Emma is one of Jane Austen's most popular novels, in large part due to the impact of Emma Woodhouse, the 'handsome, clever and rich' heroine. This lively, informed and insightful guide to Emma explores the style, structure, themes, critical reputation and literary influence of Jane Austen's classic novel and also discusses its film and TV versions. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading.

The Origins of Old English Morphology

The proper understanding of language always implies the understanding of its past and the circumstances that lead to its present state. This makes historical linguistics a field that is worth studying, and it shows that in its methods it is on an equal level with contemporary automatic analysis of natural language.

Proust's English

English is the "second language" of A la recherche du temps perdu. Although much has been written about Proust's debt to English literature, especially Ruskin, Daniel Karlin is the first critic to focus on his knowledge of the language itself--on vocabulary, idiom, and etymology. He uncovers an "English world" in Proust's work, a world whose social comedy and artistic values reveal surprising connections to some of the novel's central preoccupations with sexuality and art.

ken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings

The triumph of English in the Renaissance--the successful efforts to advance the status of English over Latin and the continental vernaculars--has long been considered the major linguistic event of the period. Too often, Paula Blank argues, this has obscured the fact that English itself was divided by internal contests. By investigating the ways that early modern writers represented dialects, Blank reveals how "English" itself was a construct of the Renaissance, produced by discriminations made among alternative then-current "Englishes".

How Skeptics do Ethics - A Brief History of the Late Modern Linguistic Turn

Enlightenment philosophers are often credited with formulating many theories about humankind and society, and in our post-modern age, we still live with some of the very same compelling, contentious and often unresolved questions about ourselves and the world we live in. Author Aubrey Neal suggests that one of these issues that lingers with us today is scepticism, and in 'How Skeptics do Ethics', he unravels the thread of this philosophy from its origins in enlightenment thinking down to our present age. He contends that linguistics and language have not brought modern philosophy any closer to understanding the role and nature of ethics in our current science-based society.