Mom, You're Ol' Fashion great book for a family to share, especially Black Americans. It includes historical facts about North Carolina and mention of Florida. It includes the history of a Black World War II Veteran. There is a short story that might interest teenagers. Some poems are a form of satire and/or humorous. Poems cover religion - humorous and inspirational; messages for educators, and a poem dedicated to Germany.

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.

What they left behind, in a vast region that once sat between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate, raw and relatable moments, like a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a child's teeth.

In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid reveals what these ancient people chose to record about their lives, allowing us to brush hands with them millennia later. We find a lullaby to soothe a baby, instructions for exorcising a ghost, countless receipts for beer, and the adorable, messy writing of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, a princess who may have created the world's first museum, and a working mother struggling with 'the juggle' in 1900 BCE.

Together, these fragments illuminate not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.

British comics writer Alan Moore (b. 1953) has a reputation for equal parts brilliance and eccentricity. Living hermit-like in the same Midlands town for his entire life, he supposedly refuses contact with the outside world while creating his strange, dense comics, fiction, and performance art. While Moore did declare himself a wizard on his fortieth birthday and claims to have communed with extradimensional beings, reticence and seclusion have never been among his eccentricities. On the contrary, for long stretches of his career Moore seemed to be willing to chat with all comers: fanzines, industry magazines, other artists, newspapers, magazines, and personal websites. Well over one hundred interviews in the past thirty years serve as testimony to Moore's willingness to be engaged in productive conversation.

"Alan Moore: Conversations" includes ten substantial interviews, beginning with Moore's first published conversation, conducted by "V for Vendetta" cocreator David Lloyd in 1981. The remainder cover nearly all of his major works, including "Watchmen," "V for Vendetta," "Swamp Thing," "Marvelman," "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," "Promethea," "From Hell," "Lost Girls," and the unfinished "Big Numbers."

While Moore's personal life and fraught business relations are discussed occasionally, the interviews chosen are principally devoted to Moore's creative practices and techniques, along with his shifting social, political, and philosophical beliefs. As such, "Alan Moore: Conversations" should add to any reader's enjoyment and understanding of Moore's work.

This new study brings recent scholarly debates on oral cultures and literate societies to bear on the earliest recorded literature in German (800-1300). It considers the criteria for assessing what works were destined for listeners, what examples anticipated readers, and how far both modes of reception could apply to one work. The opening chapters review previous scholarship, and the introduction of writing into preliterate Germany. The core of the book presents lexical and non-lexical evidence for the different modes of reception, taken from the whole spectrum of genres, from dance songs to liturgy, from drama and heroic literature to the court narrative and lyric poetry. The social contexts of reception and the physical process of reading books are also considered. Two concluding chapters explore the literary and historical implications of the slow interpenetration of orality and literacy.

This book showcases recent work about reading and books in sociology and the humanities across the globe. From different standpoints and within the broad perspectives within the cultural sociology of reading, the eighteen chapters examine a range of reading practices, genres, types of texts, and reading spaces. They cover the Anglophone area of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, multilingual space constituted by the readership of the Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech Republic; twentieth century Swahili readings in East Africa; contemporary Iran; and China during the cultural revolution and the post-Mao period. The chapters contribute to current debates about the valuation of literature and the role of cultural intermediaries; the iconic properties of textual objects and of the practice of reading itself; how reading supports personal, social and political reflection; bookstores as spaces for sociability and the interplay of high and commercial cultures; the political uses of reading for nation-building and propaganda, and the dangers and gratifications of reading under repression. In line with the cultural sociology of reading's focus on meaning, materiality and emotion, this book explores the existential, ethical and political consequences of reading in specific locations and historical moments.

Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume IV features all the verse written in the English language by English poet JOHN MILTON (1608-1674), including the essential Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, plus "Song on May Morning," "Sonnet to the Nightingale," "The Passion," "To a Virtuous Young Lady," and others.

This volume is the first to attempt a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary analysis of the manuscript cultures implementing the pothi manuscript form (a loosely bound stack of oblong folios). It is the indigenous form by which manuscripts have been crafted in South Asia and the cultural areas most influenced by it, that is to say Central and South East Asia. The volume focuses particularly on the colophons featured in such manuscripts presenting a series of essays enabling the reader to engage in a historical and comparative investigation of the links connecting the several manuscript cultures examined here. Colophons as paratexts are situated at the intersection between texts and the artefacts that contain them and offer a unique vantage point to attain global appreciation of their manuscript cultures and literary traditions. Colophons are also the product of scribal activities that have moved across regions and epochs alongside the pothi form, providing a common thread binding together the many millions of pothis still today found in libraries in Asia and the world over. These contributions provide a systematic approach to the internal structure of colophons, i.e. their 'syntax', and facilitate a vital, comparative approach.

This book comprises what may be called exercises in 'comparative cinema'. Its focus on endings, near-endings and 'late style' is connected with the author's argument that comparative criticism itself may constitute an endgame of criticism, arising at the moment at which societies or individuals relinquish primary adherence to one tradition or medium. The comparisons embrace different works and artistic media and primarily concern works of literature and film, though they also consider issues raised by the interrelationship of language and moving and still images, as well as inter- and intra-textuality. The works probed most fully are ones by Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Harun Farocki, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Chang-dong Lee, Roman Polanski, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul Schrader, while the key recurrent motifs are those of dusk, the horizon, the labyrinth, and the ruin.

What, if any, is the relationship between Charles Dickens and the decorative arts? Between Henry James and Art Nouveau? Between the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the paintings of the Impressionists?

Recent trends in scholarship have begun to reassess the assumption that the arts of painting and literature are too fundamentally disparate to permit a fruitful comparison between the two. In Victorian Contexts, Murray Roston puts that assumption to rest with imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, painting, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century. Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, he argues that in every generation there is a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way.

Eminently readable, Victorian Contexts is accessible to general readers as well as scholars of literature, the visual arts, and nineteenth-century culture.

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history.

As the first book to introduce and analyze cultural studies in contemporary China, this volume is an important resource for Western scholars wishing to understand the rise and development of cultural studies in China. Organized according to subject, it includes extensive material examining the relationships between culture and politics, as well as culture and institutions in contemporary China. Further, it discusses the development of cultural debates.

The authors are outstanding scholars engaged in the study of language varieties spoken in 'convergence areas' in which speakers are multilingual in languages of at least two but sometimes all three language families. Many of the contributions present new data collected in fieldwork. The geographic area covered is Western and Central Asia where varieties of Iranian, Semitic and Turkic languages have entered into many different types of contact. The intricate linguistic contact situations demonstrate highly interesting convergence phenomena.

First Published in 1966. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.