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Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Austen's six remarkable novels. Full of crackling dialogue, it achieves the finest balance of comedy and reflection, liveliness and solemnity. While revealing the restrictive life of genteel women at the turn of the nineteenth century, it provides as the central consciousness the clever, witty, and flirtatious Elizabeth Bennet, arguably Austen's most alluring heroine. One of the great love stories of English literature, the novel has spawned countless films and fantasies. In its brilliant balance of psychological observation and social comedy, the original effortlessly survives its global exploitation. The novels Austen wrote later in life were more complex but, drafted when the author was close to her heroine's age of twenty, Pride and Prejudice remains her most vivacious and sparkling work. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
This volume introduces the legal philosopher Adolf Reinach and his contributions to speech act theory, as well as his analysis of basic legal concepts and their relationship to positive law. Reinach's thorough analysis has recently garnered growing interest in private law theory, yet his 'phenomenological realist' philosophical approach is not in line with contemporary mainstream approaches. The essays in this volume resuscitate and interrogate Reinach's unique account of the foundations of private law, situating him in contemporary private law theory and broader philosophical currents. The work also makes Reinach's methods more accessible to those unfamiliar with early phenomenology. Together these contributions prove that while Reinach's perspective on private law shares similarities and points of departure with trends in today's legal theory, many of his insights remain singular and illuminating in their own right. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Origen of Alexandria stands at the headwaters of the entire history of Gospel reading. In this study of the earliest extant Gospel commentaries, Samuel Johnson explores questions, often associated with modern Gospel criticism, that were already formative of the first moments of the Christian interpretative tradition. Origen's approach to the Gospels in fact arose from straightforward historical and literary critical judgments: the Gospel narratives interweave things that happened with things that did not. Origen discerned that the Gospels depict events in Jesus's life not merely as matters of historical fact, but also figuratively. He did not just interpret the Gospels allegorically. Johnson demonstrates that Origen believed the Gospel writers themselves were figurative readers of the life of Jesus. Origen thus found no contradiction between discerning the truth of the Christian Gospels and facing the critical challenges of their literary form and formation. Johnson's study shows how they constitute a single unified vision.
Balancing Pressures analyses how the economy, national politics, and supranational politics shape economic policymaking in the European Union. Economic theories alert policymakers of the problems associated with policy initiatives. Economic uncertainties shape political positioning during negotiations, while actual economic conditions affect both negotiations and implementation. National pressures to win office and pursue policies systematically influence negotiating positions, implementation patterns, and outcomes. Supranational pressures are associated with membership in the euro area, the expected and actual patterns of compliance, or the context of negotiations. Spanning the period of 1994 to 2019, this book analyses how these pressures shaped the definition of the policy problems, the controversies surrounding policy reforms, the outcome, timing, and direction of reforms, the negotiations over preventive surveillance, the compliance with recommendations, and the use and effectiveness of the procedure to correct excessive fiscal deficits. It concludes by assessing the effectiveness, fairness, and responsiveness of the policy.
Cauda equina syndrome is the clinical syndrome seen when there is acute compression of the cauda equina nerve roots and is a rare neurosurgical emergency. The approximate incidence in patients presenting with low back pain is 0.27% but delays in investigation and treatment can result in life-changing permanent disability. The best practice for patients presenting with potential cauda equina syndrome is urgent MRI imaging at the presenting hospital to avoid delays in diagnosis. Patients with a positive finding of cauda equina compression should proceed to decompressive surgery to restore the diameter of the spinal canal urgently to reduce the risk of developing a permanent deficit.
Northanger Abbey is both an ingenious Gothic parody and a realistic portrait of the social education of a naive young girl in late eighteenth-century England. Conceived in the 1790s but not published until after Jane Austen's death, the novel straddles the style of her childhood writings, with their playful mockery of contemporary fiction, and the later mature works which probe both society and individual psychology. It paints a wonderfully dense picture of the material and social conditions of genteel English life in town and country. Through the young, naïve heroine, the reader experiences the popular delight in escapist and sensational fiction typical of the period. The novel invites us to enjoy being laughed at for our own fictional expectations, while happily fulfilling most of them. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
Karl Marx's criticism of religion, as applied to afterlife belief, needs to be taken seriously by Christian theologians. After outlining that belief, the author examines a picture of heaven implicit in much Christian belief and practice which is susceptible to that critique. They set out an alternative eschatology, centred on the Kingdom of God and the resurrection of the body, which is somewhat less susceptible. They then explore whether a doctrine of the intermediate state can be sustained in the light of Marx's criticisms. They go on to examine the politics of remembrance in the light of Marxist criticism, and to ask whether Christianity can help compensate for the tragic character of Marxism. A constant theme is that Christian theology should exist in tension with Marx's criticisms, never assuming that it has overcome them completely.
