In this book, Clare Connors sets out to answer the question: What is the pervasive character of the world?, tracing a genealogy of the idea of force through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Rescuing the subject from deadly dry theorists and -isms, Clare Connors focuses on the real questions that emerge when we read and study literature - such as how we find meaning and how literature relates to its historical context - before exploring the response of theorists. Using selections from works including poetry by Christina Rossetti and Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Connors unites theory with practice, revealing how enjoyable it is to think about reading.

This is the first anthology and guide to the creative possibilities of critical writing. 'We murder to dissect' writes Wordsworth. It's a sentiment shared by many lovers of literature and art, as well as by artists and writers themselves. Too often academic critical writing seems to annihilate what it analyses. Too often, it brings pre-packaged language to bear on works whose whole essence and aim is to change the ways in which we see and describe our world. How, then, to write criticism? Creative-Critical Writing: An Anthology and Guide gathers together, for the first time, writers who strive to find answers to this dilemma. Including works by creative critics as different from one another as Anne Carson and Jacques Derrida, Geoff Dyer and Helene Cixous, it celebrates writing whose formal and intellectual inventiveness is inseparable from a deep fidelity to the writing, art or music it addresses. The Reader offers at once a guide and a goad for all students and teachers and critics of literature and creative writing. It offers a thorough introduction to the theory and practice of creative-critical writing. It is an anthology of innovative and inventive work from some of the most influential writer-critics of the past thirty years.

"What is the pervasive character of the world? The answer is force." But, as Heidegger asks next: "What is force?" Connors sets out to answer this question, tracing a genealogy of the idea of force through the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. These thinkers try to pin down what force is, but know too that it is something which cannot be neutrally described. Their vigorously literary writings must therefore be read as much for the stylistic and rhetorical ways in which they render force's powerful elusiveness as for the content of their arguments. And it is perhaps literature, rather than philosophy, which best engages with force. Certainly, for Connors, these philosophical positions are foreshadowed in remarkable detail by Shakespeare's Henry V - a play shot through with forces, imaginary, military, rhetorical and bodily.

Drawing on one-to-one guided conversations with disabled children and follow-up interviews with their parents and siblings, this volume takes an in-depth look at the effects of disability on disabled children. Approaching this neglected subject through the disabled child's perspective, it considers: * disabled children's understanding of disability * the ways in which children negotiate the experience of disability in their everyday lives * children's perceptions of their relationships with professionals and their knowledge and views of service provision * children's aspirations for the future and their views on the type of support which might help achieve them * siblings' perceptions of the effects on them of having a disabled brother or sister. Informed by the social model of disability, Clare Connors and Kirsten Stalker identify and draw out the implications of their findings for social work and health services. Illustrating effective ways of communicating directly with disabled children, this will prove an invaluable resource for academics, policy makers and practitioners working with disabled children in health and social care settings.