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Books > Humanities
The study of Roman sculpture has been an essential part of the
disciplines of Art History and Classics since the eighteenth
century. From formal concerns such as Kopienkritic (copy criticism)
to social readings of plebeian and patrician art and beyond,
scholars have returned to Roman sculpture to answer a variety of
questions about Roman art, society, and history. Indeed, the field
of Roman sculptural studies encompasses not only the full
chronological range of the Roman world but also its expansive
geography, and a variety of artistic media, formats, sizes, and
functions. Exciting new theories, methods, and approaches have
transformed the specialized literature on the subject in recent
decades. Rather than creating another chronological ARCH15OXH of
representative examples of various periods, genres, and settings,
The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture synthesizes current best
practices for studying this central medium of Roman art, situating
it within the larger fields of art history, classical archaeology,
and Roman studies. This volume fills the gap between introductory
textbooks-which hide the critical apparatus from the reader-and the
highly focused professional literature. The handbook conveniently
presents new technical, scientific, literary, and theoretical
approaches to the study of Roman sculpture in one reference volume
and complements textbooks and other publications that present
well-known works in the corpus. Chronologically, the volume
addresses material from the Early Republican period through Late
Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture not only
contributes to the field of classical art and archaeology but also
provides a useful reference for classicists and historians of the
ancient world.
Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist
writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works
recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely
different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in
any of these accounts. By focusing on the literary projections of
the loyalist cause, Gould dissolves the old legend that loyalists
were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a
new sensibility drawn from their American situation and upbringing.
He shows that both sides claimed to be heritors of British civil
discourse, Old World learning, and the genius of English culture.
The first half of Writing Rebellion deals with the ways "political
disputation spilled into arguments about style, form, and
aesthetics, as though these subjects could secure (or ruin) the
very status of political authorship." Chapters in this section
illustrate how loyalists attack patriot rhetoric by invoking
British satires of an inflated Whig style by Alexander Pope and
Jonathan Swift. Another chapter turns to Loyalist critiques of
Congressional language and especially the Continental Association,
which was responsible for radical and increasingly violent measures
against the Loyalists. The second half of Gould's book looks at
satiric adaptations of the ancient ballad tradition to see what
happens when patriots and loyalists interpret and adapt the same
text (or texts) for distinctive yet related purposes. The last two
chapters look at the Loyalist response to Thomas Paine's Common
Sense and the ways the concept of the author became defined in
early America. Throughout the manuscript, Gould acknowledges the
purchase English literary culture continued to have in
revolutionary America, even among revolutionaries.
In America, as in Britain, the Victorian era enjoyed a long life,
stretching from the 1830s to the 1910s. It marked the transition
from a pre-modern to a modern way of life. Ellen White's life
(1827-1915) spanned those years and then some, but the last three
months of a single year, 1844, served as the pivot for everything
else. When the Lord failed to return on October 22, as she and
other followers of William Miller had predicted, White did not lose
heart. Fired by a vision she experienced, White played the
principal role in transforming a remnant minority of Millerites
into the sturdy sect that soon came to be known as the Seventh-day
Adventists. She and a small group of fellow believers emphasized a
Saturday Sabbath and an imminent Advent. Today that flourishing
denomination posts twenty million adherents globally and one of the
largest education, hospital, publishing, and missionary outreach
programs in the world. Over the course of her life White generated
50,000 manuscript pages and letters, and produced 40 books that
have enjoyed extremely wide circulation. She ranks as one of the
most gifted and influential religious leaders in American history,
and Ellen Harmon White tells her story in a new and remarkably
informative way. Some of the contributors identify with the
Adventist tradition, some with other Christian denominations, and
some with no religious tradition at all. Taken together their
essays call for White to be seen as a significant figure in
American religious history and for her to be understood her within
the context of her times.
Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere
beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When
separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent
realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend,
the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a
veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music,
listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds,
employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources.
With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of
sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the
phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word,
"acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the
mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrete Pierre
Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without
seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's
ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet
overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound
studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane
investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological
perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical --
and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising
and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely
detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseenpursues unseen
sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to
Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, music and metaphysics to
architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to
offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and
practice.
The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of
"acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of
philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the
history of the senses."
