The authors of this volume explore rhetorical and discursive strategies used to negotiate and establish legitimate knowledge and its disciplinary boundaries, to make scientific knowledge interesting outside academic settings as well, and to manage (c)overt knowledge in different social and political contexts. The volume focuses on the cultural concept of knowledge society, examining diverse linguistic means of knowledge transmission from the perspective of the complex interplay between knowledge and persuasion. The contributors discuss both sociological and philosophical issues, as well as textual processes in different genres that aim to communicate knowledge.

Based on three lectures given by Professor Richard Proudfoot in October 1999 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of The Globe, The Arden Shakespeare's centenary and Professor Proudfoot's retirement from King's College; this enjoyable volume aims to give a general and non-specialist audience some sense of what scholarship has achieved in three critical areas of Shakespeare studies at the end of the twentieth century. Freshly and engagingly written, this lively volume will appeal to all those with an interest in Shakespeare studies.

An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire’s classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek’s massive online archive, http://metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics.

What is humour in the English Middle Ages? Does the comic serve any function other than pleasure? How might we reexamine ideas of identity and cultural complexity in terms of humour in medieval England? As a basis, the contributors to this volume work within a number of assumptions about the humour of the period.

This volume addresses language socialization, the research area that focuses on the social, cultural and interactional contexts in which language and other knowledge are learned, both formally and informally. The volume offers: •An important 30-year retrospective of the roots and development of language socialization •Insights from a wide range of linguistic, ethnic, and geographical regions of the world •Views on language socialization as a lifelong process that takes place in various and multiple settings and over first and second/foreign languages •Approaches from different, complementary traditions and disciplines