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This chapter addresses the issue of how to read and critically decode spectral messages. It analyses the literary qualities of spirit messages. Some of the literary works that are analysed in this chapter include Eliot's ‘The Lifted Veil’, where it explores the relationship between the literary imagination and clairvoyance. This chapter also takes a look at Browning's poems in order to examine the mysterious transmission of literary ideas.
This book is dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. It applies practices of reading texts from literary and cultural studies to consider the computer game as an emerging mode of contemporary storytelling. The book contains detailed discussion of narrative and realism in four of the most significant games of the last decade: ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Half-Life’, ‘Close Combat’, and ‘Sim City’. It recognises the excitement and pleasure that has made the computer game such a massive global phenomenon.
what is at stake in exploring another way of reading texts. The encounter of feminists within the Anglo/American tradition with poststructuralist theory is marked by a series of important publications which introduced the work of so-called ‘French feminists’63 to an audience unfamiliar with the theoretical debates taking place in France (Marks and de Courtivron, 1980; Moi, 1985; Jardine, 1985). These had a profound impact. Women conscious of belonging to a vibrant and successful movement recoiled in shock at writing which appeared to undermine both their
between methodological innovation and conceptual conservatism. Friedrich Wilken (1777–1840) established a narrative that exerted a similar influence in Germany as Michaud’s had in France. Ranke’s pupil von Sybel challenged traditional approaches to reading texts, even if he replaced them with his own somewhat illusory romantic vision of the genesis of narrative sources. In the following generation, focus on the discovery, appraisal and editing of primary evidence by professional textual scholars placed crusade history on a new, intellectually more secure footing
Gothic, in a sense, has always been 'queer'. This book illustrates the rich critical complexity which is involved in reading texts through queer theories. It provides a queer reading of such early Gothic romances as William Beckford's Vathek, Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Building upon critical trend of desire between men, the book examines Frankenstein's engagement with sexual rhetoric in the early nineteenth century. It explores some ways in which the signifying practices of queerness are written into the language and, therefore, the signifying practices of Gothic fiction. Teleny's apparently medicalised representation of homosexual erotic love contains some strikingly Gothic elements. The book examines how the courtroom drama of the E. M. Forster's A Passage to India focuses on the monstrous possibility of miscegenation, an Indian accused of raping an Englishwoman. Antonia White's Frost in May can be contextualised to the concept of the 'lesbian Gothic', which helpfully illuminates the representation of adolescent female subjectivity and sexuality. Same-sex desire is represented indirectly through sensuous descriptions of the female body and intertextual allusions to other erotic texts. The book considers how the vampire has become an ambivalent emblem of gay sexuality in late twentieth-century Gothic fiction by examining Interview with the Vampire and Lost Souls. The understanding of the Gothic and queer theory in a pop video is achieved by considering how Michael Jackson's use of the Gothic in Thriller and Ghosts queers the temporality of childhood.
This section is not about definitions but about illustration. Why craft is an ineffective measure of the poem, how spirituality and the poem dialogue, a series of commentaries on ‘reading’ texts from childhood to the present day with an emphasis on creating an experimental novel when I was a teenager, and tracing its unusual history through to its recent publication as it moved through different zones of intactness and rehabilitation, an ‘introduction’ to collaborating on a collection of Persian poetry and how not being in Iran affects this process, a biographical overview of the nineteenth-century poet Auguste Lacaussade (La Réunion and France), and finally a long piece on McKenzie Wark’s and Kathy Acker’s intense email correspondence that came out of a brief physical interaction and the displacements (alluded to) that emerge from this.
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.
, they paid no attention to the fact that a fair proportion of pupils in elementary schooling, especially in large urban centres, were likely to be of Jewish or other immigrant origin. 5 Explanations in reading texts of imperial origins reveal much about the intra-British power relations in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If Linda Colley is correct in her assertion that Britishness
, what the Commission did and did not say with regard to the role of international organizations and that of ‘non-State actors’, since some of the contributions in this volume (like one or two States in the UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee) seem not to have fully appreciated what was said within the Commission or what the Commission itself actually said in its second reading texts. The Commission’s second reading in 2018 involved a detailed review of the earlier draft conclusions and commentaries (adopted on first reading in 2016) in light of comments received