Why put Abraham Lincoln, the sometime corporate lawyer and American
President, in dialogue with Karl Marx, the intellectual
revolutionary? On the surface, they would appear to share few
interests. Yet, though Lincoln and Marx never met one another, both
had an abiding interest in the most important issue of the
nineteenth-century Atlantic world-the condition of labor in a
capitalist world, one that linked slave labor in the American south
to England's (and continental Europe's) dark satanic mills. Each
sought solutions-Lincoln through a polity that supported free men,
free soil, and free labor; Marx by organizing the working class to
resist capitalist exploitation. While both men espoused
emancipation for American slaves, here their agreements ended.
Lincoln thought that the free labor society of the American North
provided great opportunities for free men missing from the American
South, a kind of "farm ladder" that gave every man the ability to
become a landowner. Marx thought such "free land" a chimera and
(with information from German-American correspondents), was certain
that the American future lay in the proletarianized cities. Abraham
Lincoln and Karl Marx in Dialogue intersperses short selections
from the two writers from their voluminous works, opening with an
introduction that puts the ideas of the two men in the broad
context of nineteenth-century thought and politics. The volume
excerpts Lincoln's and Marx's views on slavery (they both opposed
it for different reasons), the Civil War (Marx claimed the war
concerned slavery and should have as its goal abolition; Lincoln
insisted that his goal was just the defeat of the Confederacy), and
the opportunities American free men had to gain land and economic
independence. Through this volume, readers will gain a firmer
understanding of nineteenth-century labor relations throughout the
Atlantic world: slavery and free labor; the interconnections
between slave-made cotton and the exploitation of English
proletarians; and the global impact of the American Civil War.
The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and
cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and
topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater
and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it
introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the
history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on
the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their
performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a
cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field,
organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture
the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today.
Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses,
including related issues and controversies, positions and
problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and
provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both
re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas.
Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors
emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement
theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to
the handbook's website.
Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and
reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical
and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one
of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford
Handbook of The AmericanMusical will engage all readers interested
in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as
it analyses the complex relationships among the creators,
performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.
The best-selling text for introductory Latin American history
courses, A HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA encompasses political and
diplomatic theory, class structure and economic organization,
culture and religion, and the environment. The integrating
framework is the dependency theory, the most popular interpretation
of Latin American history, which stresses the economic relationship
of Latin American nations to wealthier nations, particularly the
United States. Spanning pre-historic times to the present, A
HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA takes both a chronological and a
nation-by-nation approach, and includes the most recent historical
analysis and the most up-to-date scholarship. The Ninth Edition
includes expanded coverage of social and cultural history
(including music) throughout and increased attention to women,
indigenous cultures, and Afro-Latino people assures well balanced
coverage of the region's diverse histories.
This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple
ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and
reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that
is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and
predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions.
It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas,
social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus
integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly
liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between
history, politics, and religion.
The individual contributions, written by a new generation of
scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the
processes of translation and globalization of historically specific
concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical
counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume
contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to
unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion
and secularism as modern concepts.
Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in
the Spanish Civil War.
For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and
nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects
Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and
meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most
recent "The Importance of Love." Wolf's essays warn us against the
common tendency to classify values in terms of a dichotomy that
contrasts the personal, self-interested, or egoistic with the
impersonal, altruistic or moral. On Wolf's view, this tendency
ignores or distorts the significance of such values as love,
beauty, and truth, and neglects the importance of meaningfulness as
a dimension of the good life. These essays show us how a
self-conscious recognition of the variety of values leads to new
understandings of the point, the content, and the limits of
morality and to new ways of thinking about happiness and
well-being.
