Why are young women today deeply unhappy with their own bodies? Why do even young girls inflict serious harm to themselves by dangerous patterns of bingeing and dieting? Drawing on a wide source of feminist perspectives this book examines this epidemic of body-hatred.

Children's play throughout history has been free, spontaneous, and intertwined with work, set in the playgrounds of the fields, streams, and barnyards. Children in cities enjoyed similar forms of play but their playgrounds were the vacant lands and parks. Today, children have become increasingly inactive, abandoning traditional outdoor play for sedentary, indoor cyber play and poor diets. The consequences of play deprivation, the elimination and diminution of recess, and the abandonment of outdoor play are fundamental issues in a growing crisis that threatens the health, development, and welfare of children.

This valuable book traces the history of children's play and play environments from their roots in ancient Greece and Rome to the present time in the high stakes testing environment. Through this exploration, scholar Dr. Joe Frost shows how this history informs where we are today and why we need to re-establish play as a priority. Ultimately, the author proposes active solutions to play deprivation. This book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of early childhood education and child development.

Children s play throughout history has been free, spontaneous, and intertwined with work, set in the playgrounds of the fields, streams, and barnyards. Children in cities enjoyed similar forms of play but their playgrounds were the vacant lands and parks. Today, children have become increasingly inactive, abandoning traditional outdoor play for sedentary, indoor cyber play and poor diets. The consequences of play deprivation, the elimination and diminution of recess, and the abandonment of outdoor play are fundamental issues in a growing crisis that threatens the health, development, and welfare of children.

This valuable book traces the history of children s play and play environments from their roots in ancient Greece and Rome to the present time in the high stakes testing environment. Through this exploration, scholar Dr. Joe Frost shows how this history informs where we are today and why we need to re-establish play as a priority. Ultimately, the author proposes active solutions to play deprivation. This book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of early childhood education and child development.

The Association for the Study of Play (ASP) is the sponsor of the seventh volume in the Play and Culture Studies Series. The ASP is a professional group of researchers who study play. The purpose of this series is to advance knowledge about play and culture. Volume seven presents current theoretical and empirical research on play and culture from a variety of disciplines including psychology, education, and sociology. The book begins with an overview of the twentieth-century and moves from conceptualizing play to significant and timely topics, such as the relationship between play and literacy. Applications to practice and policy implications are presented and include play with action figures; playgrounds; play as an integral part of the human experience; and the value of play with books for toddlers. Research activity and interests of contemporary play scholars are highlighted and discussed in relation to projected problems and needs facing us as we enter the new millennium, such as childhood obesity; play as a venue for social interaction; and play as a method of developing skill for interaction at the local and national levels as adults.

'The Jacobean dramatists make better sense if seen as working in Shakespeare's light'. This premise underlies Dr Frost's study of the influence of Shakespeare upon his contemporaries. Certain writers - Middleton especially - he shows to have been radically transformed, while Webster and Ford reacted against the dominant tragic mode, and yet exploited the master for their own purposes. Almost all Shakespeare's successors were happy to lift an idea, a phrase, a character or a scene. More important, Shakespeare's influence revolutionised two dramatic forms, the revenge play and the romance. In removing an artificial barrier that divided the isolated genius from 'the rest', this original 1968 publication illustrates Shakespeare's impact on his age, and produces supporting evidence from records of publication, play performance and contemporary comment to overthrow the long-held doctrine of relative neglect. Dr Frost's interest in literary indebtedness is critical as much as scholarly, while his discussion of the romance offers an approach to Shakespeare's final plays. His general thesis is challenging, and is likely to affect the readers' views on the history of drama and of taste, as well as their estimate of the writers themselves.

Young Women and the Body sets out to examine why the current generation of young women seem to be deeply unhappy with their own bodies. Dieting and disguising are commonplace, and inflicting serious harm by no means rare in fourteen to eighteen year olds. Despite prophesies to the contrary boys and adults are suffering far less. Drawing on feminist social constructionist perspectives the book seeks to examine this epidemic of body-hatred.

T. S. Eliot said of the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580 1627) that 'he wrote one tragedy which more than any other play except those of Shakespeare has a profound and permanent moral value and horror': Middleton has increasingly been recognised as one of the most important, if not the most important, Jacobean dramatist after Shakespeare himself. This volume contains The Changeling (of which Eliot gave so high an estimate), together with Middleton's other surviving tragedy, Women Beware Women, his best comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and a more light-hearted early play, A Mad World, My Masters. Though Middleton is typical of many university-trained writers of the period who eked out a living in popular entertainment, his work has a cold satiric stance, a grimly determinist flavour and a savage economy which make it unique. He wrote plays for the boys' companies in the early 1600s and later for Shakespeare's own company, the King's Men, but seems never to have established himself as more than a jobbing dramatist.

First published in 1976, The Cambridge Liturgical Psalter is a modern English-language version prepared for public and private worship by a panel of eight Hebrew specialists drawn from various Christian traditions, working over a period of six years and in collaboration with a single literary scholar who was conversant with the long tradition of translations into English of this ancient Biblical text. Excerpted in a Penguin classic, The Psalms in English (1996), as one of only two versions chosen to represent the twentieth Century, it went into six national prayer books, was bound up as The Liturgical Psalter in An Alternative Service Book 1980, and was authorised for use in various Churches world-wide. It remains a version licensed for use in the Church of England. The Cambridge Liturgical Psalter represents the best modern understanding of what is on occasions a very difficult Hebrew text. Recognized by Jews and Christians as a reliable translation, it is here published for the first time with Notes prepared by the Secretary of the original Hebrew panel to explain the reasoning behind their decisions. 'A masterly production' JOHN CROOK, Professor of Ancient History, University of Cambridge. 'This is the version we should henceforth teach our children' GORDON WAKEFIELD, Moderator of the United Reformed Church.