A delightfully funny story about friendship and seasonal change from the multi-award-winning Julia Donaldson. Chack the blackbird and Apollo the swallow are friends. But when Apollo tells Chack that he will soon be flying to Africa – Chack doesn't believe him. And when Chack tells Apollo that the blossom on his favourite tree will one day turn into orange berries – Apollo doesn't believe him either! But as the seasons change, Chack and Apollo are both in for a big surprise … Join Chack and Apollo on a round-the-world adventure in this delightfully funny story about friendship and change. From the author of the multi-million-selling The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson, Follow the Swallow is the perfect book for EVERY season!

"A beautiful, gentle, rhyming exploration of grief and mourning." - Joe Coelho, Waterstones Children's Laureate The Hare-Shaped Hole is a beautiful, touching, and poignant picture book which gently explores themes of grief and loss. Hertle and Bertle were always a pair, though one was a turtle and one was a hare. They were utterly buddies, and best friends forever and whenever you looked, you would find them together... until quite unexpectedly... the end came. When Hertle disappears for good, Bertle can only see a Hertle-shaped hole where his friend should be. He pleads with it, get angry with it, but the hole still won't bring his Hertle back. It seems like hope is lost... until Gerda the kindly bear finds him. She explains that he must fill the hole with his memories of Hertle. And slowly... Bertle begins to feel a little bit better. Powerful and moving text from children's author and poet John Dougherty is paired perfectly with warm illustrations from the wonderfully talented Thomas Docherty in a thoughtful and sensitive approach to this difficult topic. This moving picture book can be used as part of a gentle conversation about death and grief with children.

One night Joe leaves his window open and with a swirl of leaves and a flap of feathers, the Wild invites him outside to explore the night-time city. Joe learns that animals and plants can thrive even in the most built-up environment, and that with a bit of imagination, a city can be full of surprises.

Exploring the controversial history of an aesthetic - realism - this book examines the role that realism plays in the negotiation of social, political, and material realities from the mid-19th century to the present day. Examining a broad range of literary texts from French, English, Italian, German, and Russian writers, this book provides new insights into how realism engages with themes including capital, social decorum, the law and its politicisation, modern science as a determining factor concerning truth, and the politics of identity. Considering works from Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell, Docherty proposes a new philosophical conception of the politics of realism in an age where politics feels increasingly erratic and fantastical.

Wie ken nie die seun met die goue hare en die wit hoedjie wat op die groot, wit gans oor Lapland sweef nie? Dis Niels Holgersson, natuurlik.

Niels Holgersson bly op ’n plaas in Swede. Hy is ’n klein niksnut. Eendag gebeur iets vreemds met hom. Hy word in ’n kabouter verander en beland op die rug van ’n mak gans. Saam beleef Niels en die gans Maarten groot avonture. Hulle emigreer saam met die wildeganse na Lapland.

Onderweg maak hulle vriende, soos meneer Emerik die ooievaar en Donsie, die grys gans. Maar hulle moet ligloop vir Smirre, die geslepe jakkals ...

This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication.
Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of 'transparency'. In a postmodern 'transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, 'here I take my stand'.
The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims 'I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood.

This book deals with the arguments over postmodernism. Going beyond the post-structuralist controversy in its interdisciplinary scope, postmodernism questions the fundamental civil, political, ethical and cultural criteria which make criticism and theory available, legitimate, or, indeed, impossible. Yet since the key texts are widely scattered, the broad range of arguments remain relatively unknown.

Anna het 'n lewendige verbeelding met drome wat vir haar werklik voel. Een oggend word sy wakker en besef dat sy haar droom nie kan onthou nie. Saam met haar hond reis sy deur haar drome op soek na die verlore droom. Hulle ontmoet reuse, vampiere, en 'n herhalende droom. Oplaas vind Anna die antwoord: haar droom was nader as wat sy gedink het. Sy klim weer in die snoesige bed en sien uit na nog interessante drome.

"Alterities" marks an advance to a new stage in critical theory. Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary with cinema from popular to art-film and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Badiou, Thomas Docherty intervenes in the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practise a new literary criticism, with theoretical foundations rooted in a postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art.

Alterities marks an advance to a new stage of critical theory. Dealing with literature from Shakespeare and Donne to Calvino, with philosophy from the medieval to the contemporary, with cinema from popular to art-film, and with political theory from Marx to Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Badiou, Thomas Docherty intervenes in all the major contemporary cultural debates to propose and practice a new criticism, whose theoretical foundations lie in a postmodern ethics, ecopolitics, and an austere attention to the radical difficulties of art. Bound together by the cohesive drive of Docherty's intelligence and the coerciveness of the arguments he enlarges about alterity and historicity, Alterities rehabilitates the question of why we bother about art, and proposes new modes of critical engagement with contemporary culture.

Mood is a phenomenon whose study is inherently interdisciplinary. While it has remained resistant to theorisation, it nonetheless has a substantial influence on art, politics and society. Since its practical omnipresence in every-day life renders it one of the most significant aspects of affect studies, it has garnered an increasing amount of critical attention in a number of disciplines across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in the past two decades. Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical exploration of the phenomenon of mood from an interdisciplinary angle. Building on cutting-edge research in this emerging field and bringing together established and new voices, it bridges the existing disciplinary gap in the study of mood and further consolidates this phenomenon as a crucial concept in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study. By combining perspectives and concepts from the literary studies, philosophy, musicology, the social sciences, artistic practice and psychology, the volume does the complexity and richness of mood-related phenomena justice and benefits from the latent connections and synergies in different disciplinary approaches to the study of mood.

