The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology.

This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture.

This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre and torture. Sympathy, the sudden and spontaneous entry of one person s feelings into those of another, made it possible for people to share sentiments so vividly that neither reason nor self-interest could limit the degree to which individuals might care for others, or act involuntarily on their behalf. The progress of sympathy is intertwined with the period of global exploration evidenced by Cook s voyages and the rise of the sentimental novel before being met by growing suspicion in the works of radicals such as Wollstonecraft and Godwin. The history of sympathy seems to involve a dialectic of immediacy and artifice in which the knowledge of what it is like to be someone else is alternately the product of involuntary passion and of conscious manipulation. The question of social virtue, where it comes from, how it is aroused and in what direction it tends is perpetually being interrogated with no definite answer ever emerging.

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology.

One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals. Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs. This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.

The author of Tristram Shandy made frequent use of literary fragments from other writers, as part of his own style. Laurence Sterne's quotations, plagiarisms and allusions were often employed in the service of the pleonasm, or 'performed pun'. Jonathan Lamb describes Sterne's operation of the pleonasm as his 'double principle'. He sees this style not as the key to some clever puzzle whose clues we go on solving in the hope of total disclosure of meaning (as some critics have claimed); rather the opposite, that it is a consoling reminder that neither we nor the text can ever be complete. Lamb severs Sterne from the Locke tradition and frees him from the 'influence' oriented studies which have aimed to authenticate him through his borrowings. This allows us to read him as a writer eagerly exploring the turns and paradoxes of associationist thought and adapting the rhetoric of the sublime to the stutterings of ordinary speech.

The Rhetoric of Suffering draws on the book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics that infect various C18th works - poetry, philosophy, political oratory, accounts of exploration, commentaries on criminal law - which tried to account for the relations between human suffering and systems of secular and divine justice. Deliberately eschewing questions of chronology or discursive coherence, genre or topic, Jonathan Lamb offers considerations of Richardson and Fielding, Hawkesworth and the South Pacific, Goldsmith and Godwin, Hume and Walpole, Blackstone and Bentham, Burke and Longinus, and Blackmore and Wright of Derby. Asking why it was that standard consolations, which had worked for centuries, suddenly stopped working, or were treated as insults by people who felt peculiarly isolated by misery, this wide-ranging account of the improbability of complaint in the eighteenth century offers an answer. Far from crystallizing or objectifying the issue of complaint, the book of Job seems to restore its limitless and unprecedented urgency. The Rhetoric of Suffering examines complaints that fall into this dissident and singular category, and relates their improbability to the aesthetics of the sublime, and to current theories of practice and communication. Lamb focuses on William Warburton's contentious interpretation of Job, contained in his Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738-1741), a prime example of the debate that emerges when Job is used as an unequivocal justification of providence.

Who is in control? The sustained threat from rogue states, international terrorism, religious extremists, and moral confusion arising from liberal views of all kinds begs the question: what is happening to our world? Is no-one in control? This is a deep vulnerability that many people express. And not simply in global events. Our own personal world often seems out of control as we reel from suffering, family tragedies and unanswered prayers. The prophet Habakkuk knew that God was in control but, like us, his personal experience seemed to contradict this and he wrestled with the tension. This book is a dialogue between the prophet and God. Habakkuk confronts God with his confusion and, in doing so, he expresses the voice of the godly in Judah and he speaks for us. We join in the journey from 'why?' to worship.

The oil business has never been truly a market, where prices are determined by simple supply and demand. Instead it is distorted by long lead times, a producer cartel, subsidies and a lack of true alternatives. Jonathan Lamb argues that this is all changing. Fracking has provided a resource with unparalleled flexibility, subsidies are in retreat, natural gas is conquering all, while the price gyrations of the past decade have forced an industry focus on costs and technology. The threat of alternatives is forcing the pace of efficiency and the threat of peak demand has changed the way that resource holders view the business. Oil prices are driven more by market forces than ever before, making high prices unsustainable, potentially good news for consumers, if not the planet.

Understanding and Using the Bible is an engaging and exciting introduction to biblical methods and practices of study, edited by two trusted teachers in collaboration with a diverse array of contributors. Part one explores key Christian beliefs about the Bible and why it matters, guides effective use and application of the Bible in different cultural and social contexts, and encourages readers to take the Bible as a whole and build a biblical worldview. Part two illustrates applied Bible use in different contexts with contributions from a variety of authors.

The Banjax Arrest is a psychological mystery set among religious fanatics on a distant lunar colony. This fast-paced novel combines a young man's inner struggle with a quest to bring down a tyrant and rescue a community from impending destruction. After sustaining a traumatic head injury as a teenager Troy Pace suffers severe memory loss and his personality is altered. Once a promising student he becomes an anti-social drop-out whose repeated brushes with the law embarrass his high-ranking politician father. Following a violent nocturnal episode with a young woman he is dispatched to a remote moon acquired for habitation by the fugitive tycoon Baron Banjax. There he discovers a colony whose inhabitants are struggling to survive after a devastating meteorite impact and over which hangs the shadow of the ruthless cult leader, Croman. Still struggling to control his own demonic urges, Troy undertakes to carry out an assassination that will save the colonists. Yet in seeking redemption for his past misdeeds he will ultimately learn that he is a pawn in an even more sinister game.