The ten readings in this 1985 volume were originally delivered as Lecturae Dantis at the University of Cambridge. Their purpose is twofold: to offer a well-informed commentary on individual Cantos of The Divine Comedy, and to prove to those who wish to read Dante's poem but do not have a close familiarity with the language - or indeed have little or no knowledge of it - that it can be done with the help of a prose translation. Professor Limentani offers a scrupulous exposition of each of the ten Cantos, ironing out linguistic difficulties. His principal aim is to provide an overall idea of Dante's purpose in writing the poem, of his artistry, of his conception of the universe, and of his views on contemporary politics. The volume is genuinely introductory and could be profitably read by all non-specialists approaching Dante's poem for the first time.
This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.
Anthony Trollope was among the most prolific, popular, and richly diverse writers of the mid-Victorian period, with forty-seven novels and a variety of other writings to his name. Both a serial and series writer whose novels traversed Ireland, England, Australia and New Zealand, and genres from realism to science fiction, Trollope also published criticism, short fiction, travel writing and biography. The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope provides a state-of-the-field review of critical perspectives on his work, with the volume's sixteen essays addressing Trollope's biography, autobiography, canonical fiction, short stories and travel writing, as well as surveying diverse topics including gender, sexuality, vulgarity, and the law.
The figure of the grateful slave, devoted to his or her master in thanks for kind treatment, is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century writing from Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack (1722) to Maria Edgeworth's 'The Grateful Negro' (1804). Yet this important trope, linked with discourses that tried to justify racial oppression, slavery and colonialism, has been overlooked in eighteenth-century literary research. Challenging previous accounts of the relationship between sentiment and slavery, in this book George Boulukos shows how the image of the grateful slave contributed to colonial practices of white supremacy in the later eighteenth century. Seemingly sympathetic to slaves, the trope actually undermines their cause and denies their humanity by showing African slaves as willingly accepting their condition. Taking in literary sources as well as texts on colonialism and slavery, Boulukos offers a fresh account of the development of racial difference, and of its transatlantic dissemination, in the
Theodore Dreiser is one of the most penetrating observers of the greatest period of social change the United States ever saw. Writing as America emerged as the world's wealthiest nation, Dreiser chronicled industrial and economic transformation and the birth of consumerism with an unmatched combination of detail, sympathy, and power. The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume are written by a leading team of scholars of American literature and culture. They establish parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.
The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature offers students a literary history of American writing in English between 1492 and 1820, as well as providing a concise social and cultural history of these three centuries. Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture, and explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature. Elliott provides an overview of the oral and written literature of the Europeans who explored, settled and colonised the North American continent. He goes on to focus on the New England Puritans and demonstrates the lasting impact of their thought and writing on early American literature. Elliott traces the evolution of forms and genres that have come to be seen as quintessentially American. This highly engaging and comprehensive study will be essential reading for students of the literature, history and culture of early America.
This Companion volume provides a comprehensive overview of the major themes and topics pertinent to ancient Greek law. A substantial introduction establishes the recent historiography on this topic and its development over the last 30 years. Many of the 22 essays, written by an international team of experts, deal with procedural and substantive law in classical Athens, but significant attention is also paid to legal practice in the archaic and Hellenistic eras; areas that offer substantial evidence for legal practice, such as Crete and Egypt; the intersection of law with religion, philosophy, political theory, rhetoric, and drama, as well as the unity of Greek law and the role of writing in law. The volume is intended to introduce non-specialists to the field as well as to stimulate new thinking among specialists.
The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe establishes new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Beecher Stowe's writing and life. This collection of specially commissioned essays provides new perspectives on the frequently read classic Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Stowe's representation of race, her attitude to reform, and her relationship to the American novel. The volume investigates Stowe's impact on the American literary tradition and the novel of social change. Contributions also offer lucid and provocative readings that analyze Stowe's writings through a variety of contexts, including antebellum reform, regionalism, law and the protest novel. Fresh, accessible, and engaged, this is the most up to date introduction available to Stowe's work. The volume, which offers a comprehensive chronology of Stowe's life and a helpful guide to further reading, will be of interest to students and teachers alike.
The purpose of this book is to introduce the basic ideas of mathematical proof to students embarking on university mathematics. The emphasis is on helping the reader in understanding and constructing proofs and writing clear mathematics. This is achieved by exploring set theory, combinatorics and number theory, topics which include many fundamental ideas which are part of the tool kit of any mathematician. This material illustrates how familiar ideas can be formulated rigorously, provides examples demonstrating a wide range of basic methods of proof, and includes some of the classic proofs. The book presents mathematics as a continually developing subject. Material meeting the needs of readers from a wide range of backgrounds is included. Over 250 problems include questions to interest and challenge the most able student as well as plenty of routine exercises to help familiarize the reader with the basic ideas.
The figure of the grateful slave, devoted to his or her master in thanks for kind treatment, is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century writing from Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack (1722) to Maria Edgeworth's 'The Grateful Negro' (1804). Yet this important trope, linked with discourses that tried to justify racial oppression, slavery and colonialism, has been overlooked in eighteenth-century literary research. Challenging previous accounts of the relationship between sentiment and slavery, in this book George Boulukos shows how the image of the grateful slave contributed to colonial practices of white supremacy in the later eighteenth century. Seemingly sympathetic to slaves, the trope actually undermines their cause and denies their humanity by showing African slaves as willingly accepting their condition. Taking in literary sources as well as texts on colonialism and slavery, Boulukos offers a fresh account of the development of racial difference, and of its transatlantic dissemination, in the
Silvan Tomkins was one of the most influential theorists on emotion and emotional expression. Over a period of 40 - some years - until his death in 1991 - he developed a set of original, important ideas about the nature of affect and its relationship to cognition and personality. Tomkins dealt with fundamental questions in a fresh and provocative way, establishing affect as a separate, biological system, and providing compelling data on discrete affect expressions. Several years before his death, Professor Tomkins agreed to bring his papers (unpublished and published) together into Exploring Affect for Cambridge Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. He worked with Paul Ekman and Klaus Scherer to develop a structure for the book that would synthesize his theory of emotion. Unfortunately, he died before he was able to complete the process. Virginia Demos, who knew Professor Tomkins well, took on the enormous task of compiling the papers and writing connective material for the book.
