The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901
Author: Heidi Liedke File Type: pdf This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that idleness is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of the Victorians as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to re-subjectification and the assertion of a late-Romantic sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between Romantic and Victorian, the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context. **
Author: Andrew Schartmann
File Type: pdf
Koji Kondos Super Mario Bros. (1985) score redefined video game music. With under three minutes of music, Kondo put to rest an era of bleeps and bloops-the sterile products of a lab environment-replacing it with one in which game sounds constituted a legitimate form of artistic expression. Andrew Schartmann takes us through the various external factors (e.g., the video game crash of 1983, Nintendos marketing tactics) that coalesced into a ripe environment in which Kondos musical experiments could thrive. He then delves into the music itself, searching for reasons why our hearts still dance to the primitive 8-bit tunes of a bygone era. What musical features are responsible for Kondos distinct Mario sound? How do the different themes underscore the vastness of Princess Peachs Mushroom Kingdom? And in what ways do the games sound effects resonate with our physical experience of the world? These and other questions are explored within, through the lens of Kondos compositional philosophy-one that would influence an entire generation of video game composers. As Kondo himself stated, we [at Nintendo] were trying to do something that had never been done before. In this book, Schartmann shows his readers how Kondo and his team not just succeeded, but heralded in a new era of video games. **
Author: Robin Blackburn
File Type: pdf
Robin Blackburns history captures the complexity of a revolutionary age in a compelling narrative. In some cases colonial rule fell while slavery flourished, as happened in the South of the United States and in Btazil elsewhere slavery ended but colonial rule remained, as in the British West Indies and French Windwards. But in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated. This story of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the `first emancipation in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel actions of slave resistance and metropolitan abolitionism, and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism. --
Author: David Runciman
File Type: pdf
Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. The Confidence Trap shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them--and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything--a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasnt already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap. Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008.A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama.In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them--and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything--a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasnt already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.**
Author: Michelina Di Cesare
File Type: pdf
This volume collects medieval Latin texts from the 8th to the 14th centuries that shape a pseudo-historical image of the Prophet Muhammad. The texts, from critical editions, manuscripts and early printed books, are arranged in chronological order in 55 entries. Each is provided with an introduction, notes and a bibliography. The volume is an essential tool for the historical research of Christian-Muslim relations.**
Author: J. R. C. Cousland
File Type: pdf
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (or Paidika) is one of the most unusual gospels in the Christian tradition. Instead of revealing the compassionate Jesus so familiar to us from the biblical Gospels, it confronts its readers with a very different Jesus a child who sometimes acts like a holy terror, killing and harming others for trifling faults. So why is Jesus portrayed as acting in such an unchristian fashion? To address this question, Cousland focuses on three interconnected representations of Jesus in the Paidika Jesus as holy terror, as child, and as miracle-working saviour. Cousland endeavours to show that, despite the differing character of these three roles, they present a unified picture. Jesus unusual behaviour arises from his growing pains as a developing child, who is at the same time both human and divine. Couslands volume is the first detailed examination of the Christology of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and provides a fresh and engaging approach to a topic not often discussed in representations of Jesus.
Author: Keri Leigh Merritt
File Type: pdf
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these masterless men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.**ReviewOne of the books many strengths is that Merritt tells the story of poor white southerners without downplaying the experiences of black southerners and the brutality of slavery.ul lL.A. Review of Booksl ulFor Merritts poor (landless, slaveless, mostly propertyless) whites, relying on whiteness as a means of class mobility was normally out of the question, and the same elite and bourgeois institutions that sustained slavery also went a long way in oppressing poor whites slavery as a driver of low wages and unemployment an almost total lack of public schools and access to credit slave patrols and behavioral laws and community surveillance as forms of social control and retributive justice (against poor whites, too) and the slaveholders monopolization of land, resources, credit, and political power.ul lCounterpunchl ulBook Description Owning neither land nor slaves, poor whites comprised about a third of the American Souths white population in 1860. Focusing on land, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men shows what happens to excess workers in a slave society.
Author: Peter Goodrich
File Type: pdf
Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake. Contributors Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trustedt, Marco WanReview The essays in this timely and provocative volume are concerned with the shaping of laws interpretive spaces and with the temporal and spatial management of law towards the possibility for justice. With new and important perspectives on the significance of Derrida and Agamben for legal critique, Administering Interpretation will be welcomed across the disciplines by scholars interested in legal theory, politics, and interpretive practice. - bBradin Cormack, Princeton Universityb This collection is a cumulative and powerful display of the possibilities inherent in continental philosophy for the work of legal interpretation. Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld underline to important effect the woeful marginality of critical jurisprudence and critical legal interpretation in the contemporary U.S. legal academy, in contrast to transoceanic points of comparison. The collection itself is an effective advertisement for the absurdity of that marginality. -b Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, School of Lawb