This book argues that Doctor Who, the world’s longest-running science fiction series often considered to be about distant planets and monsters, is in reality just as much about Britain and Britishness. Danny Nicol explores how the show, through science fiction allegory and metaphor, constructs national identity in an era in which identities are precarious, ambivalent, transient and elusive. It argues that Doctor Who’s projection of Britishness is not merely descriptive but normative—putting forward a vision of what the British ought to be.

Linking recent advances in theoretical syntax and empirical research in language development, the book claims that second language acquisition is not totally distinct from first language acquisition, but rather is a replay, a relearning of language. It argues that Universal Grammar is a template guiding acquisition of L1 while constraining acquisition of L2. Assuming that a syntactic distinction crucial for language and its acquisition is the division between lexical and functional categories, it argues that the key to L2 as well as L1 acquisition of syntax is the mastery of morphological features and their linking to functional categories.

There’s a crisis of trust in politics across the western world. Public anger is rising and faith in conventional political leaders and parties is falling. Anti-politics, and the anti-politicians, have arrived. In Enough Said, President and CEO of The New York Times Company Mark Thompson argues that one of most of significant causes of the crisis is the way our public language has changed.

Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the defining authors in the literature and culture of post-war America. Yet he has long been a polarising figure and throughout his long career he has won the disapproval of an extremely diverse range of public moralists -- including, it would seem, the Nobel Prize committee. Far from seeking to make Roth a more palatable writer, Patrick Hayes argues that Roth's interest in transgressing against the 'virtue racket', as one of his characters put it, defines his importance.

Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction

This book presents a complete reconsideration of the nature of narrative organization developed in the framework of a new and comprehensive approach to cognitive science: enaction. This new paradigm offers an understanding of human cognition based in the perception and sensory motor dynamics of an agent and a world. It argues that narrative is but one form of conceptual organization for human minds, the other being categorical organization.