After the Stonewall riots and when AIDS raised legal questions for many partners, same-sex marriage became an issue for more couples. One response that states commonly gave was to pass laws defining marriage as a contract between a woman and a man; and the federal government adopted this position. Opponents of same-sex marriage frequently said this was a new phenomenon and it involved "unnatural" behavior, though same-sex couples have been known for over 4000 years, and the same had been said of those who advocated interracial marriage. Some blamed natural disasters and war deaths on homosexuals as God’s revenge. Massachusetts was first to declare the law preventing same-sex marriage unconstitutional and the precedent relied on most heavily was the case of Andrea and Sylvester, as their past was revived to challenge a second marriage taboo. California ruled next and again frequently called on Andrea and Sylvester’s case for support. That got things rolling and 37 states have approved same-sex marriage through legislative action or court decision. The US Supreme Court’s decision will determine whether the final 13 also are included. T

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294

Publisher

Algora Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1628941618

ISBN 13

9781628941616

Three Hundred Years of Decadence

New Orleans Literature and the Transatlantic World

By: Robert Azzarello

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Three Hundred Years of Decadence

New Orleans Literature and the Transatlantic World

By: Robert Azzarello

New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.

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Page Count

256

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807170887

ISBN 13

9780807170885

Convictions Without Truth

The Incompatibility of Science and Law

By: Robert Schehr

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Convictions Without Truth

The Incompatibility of Science and Law

By: Robert Schehr

Convictions Without Truth sets out to determine whether and to what extent science and law may coexist in an institutional relationship that truthfully generates individualization through application of forensic testimony for charges relating to violations of criminal law. In the first two chapters, readers are exposed to contemporary unscientific forensic practices as juxtaposed to the evidentiary standard announced by the United States Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, as well as scientific requirements for validity and reliability of expert witness testimony. The remaining chapters provide an explanation for retention of existing, though faulty, forensic practices by way of analysis of path dependency, the fixation of belief, and neuro and cognitive psychology. Through immanent critique and unmasking, the book deconstructs prevailing forensic practices through application of existing published documentation. The final chapter addresses the fixation of belief from the perspective of neuropsychology and cognitive psychology. Readers will gain an understanding of the current concerns relating to application of contemporary forensic practices; current case law and federal rules guiding the introduction of expert witness testimony; and why it is that despite widely recognized concerns raised from within and outside of the criminal legal system, application of unscientific forensic practices continues. The book also shows how the criminal legal system is experiencing a paradigm shift due to dialectical juxtaposition of existing unscientific forensic practices with contemporary science. Readers are shown that because of its continued reliance upon unscientific forensic practices, the criminal legal system reveals its hegemonic commitment to social control through its willingness to accept "satisfying" as opposed to "truthful" results that generate wrongful convictions. Convictions Without Truth will be of particular interest to students, academics, and practitioners working within the criminal legal field. It will also appeal to those wanting to know more about forensics and criminal law.

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Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000618242

ISBN 13

9781000618242

Back to Nature

The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

By: Robert Watson

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Back to Nature

The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

By: Robert Watson

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Sweeping across scholarly disciplines, Back to Nature shows that, from the moment of their conception, modern ecological and epistemological anxieties were conjoined twins. Urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism, colonialism, revived Skepticism, empirical science, and optical technologies conspired to alienate people from both the earth and reality itself in the seventeenth century. Literary and visual arts explored the resulting cultural wounds, expressing the pain and proposing some ingenious cures. The stakes, Robert N. Watson demonstrates, were huge. Shakespeare's comedies, Marvell's pastoral lyrics, Traherne's visionary Centuries, and Dutch painting all illuminate a fierce submerged debate about what love of nature has to do with perception of reality.

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