Author: Carolyn Conley File Type: pdf The Unwritten Law examines the values and assumptions of mid-Victorian England as revealed in the actual workings of the criminal justice system. The working definitions of criminality and justice were often influenced more by certain tacit assumptions than by the written law. Through a careful study of the ways that the status and circumstances of victims and suspects influenced judicial decisions, Conley provides important new insights into Victorian attitudes toward violence, women, children, community, and the all-important concept of respectability. She also addresses issues that continue to be of concern in todays society How can equal justice be preserved when social and economic conditions and expectations are not equal? How can the rights of the accused be reconciled with those of victims--especially children? Can and should the courts interfere with the traditions of family and community? What standards can determine the criminality of a particular act and the justice and efficacy of punishment? This original analysis will hold special interest for students and scholars of British history, social history, and criminality and the law.ReviewThis is a welcome addition to the literature on the nature of crime and criminal justice in England.--Journal of Modern HistoryA valuable contribution to Victorian social history....Provides a rich resource for other more specialized historical studies, while offering a fascinating mosaic of late-Victorian society.--American Historical ReviewWith a fascinating array of cases to illustrate her argument...Conleys volume abounds in revealing insights.--Journal of Social HistoryA valuable contribution to this field.--Victorian StudiesA useful addition to the growing literature on local crime and police studies. Conley has provided an interesting and balanced treatment of her subject.--ChoiceAbout the AuthorCarolyn A. Conley is at University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Author: V. S. Naipaul File Type: mobi ReviewA Tolstoyan spirit.... The so-called Third World has produced no more brilliant literary artist.John Updike, *The New Yorkerbr Ambitious and successful.The Times *(London) A profound novel of cultural displacement, The Mimic Men masterfully evokes a colonial mans experience in a postcolonial world.br Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he secretly fantasized about a heroic India, yet changed his name from Ranjit Kripalsingh. As he assesses his short-lived marriage to an ostentatious white woman, Singh realizes what has kept him from becoming a proper Englishman. But it is the return home and his subsequent immersion in the roiling political atmosphere of a newly self-governed nation that ultimately provide Singh with the necessary insight to discover the crux of his disillusionment.

Author: James Overfield File Type: pdf This analysis of the intellectual life of German universities in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries demonstrates that humanist-scholastic relations were not the titanic struggles depicted in the humanists own arguments or in many modern chronicles. Eschewing neat but misleading dichotomies, the author desribes the German humanists critique of scholasticism from the 1450s to the 1510s and the scholastics response. He traces the reception of humanists in Germanys universities, including their place in the academic corporation, the opposition they faced, and the pace of humanist curriculum reforms, and he places the famous Reuchlin affair and other intellectual feuds in the context of humanist-scholastic relations.After 1500 the calls of the early humanists for the reform of Latin grammar instruction and the teaching of the studia humanitatis gave way to more encompassing attacks on scholastic theology and the philosophical offerings of the arts course. This study draws on a wide variety of sources to describe both the gradual emergence of Renaissance humanism after 1450 and its rapid triumph after 1500.a name=reviewsabEndorsementbA major book that is of vital importance for understanding the intellectual milieu from which the Reformation emerged.--Guy Fitch Lytle, University of Texas

Author: Edith Wharton File Type: epub Edith Whartons masterpiece brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age. Set among the very rich in 1870s New York, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal. As all three are drawn into a love triangle filled with sensuality, subtlety, and betrayal, Archer faces a harrowing choice between happiness and the social code that has ruled his life. The resulting tale of thwarted love is filled with irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance. Recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever awarded to a woman, this great novel paints a timeless portrait of society still unmatched in American literaturean arbitrary, capricious social elite that professes inviolable standards but readily abandons them for greed and desire.**