Böcker utgivna av EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

What links Italian neorealism to Django Unchained, French comic books to Third-World insurgency, and Bollywood song-and-dance to Eastern Bloc film distribution? As this volume illustrates, the answers lie in the Spaghetti Western genre.As the reference points of American popular culture became ever more prominent in post-war Europe, the hundreds of films that make up the Italian (or 'Spaghetti') Western documented profound shifts in their home country's cultural outlook, while at the same time denying specifically national discourses. An object of fascination and great affection for fans, filmmakers and academics alike, the Western allitaliana arose from a diverse confluence of cultural strands, and would become a pivotal moment in cinematic history.Reappraising a diverse selection of films, from the internationally famed works of Sergio Leone to the cult cachet of Sergio Corbucci and the more obscure outputs of such directors as Giuseppe Colizzi and Ferdinando Baldi, this comprehensive study brings together leading international scholars in a variety of disciplines to both revisit the genre's cultural significance and consider its on-going influence on international film industries.

The third duke of Buccleuch (17461812) presided over the management of one of Britain's largest landed estates during a period of profound agrarian, social and political change. Tutored by the philosopher Adam Smith, the duke was also a leading patron of the Scottish Enlightenment, lauded by the Edinburgh literati as an exemplar of patriotic nobility and civic virtue, while his alliance with Henry Dundas dominated Scottish politics for almost 40 years. Combining the approaches of intellectual, economic and agrarian history, this book examines the life and career of the third duke, focusing in particular on his relationship with Adam Smith and the improvement of his vast Border estates, assessing the influence of Enlightenment thought on agricultural revolution. In its exploration of the cultural as well as the economic roots of Improvement and in its assessment of a previously unappreciated aspect of Smith's career, this book has appeal for both specialist scholars and general readers interested in the Scottish Enlightenment and the culture of Improvement in 18th-century Scotland.

From early cinema to present-day scientific research, military uses, digital art and gaming, this book casts new light on the capacity of the moving image to act as a record of the world around us, challenging the orthodox definitions of documentary cinema.

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.

Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (even including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, post-socialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique post-socialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film.

Now available in a completely revised edition, this book describes the English language between the years 1500 and 1700 - the different varieties of the language, the attitudes of its speakers towards it, its pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. It will be useful to serious students of the history of English and takes full account of those readers who are mainly interested in the literature of the period by providing plenty of references to literary works and authors.

Edinburgh University Press will publish two self-contained guides to reading al-Jahiz that also shed light on his society and its writings. This first volume, 'In Praise of Books', is devoted to bibliomania and al-Jahiz's bibliophilia. Volume 2, In Censure of Books, explores Al-Jahiz's bibliophobia. Al-Jahiz was a bibliomaniac, theologian, and spokesman for the political and cultural elite, a writer who lived, counselled and wrote in Iraq during the first century of the 'Abbasid caliphate. He advised, argued and rubbed shoulders with the major power brokers and leading religious and intellectual figures of his day, and crossed swords in debate and argument with the architects of the Islamic religious, theological, philosophical and cultural canon. His many, tumultuous writings engage with these figures, their ideas, theories and policies. They give us an invaluable but much-neglected window onto the values and beliefs of this cosmopolitan elite.

Pierre Brule's brilliant evocation of how women lived in ancient Greece describes every aspect of their lives, including their religious, familial and domestic duties, their economic importance, and their social, moral and legal status as wives, cohabitees or slaves. He examines their sexual roles, what the status of a woman's body was and what her own and others' attitudes were likely to be towards it. Professor Brule does all this in the context of the development and achievements of Greek civilisation.Women appear not to have been highly regarded in ancient Greece, with female infanticide a common practice. Strains of misogyny can be heard in Greek literature, drama and philosophy: 'The most unintelligent people in the world' is how one character refers to women in Plato's Symposium (which also features Diotima, his best-known female sage). Women had few duties beyond the home, and the evidence that they existed at all is tantalisingly small. Yet by piecing together fragments and clues, the author gives us a vivid account of women's lives in Greece 2,500 years ago.Pierre Brule's deft scholarship and engaging style make this fascinating history always readable, sometimes moving, and often entertaining.

This book demonstrates the advantage of a corpus based approach to Arabic, and presents an overview of current research on the Arabic language within corpus linguistics. Dealing not only with modern standard Arabic, the book also considers classical and colloquial forms.

Using animals for scientific research is a highly contentious issue that Continental philosophers engaging with 'the animal question' have been rightly accused of shying away from. Now, Wahida Khandker asks whether Continental approaches to animality and organic life will make us reconsider our treatment of non-human animals. By following its historical and philosophical development, she argues that the concept of 'pathological life' as a means of understanding organic life as a whole plays a pivotal role in refiguring the human-animal distinction. She explores the significance of this across philosophy and the life sciences through the work of a number of key thinkers of life and process, from Henri Bergson to Donna Haraway.

This is a reassessment of the moral and theological foundations of modern Europe. It challenges a number of deeply rooted assumptions about the basis of both Scottish culture and of Enlightenments in general. It argues that the formidable dual influences of humanism and Calvinism forced a discussion about the essentially moral function of scholarship and learning to the very centre of intellectual debate in early modern Scotland, and that this in turn led to the growth of an "e;enlightened"e; community amongst the Scottish literati. As such, the text is a direct challenge to conventional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment as an unanticipated, short-lived explosion of ideas.

