Jeannette King explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important female novelists, including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analyzing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important interdisciplinary debate. While showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might challenge that power through their own lives.
Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence.
If you’re like most people, you’ve already met some poisonous creatures. Perhaps you’ve been stung by a honeybee, or touched by a jellyfish. Surely you’ve seen pictures of tarantulas and rattlesnakes. Now you can read and find out more about these amazing animals.
This old book is a great introduction to all of the fields that make up cognitive science at a relatively low price, although it could use an updated edition. It takes a computational perspective as it surveys the various areas, and that is good for someone coming from a scientific field. It covers psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, relating them all to the field of cognitive science. In spite of the complexity of each of these individual areas, there really are no hard prerequisites for reading it. However, I would recommend you have at least an upper-level undergraduate knowledge of two of the fields covered in order to better see the total interconnection of all the fields. The book probably goes into the most depth in the areas of natural language processing and vision because these are the most computationally complex. This book is not the last word on any of the fields it covers, but it will get you started.
Life on Mars, a strange dream, and attacks by murderous birds -these are just some of the subjects of these enjoyable short stories. They will amuse and shock you.