This book offers a unique perspective for understanding how and why
the Second World War in Europe ended as it did-and why Germany, in
attacking the Soviet Union, came far closer to winning the war than
is often perceived. Why Germany Nearly Won: A New History of the
Second World War in Europe challenges this conventional wisdom in
highlighting how the re-establishment of the traditional German art
of war-updated to accommodate new weapons systems-paved the way for
Germany to forge a considerable military edge over its much larger
potential rivals by playing to its qualitative strengths as a
continental power. Ironically, these methodologies also created and
exacerbated internal contradictions that undermined the same war
machine and left it vulnerable to enemies with the capacity to
adapt and build on potent military traditions of their own. The
book begins by examining topics such as the methods by which the
German economy and military prepared for war, the German military
establishment's formidable strengths, and its weaknesses. The book
then takes an entirely new perspective on explaining the Second
World War in Europe. It demonstrates how Germany, through its
invasion of the Soviet Union, came within a whisker of cementing a
European-based empire that would have allowed the Third Reich to
challenge the Anglo-American alliance for global hegemony-an
outcome that by commonly cited measures of military potential
Germany never should have had even a remote chance of
accomplishing. The book's last section explores the final year of
the war and addresses how Germany was able to hang on against the
world's most powerful nations working in concert to engineer its
defeat. Detailed maps show the position and movement of opposing
forces during the key battles discussed in the book More than 30
charts, figures, and appendices, including detailed orders of
battle, economic figures, and equipment comparisons
We all have beliefs to the effect that if a certain thing were to
happen a certain other thing would happen. We also believe that
some things simply must be so, with no possibility of having been
otherwise. And in acting intentionally we all take certain things
to be good reason to believe or do certain things. In this book
Barry Stroud argues that some beliefs of each of these kinds are
indispensable to our having any conception of a world at all. That
means no one could consistently dismiss all beliefs of these kinds
as merely ways of thinking that do not describe how things really
are in the world as it is independently of us and our responses.
But the unacceptability of any such negative 'unmasking' view does
not support a satisfyingly positive metaphysical 'realism'. No
metaphysical satisfaction is available either way, given the
conditions of our holding the beliefs whose metaphysical status we
wish to understand. This does not mean we will stop asking the
metaphysical question. But we need a better understanding of how it
can have whatever sense it has for us. This challenging volume
takes up these large, fundamental questions in clear language
accessible to a wide philosophical readership.
Since the late nineteenth century, fears that marriage is in crisis
have reverberated around the world. Domestic Tensions, National
Anxieties explores this phenomenon, asking why people of various
races, classes, and nations frequently seem to be fretting about
marriage. Each of the twelve chapters analyzes a specific time and
place during which proclamations of marriage crisis have dominated
public discourse, whether in 1920s India, mid-century France, or
present-day Iran. While each nation has had its own reasons for
escalating anxieties over marriage and the family, common themes
emerge in how people have understood and debated crises in
marriage. Collectively, the chapters reveal how diverse individuals
have deployed the institution of marriage to talk not only about
intimate relationships, but also to understand the nation, its
problems, and various socioeconomic and political transformations.
The volume reveals critical insights and showcases original
research across interdisciplinary and national boundaries, making a
groundbreaking contribution to current scholarship on marriage,
family, nationalism, gender, and the law.
That the longstanding antagonism between science and religion is
irreconcilable has been taken for granted. And in the wake of
recent controversies over teaching intelligent design and the
ethics of stem-cell research, the divide seems as unbridgeable as
ever.
In Science vs. Religion, Elaine Howard Ecklund investigates this
unexamined assumption in the first systematic study of what
scientists actually think and feel about religion. In the course of
her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and
interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe
about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50
percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls
"spiritual entrepreneurs," seeking creative ways to work with the
tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of
traditional religion. The book centers around vivid portraits of 10
representative men and women working in the natural and social
sciences at top American research universities. Ecklund's
respondents run the gamut from Margaret, a chemist who teaches a
Sunday-school class, to Arik, a physicist who chose not to believe
in God well before he decided to become a scientist. Only a small
minority are actively hostile to religion. Ecklund reveals how
scientists-believers and skeptics alike-are struggling to engage
the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and
argues that many scientists are searching for "boundary pioneers"
to cross the picket lines separating science and religion.
With broad implications for education, science funding, and the
thorny ethical questions surrounding stem-cell research, cloning,
and other cutting-edge scientific endeavors, Science vs. Religion
brings a welcome dose of reality to the science and religion
debates.