Mood is a phenomenon whose study is inherently interdisciplinary. While it has remained resistant to theorisation, it nonetheless has a substantial influence on art, politics and society. Since its practical omnipresence in every-day life renders it one of the most significant aspects of affect studies, it has garnered an increasing amount of critical attention in a number of disciplines across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in the past two decades. Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical exploration of the phenomenon of mood from an interdisciplinary angle. Building on cutting-edge research in this emerging field and bringing together established and new voices, it bridges the existing disciplinary gap in the study of mood and further consolidates this phenomenon as a crucial concept in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study. By combining perspectives and concepts from the literary studies, philosophy, musicology, the social sciences, artistic practice and psychology, the volume does the complexity and richness of mood-related phenomena justice and benefits from the latent connections and synergies in different disciplinary approaches to the study of mood.

Contemporary criticism of Donne has tended to ignore the historical culture and ideology that conditioned his writings, reinforcing the traditionally accepted model of the poet as a humanist of ethical, cultural and political individualism. In this title, first published in 1986, Thomas Docherty challenges this with a more rigorously theoretical reading of Donne, particularly in relation to the specific culture of the late Renaissance in Europe. Docherty locates Donne's poetry at the crux of the various scientific, legal, domestic and rhetorical discourses that surrounded and informed it. With a broadly post-structuralist approach, this reissue will benefit literature students with an interest in the wider study and context of John Donne's work.

Criticism and Modernity traces the conditions under which criticism emerges as a socio-cultural practice within the institutionalized forms of European modernity and democracy. It argues that criticism is born out of anxieties about national supremacy in the late seventeenth century, with the consequence that the emergent national cultures of the eighteenth century and since become sites for the regulation of the democratic subject through the academic form of arguments about the proper relations of aesthetics to ethics and politics. The central issue is that of legitimation: how can subjective aesthetic experiences regulate the norms of ethical justice? That question is posed not as an abstract philosophical issue, but rather as a question properly located within the struggles for national culture. The usual Germanic source of modern aesthetics and criticism is here placed in the broader European context, involving contests between England, France, Scotland, Ireland, and the emergent Germany and Italy. Writers addressed include Corneille, Dryden, Moliere, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer; and, throughout, the legacy of these thinkers is found in the most recent contemporary theory, in work by Agamben, Badiou, Lyotard, MacIntyre, and others. A closing chapter considers the formation of the university across modern Europe, in Vico's Naples, Humboldt's Berlin, Newman's Dublin, Blair's Edinburgh, the France of Alain and Benda, the England of Leavis, as well as our contemporary institutional predicaments.

Contemporary criticism of Donne has tended to ignore the historical culture and ideology that conditioned his writings, reinforcing the traditionally accepted model of the poet as a humanist of ethical, cultural and political individualism. In this title, first published in 1986, Thomas Docherty challenges this with a more rigorously theoretical reading of Donne, particularly in relation to the specific culture of the late Renaissance in Europe. Docherty locates Donne's poetry at the crux of the various scientific, legal, domestic and rhetorical discourses that surrounded and informed it. With a broadly post-structuralist approach, this reissue will benefit literature students with an interest in the wider study and context of John Donne's work.

This reader provides a selection of articles and essays by leading figures in the postmodernism debate.

From post-truth politics to "no-platforming" on university campuses, the English language has been both a potent weapon and a crucial battlefield for our divided politics. In this important and wide-ranging intervention, Thomas Docherty explores the politics of the English language, its implication in the dynamics of political power and the spaces it offers for dissent and resistance. From the authorised English of the King James Bible to the colonial project of University English Studies, this book develops a powerful history for contemporary debates about propaganda, free speech and truth-telling in our politics. Taking examples from the US, UK and beyond - from debates about the Second Amendment and free-speech on campus, to the Iraq War and the Grenfell Tower fire - this book is a powerful and polemical return to Orwell's observation that a degraded political language is intimately connected to an equally degraded political culture.

"A beautiful, gentle, rhyming exploration of grief and mourning." - Joe Coelho, UK Children's Laureate The Hare-Shaped Hole is a beautiful, touching, and poignant picture book which gently explores themes of grief and loss. Hertle and Bertle were always a pair, though one was a turtle and one was a hare. They were utterly buddies, and best friends forever, and whenever you looked, you would find them together... until quite unexpectedly... the end came. When Hertle disappears for good, Bertle can only see a Hertle-shaped hole where his friend should be. He pleads with it, get angry with it, but the hole still won't bring his Hertle back. It seems like hope is lost... until Gerda the kindly bear finds him. She explains that he must fill the hole with his memories of Hertle. And slowly... Bertle begins to feel a little bit better. Powerful and moving text from children's author and poet John Dougherty is paired perfectly with warm illustrations from the wonderfully talented Thomas Docherty in a thoughtful and sensitive approach to this difficult topic. This moving picture book can be used as part of a gentle conversation about loss with children.

Oxford Reading Tree Story Sparks is an emotionally-engaging fiction series that will fire children's imaginations and develop their comprehension skills. The variety of authors and illustrators broadens children's reading experience, with something to appeal to every child. The titles at Oxford Levels 1+ to 5 are phonically decodable with some extra high-interest words to expand children's vocabularies and enrich the stories. All the books in the series are carefully levelled, making it easy to match every reader to the right book. This pack contains 36 books, six of each of the following titles: Pip, Lop, Mip, Bop and the Bumbles, Tomorrow Never Comes, The Night Knight, Snoot's Birthday Surprise, Sometimes Mum is Silly and The Festival of Colours.