This book is a study of the literary strategies which the first professional philosophers used to market their respective disciplines. Philosophers of fourth-century BCE Athens developed the emerging genre of the "protreptic" (literally, "turning" or "converting"). Simply put, protreptic discourse uses a rhetoric of conversion that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy in order to live a good life. The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize a new cultural institution: the school of higher learning (the first in Western history).
The most original and ground-breaking work on Beowulf in several decades, this book uses “lexomic” methods that blend computer-assisted statistical analysis with traditional approaches to reveal new and surprising information about the construction and sources of the greatest surviving Old English poem. Techniques of cluster analysis identify patterns of vocabulary distribution that indicate robust similarities and differences among segments of the poem. The correlation of these patterns with knowledge gained from source-study, philological analysis, and neglected previous scholarship sheds new light on the material of which Beowulf was made and the way it was composed.
This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story. Victorian ghost stories have traditionally been read in the context of agnosticism – as stories which reveal a society struggling with Christian orthodoxy in a new ‘Enlightened’ world. This book, however, uses theological ideas from St Augustine through to modern theologians to identify a theological journey taken by the protagonists of such stories, and charts each stage of this journey through the short stories it examines.
The Handbook of English for Academic Purposes provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to English for Academic Purposes (EAP), covering the main theories, concepts, contexts and applications of this fast growing area of applied linguistics.
Authored by specialists from around the world, each chapter focuses on a different area of EAP and provides a state-of-the-art review of the key ideas and concepts. Illustrative case studies are included wherever possible, setting out in an accessible way the pitfalls, challenges and opportunities of research or practice in that area. Suggestions for further reading are included with each chapter.
Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, and material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions, book culture, translations, film and television adaptations, festivals, and national heritage.