American Indian tribes have long been recognized as "domestic,
dependent nations" within the United States, with powers of
self-government that operate within the tribes' sovereign
territories. Yet over the years, Congress and the Supreme Court
have steadily eroded these tribal powers. In some respects, the
erosion of tribal powers reflects the legacy of an imperialist
impulse to constrain or eliminate any political power that may
compete with the state. These developments have moved the nation
away from its early commitments to a legally plural society-in
other words, the idea that multiple nations and their legal systems
could co-exist peacefully in shared territories. Shadow Nations
argues for redirecting the trajectory of tribal-federal relations
to better reflect the formative ethos of legal pluralism that
operated in the nation's earliest years. From an ideological
standpoint, this means that we must reexamine several long-held
commitments. One is to legal centralism, the view that the
nation-state and its institutions are the only legitimate sources
of law. Another is to liberalism, the dominant political philosophy
that undergirds our democratic structures and situates the
individual, not the group or a collective, as the bedrock moral
unit of society. From a constitutional standpoint, establishing
more robust expressions of tribal sovereignty will require that we
take seriously the concerns of citizens, tribal and non-tribal
alike, who demand that tribal governments operate consistently with
basic constitutional values. From an institutional standpoint,
these efforts will require a new, flexible and adaptable
institutional architecture that is better suited to accommodating
these competing interests. Argued with grace, humanity, and a
peerless scholarly eye, Shadow Nations is a clarion call for a true
and consequential rethinking of the legal and political
relationship between Indigenous tribes and the United States
government.
Taking the Long View argues in a series of engagingly written
essays that remembering the past is essential for men and women who
want to function effectively in the present--for without some
knowledge of their own past, neither individuals nor institutions
know where they have been or where they are going. The book
illustrates its thesis with tough-minded examples from the Church's
life and thought, ranging from more abstract problems like the
theoretical role of historical criticism to such painfully concrete
issues as the commandment of Jesus to forgive unforgivable wrongs.
Ever since Karl Jasper's "axial age" paradigm, there have been a
number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and
Greco-Roman history and culture. Most of these have centered on the
emergence of the world's philosophical and religious traditions, or
on models of empire building. However, to date there has been no
comparative study involving literatures of multiple traditions in
the ancient East Asian and Mediterranean cultural spheres. At first
glance, it would appear that the literary cultures of early Japan
and Rome share little in common with each other. Yet both were
intimately connected with the literature of antecedent "reference
cultures," China and Greece respectively. These connections had
far-reaching legal, ethical, material, linguistic, bibliographical,
and literary consequences that made for distinctive Sino-Japanese
and Greco-Roman dynamics. Exploring writers from Otomo no Yakamochi
to Sugawara no Michizane and Sei Shonagon and from Cicero and
Virgil to Ovid and Martianus Capella, Classical World Literatures
captures the striking similarities between the ways Early Japanese
writers wrote their own literature through and against the literary
precedents of China and the ways Latin writers engaged and
contested Greek precedents. Chapters engage in issues ranging from
early narratives of literary history, cultural foundation figures,
literature of the capital and poetry of exile, to strategies of
cultural comparison in the form of parody and satire or synoptic
texts. The book also brings to light suggestive divergences that
are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and
aesthetic differences between Early Japanese and Roman literary
cultures. Author Wiebke Denecke examines how Japanese and Latin
writers were affected by an awareness of their own belatedness, how
their strategies in telling of the origins of their own literatures
evolved, and how notions about simplicity, ornateness, and cultural
decline came to be blamed on the influence of their cultural
ancestors. Proposing an innovative methodology of "deep comparison"
for the cross-cultural comparison of premodern literary cultures
and calling for an expansion of world literature debates into the
ancient and medieval worlds, Classical World Literatures is both a
theoretical intervention and an invitation to reading and
re-reading four major literary traditions of the classical world in
an innovative and illuminating light.
"Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers "examines the discourse of
seventeenth-century English physicians to demonstrate that
physicians utilized cultural attitudes and beliefs to create
medical theory. They meshed moralism with medicine to self-fashion
an image of themselves as knowledgeable health experts whose
education assured good judgment and sage advice, and whose interest
in the health of their patients surpassed the peddling of a single
nostrum to everyone. The combination of morality with medicine gave
them the support of the influential godly in society because
physicians' theories about disease and its prevention supported
contemporary concerns that sinfulness was rampant. Particularly
disturbing to the godly were sins deemed most threatening to the
social order: lasciviousness, ungodliness, and unruliness, all of
which were most clearly and threateningly manifested in the urban
poor. Physicians' medical theories and suggestions for curbing some
of the most feared and destructive diseases in the seventeenth
century, most notably plague and syphilis, focused on reforming or
incarcerating the sick and sinful poor. Doing so helped propel
physicians to an elevated position in the hierarchy of healers
competing for patients in seventeenth-century England.
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