This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.
This is the first book dedicated to providing exam practice in the new required single best answer question style for the FRCA. It contains 300 single best answer multiple choice questions and advice on how to approach revision and sitting the exam. There are also four 75-question exam papers, each with an answer section containing detailed explanations of the reasoning behind the answer and providing background information about each topic. SBAs for the Final FRCA may be used for examination practice and as a source of knowledge on many of the key topics in the syllabus. From the writing team behind SAQs for the Final FRCA, this book uses a similar style of challenging questions and well researched explanations to help the candidate through the new FRCA written paper. This is an invaluable tool for your exam preparation.
In this book, Anne Porter explores the idea that mobile and sedentary members of the ancient world were integral parts of the same social and political groups in greater Mesopotamia during the period 4000 to 1500 BCE. She draws on a wide range of archaeological and cuneiform sources to show how networks of social structure, political and religious ideology, and everyday as well as ritual practice worked to maintain the integrity of those groups when the pursuit of different subsistence activities dispersed them over space. These networks were dynamic, shaping many of the key events and innovations of the time, including the Uruk expansion and the introduction of writing, so-called secondary state formation and the organization and operation of government, the literary production of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the first stories of Gilgamesh, and the emergence of the Amorrites in the second millennium BCE.
The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain offers new and thought provoking essays on an author of enduring pre-eminence in the American canon. The book is a collaborative project, assembled by scholars who have played crucial roles in the recent explosion of Twain criticism. Accessible enough to interest both experienced specialists and students new to Twain criticism, the essays examine Twain from a wide variety of critical perspectives, and include timely reflections by major critics on the hotly debated dynamics of race and slavery perceptible throughout his writing. The volume includes a chronology of Twain's life and a list of suggestions for further reading, to provide the students or general reader with sources for background as well as additional information.
The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe establishes new parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Beecher Stowe's writing and life. This collection of specially commissioned essays provides new perspectives on the frequently read classic Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Stowe's representation of race, her attitude to reform, and her relationship to the American novel. The volume investigates Stowe's impact on the American literary tradition and the novel of social change. Contributions also offer lucid and provocative readings that analyze Stowe's writings through a variety of contexts, including antebellum reform, regionalism, law and the protest novel. Fresh, accessible, and engaged, this is the most up to date introduction available to Stowe's work. The volume, which offers a comprehensive chronology of Stowe's life and a helpful guide to further reading, will be of interest to students and teachers alike.
Current theories and views on the differences in the 'mind' of human societies depend very much on a dichotomy between 'advanced' and 'primitive', or between 'open' and 'closed', or between 'domesticated' and 'savage', that is to say, between one of a whole variety of 'we-they' distinctions. Professor Goody argues that such an approach prevents any serious discussion of the mechanisms leading to long-term changes in the cognitive processes of human cultures or any adequate explanation of the changes in 'traditional' societies that are taking place in the world around us. In this book he attempts to provide the framework for a more satisfactory explanation by relating certain broad differences in 'mentalities' to the changes in the means of communication, and specifically to the series of shifts involved in the development of writing. The argument is based upon theoretical considerations, as well as empirical evidence derived from recent fieldwork in West Africa and the study of a wide
Unlike existing texts, this book blends for the first time three topics in physics - symmetry, condensed matter physics and computational methods - into one pedagogical textbook. It includes new concepts in mathematical crystallography; experimental methods capitalizing on symmetry aspects; non-conventional applications such as Fourier crystallography, color groups, quasicrystals and incommensurate systems; as well as concepts and techniques behind the Landau theory of phase transitions. Adopting a computational approach to the application of group theoretical techniques to solving symmetry related problems, it dramatically alleviates the need for intensive calculations usually found in the presentation of symmetry. Writing computer programs helps the student achieve a firm understanding of the underlying concepts, and sample programs, based on Mathematica, are presented throughout the book. Containing over 150 exercises, this textbook is ideal for graduate students in condensed matter
The Elements of MATLAB Style is a guide for both new and experienced MATLAB programmers. It provides a comprehensive collection of standards and guidelines for creating solid MATLAB code that will be easy to understand, enhance, and maintain. It is written for both individuals and those working in teams in which consistency is critical. This is the only book devoted to MATLAB style and best programming practices, focusing on how MATLAB code can be written in order to maximize its effectiveness. Just as Strunk and White's The Elements of Style provides rules for writing in the English language, this book provides conventions for formatting, naming, documentation, programming and testing. It includes many concise examples of correct and incorrect usage, as well as coverage of the latest language features. The author also provides recommendations on use of the integrated development environment features that help produce better, more consistent software.
Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels - challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligent - remain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. The highly successful Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere. The remaining chapters, as well as the guide to further reading, have all been fully updated. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf remains the first port of call for students new to Woolf's work, with its informative, readable style, chronology and authoritative information about secondary sources.a
