The songs of the Royal Zh?u (“Zh?u Nán” ??) and of the Royal Shào (“Shào Nán” ??) have formed a conceptual unit since at least the late Spring and Autumn period (771–453 BC). With this book Meyer and Schwartz provide a first complete reading of their earliest, Warring States (453–221 BC), iteration as witnessed by the ?nhu? University manuscripts. As a thought experiment, the au…
This short book aims to turn a modest, one might even think trivial, literary labour into something more substantial, going beyond one particular novel into broader questions of novel-writing, character and narrative. My starting point is tracking down those allusions and quotations in Middlemarch that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars. Most…
Islamic Sensory History, Volume 2: 600–1500 presents a selection of texts translated into English from Arabic and Persian. These selected texts all offer illustrative engagements with issues related to the sensorium in different times, places, and social milieus throughout the early and medieval history of Islamic societies. Each chapter is prefaced by an introductory essay by the translator,…
The Huayuanzhuang East oracle bone inscriptions, first discovered in 1991 and completely published in six folio volumes in 2003, are a synchronically compact and unified late Shang (ca. 1250-1045 BC) corpus of several thousand individual divination accounts inscribed on hundreds of still intact turtle shells and cattle scapulae. Produced under the patronage of a prince of the royal f…
It was a cold winter evening in 2010, and I had just arrived in Paris for a short research trip. The tiny hotel where I would be staying was on the fifth floor of the ophthalmological wing of the hôtel-Dieu (or hospital) just across from the cathedral of Notre Dame. 1 Given the subject of the book I was in France to research, it seemed appropri-ate that I should s…
‘Metaphysical poetry’ is a problematic term: it is broad and the phe-nomenon it denotes has blurred borderlines. In the eyes of some of the leading figures within classicist aesthetics, this description seemed pejorative, suggesting poems that were too detached from the rules of rationalised discourse, and often invoked contradictory ideas. T.S. Eliot pointed this out in his essay The Metap…
The boreal forest is a vast biome encompassing approximately one-third (30%) of the world’s forest area. It harbors about half of the world’s remaining natural and near-natural forests and provides important ecological, economic, social, and cultural services and values that benefit human communities (Burton et al., 2010; Gauthier et al., 2015a). …
The water I want to well is the deep language making meaning that deepens the way we think about autistic perception. The well is the way we rapaciously answer the way that neurotypicality speaks about arrangement of art attention and autistic importance that people don’t really want and I think that the water is required for easy language and should not sta…
Opening with a lucid overview of the rise and spread of Islam, from the seventh to the twenty-first century, this Very Short Introduction introduces the story of Islamic history, charting the evolution of what was originally a small, localized community of believers into an international religion with over a billion adherents. The book examines how Islam rose from the obscurity of seventh-centu…