This lively collection of essays gives a non-technical, but profound analysis of the essential relationship between politics and literature. Bernard Crick shows how 'political theatre' is often both bad theatre and simplistic politics, but how good producers can bring out political messages in such seemingly 'unpolitical' dramas as Twelfth Night. The essays begin with general themes, including a vigorous critique of RSC and NT producers' views of the political, and a denial of the myth that the far left dominated 1930s writing. They then move on to an analysis of George Orwell and finally to celebrate specific occasions and events in modern British theatre. With his refreshing disrespect for over-ornate and overly scholastic Marxist and academic writers, Professor Crick's book will be of interest to all those concerned with the arts and the theatre, as well as political philosophers and English literature students.

Following a long tradition of objectification, 20th-century French feminism often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing. Amaleena Damle addresses questions of bodies, boundaries and philosophical discourses by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary philosophers and authors on the subject of contemporary female corporeality and transformation.

The literary potential of trauma is examined in this book, bringing trauma theory and literary texts together for the first time. Trauma Fiction focuses on the ways in which contemporary novelists explore the theme of trauma and incorporate its structures into their writing. It provides innovative readings of texts by Pat Barker, Jackie Kay, Anne Michaels, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, W. G. Sebald and Binjamin Wilkomirski. It also considers the ways in which trauma has affected fictional form, exploring how novelists have responded to the challenge of writing traumatic narratives, and identifying the key stylistic features associated with the genre. In addition, the book introduces the reader to key critics in the field of trauma theory such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman. The linking of trauma theory and literary texts not only sheds light on works of contemporary fiction, it also points to the inherent connections between trauma theory and the literary which have often been overlooked. The distinction between literary theme and style in the book opens up major questions regarding the nature of trauma itself. Trauma, like the novels discussed, is shown to take an uncertain but productive place between content and form.Key Features*Idenitifes and explores a new and evolving genre in contemporary fiction*Thinks through the relation between trauma and literature*Produces innovative readings of key works of contemporary fiction *Provides an introduction to key ideas in trauma theory

A compelling cultural reinterpretation of humanist discourses of boyhood The English epyllion, the highly erotic mythological verse that swept the London literary scene in the 1590s, is as much about rhetoric as about sex. So argues William Weaver in this fascinating study of Renaissance education and poetry. Rhetoric, moreover, is erotic. Far being merely formal, rhetoric is the key to deciphering the cultural meanings of an enigmatic genre. Weaver attends to one of the epyllions defining dramas: boys in transition to adulthood. Whereas recent studies of the epyllion have posited sexuality as the primary, even exclusive, means of representing beautiful boys, Weaver discovers that Renaissance male sexuality itself is an effect of a disciplinary drama of pedagogical transition from boyhood to adolescence, grammar to rhetoric. This drama of differentiation, lucidly expounded by Weaver, is at the heart of the erotic epyllia of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their imitators.Key Features*Focuses on six poems written between 1592 and 1594, looking to the most inventive period of the English epyllion *Documents previously unknown sources of Marlowes Hero and Leander and Shakespeares Venus and Adonis*Makes the first cultural critique of the Renaissance progymnasmata, the popular rhetorical exercises*Shows the vital connections between English poetry and continental rhetoric*Productively complements histories of sexuality, queer theory and feminist criticism

The Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788) was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (edited as vol. 3 of the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid). These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of common sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. The Active Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price.

Studying the work of Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Beckett, Sara Crangle explores the everyday human longings found in Modernist writing. This discussion is set within a framework of continental philosophy, particularly the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas.

This ambitious book examines the encounter between Gaels and Europeans in Scotland in the central Middle Ages, offering new insights into an important period in the formation of the Scots' national identity. It is based on a close reading of the texts of several thousand charters, indentures, brieves and other written sources that record the business conducted in royal and baronial courts across the length and breadth of the medieval kingdom between 1150 and 1400.Under the broad themes of land, law and people, this book explores how the customs, laws and traditions of the native inhabitants and those of incoming settlers interacted and influenced each other. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, the author places her subject matter firmly within the recent historiography of the British Isles and demonstrates how the experience of Scotland was both similar to, and a distinct manifestation of, a wider process of Europeanisation.

This book could easily be called 'A Guide for the Modern Muslim', for someone to whom the sentiments of his or her ancestors resonate but who cannot accept the canonised formulas of a stultified education. Charfi spells out what, for him, is the essential message of Islam, followed by a history of its unfolding through the person of the Prophet Muhammad, who was a visionary seeking to change the ideals, attitudes and behaviours of the society in which he lived. The message and its history are delineated as two separate things, conflated by tradition. Charfi's reflections cross those horizons where few Muslim scholars have dared until now to tread. He confronts with great lucidity those difficult questions with which Muslims are struggling, attempting to reconsider them from a moral and political perspective that is independent of the frameworks produced by tradition."e;

Recent discussions of the 'Chinese economic development model', the emergence of an alternative 'Muslim model' over the past quarter century and the faltering globalisation of the 'Washington Consensus' all point to the need to investigate more systematically the nature of these models and their competitive attractions. This is especially the case in the Muslim world which both spans different economic and geographic categories and is itself the progenitor of a development model. The 'Chinese model' has attracted the greatest attention in step with that country's phenomenal growth and therefore provides the primary focus for this book. This volume examines the characteristics of this model and its reception in two major regions of the world - Africa and Latin America. It also investigates the current competition over development models across Muslim contexts. The question of which model or models, if any, will guide development in Muslim majority countries is vital not only for them, but for the world as a whole. This is the first political economy study to address this vital question as well as the closely related issue of the centrality of governance to development.