Many critics regard Mansfield Park as Austen's supreme achievement. It is a serious, even earnest work, but never dull, finding its comedy less in dialogue than in situation. It has wonderful set pieces including an outing to a grand house, aborted theatricals and a visit to a chaotic ménage. All Austen's novels are set during the French Wars, but Mansfield Park catches most clearly the anxious mood of a wartime nation unsure of its moral status. The heroine Fanny Price holds to principles against sophisticated laxness, but she is also self-deceiving as her principles jostle against her nature and youth. With the subtle irony that is her forte, Austen shows that integrity wins out but at a cost – and that virtue is neither easy nor always pleasurable to achieve. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
A powerful portrait of grief triumphantly overcome, Persuasion is Austen's most passionate work: more than any previous novel, it concentrates on the intense inner life of the heroine. It opens with Anne Elliot lamenting lost love in a painful reversal of the courtship novel; it then transforms into a rapturous romantic comedy. Against a dysfunctional gentry family corroded by snobbishness, the novel pits professional self-made naval men marked by energy and domestic virtues: the heroine's future lies with them rather than with the landed class into which she was born. Persuasion is the only Austen novel that ends with the heroine lacking a settled home. Uniquely in Austen's oeuvre, an earlier part of the text survives. This edition includes a transcript, allowing readers to glimpse Austen's creative process. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
Money and destructive passion overshadow romance in this darkly humorous novel of sexual manoeuvring and greed. Appearing anonymously in 1811 under the attribution 'By A Lady', Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen's first published work. Uniquely among her novels it has two heroines: stoical Elinor, the sensitive consciousness of the book, representative of 'sense', and flamboyant, self-indulgent Marianne, whose emotional adventures deliver energy and zest, representative of 'sensibility'. The novel is an edgy contrapuntal tale of different personalities and experiences, revealing much about the constraints and difficulties of a woman's life. In addition, the book offers a remarkable window onto the material culture of Austen's time; it includes some memorable bric-a-brac such as an ornamented toothpick case and some fine breakfast china quarrelled over by rich and poor relatives. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
Technologists frequently promote self-tracking devices as objective tools. This book argues that such glib and often worrying assertions must be placed in the context of precarious industry dynamics. The author draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with developers of self-tracking applications and wearable devices in New York City's Silicon Alley and with technologists who participate in the international forum called the Quantified Self to illuminate the professional compromises that shape digital technology and the gap between the tech sector's public claims and its interior processes. By reconciling the business conventions, compromises, shifting labor practices, and growing employment insecurity that power the self-tracking market with device makers' often simplistic promotional claims, the book offers an understanding of the impact that technologists exert on digital discourse, on the tools they make, and on the data that these gadgets put out into the world.
Addresses the role of structure in semantic analysis from the perspective of theories of meaning using rich theories of types. Also relates the theory of frames to these type theories as introducing, to some extent, similar structure into semantic analysis. The authors show how a structured approach is necessary to appropriately analyse phenomena in areas as diverse as lexical semantics and the semantics of attitudinal constructions referring to psychological states. In particular, these are: polysemy taken together with copredication, and attitudes such as belief and knowledge. The authors argue that the very same structure required to define a rich system of types enables them to adequately analyse both of these phenomena, thus revealing similarities in two otherwise apparently unrelated topics in semantics. They also argue that such theories facilitate a semantic theory oriented towards a psychological and contextually situated view of meaning. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
An increasingly large part of the population in the West identifies as religious Nones. Contrary to what might be assumed, most of them are not outright atheists. They reject traditional religion, but many pursue different forms of spirituality, and many entertain supernatural ideas. This Element concerns the worldview of these 'semi-secular' Nones. When asked about whether they believe in God, they usually provide answers like 'Perhaps not God per se, but I do believe in something'. Belief in 'somethin' is the ontological cornerstone of many Nones' worldviews. The authors reconstruct it as the view 'Somethingism'. They assess Somethingism by inquiring how well it stands up to the epistemic challenge of being true to the demands of reason. They also assess it by exploring how it manages the existential challenge of providing comfort and guidance in this life, and its ability to align us with any transcendent reality there might be.
In her earliest writings, a precocious, alarmingly assured Jane Austen views the adult world with wide, clear eyes, cheekily amused at the emotions, pomposity, intrigues and bustle of family and friends. Composed between the ages of eleven and seventeen, they reveal a child's excitement in language and its imaginative possibilities. Most pieces are ebullient and anarchic; many are surreal, displaying gluttony, drunkenness, matricide, theft and excess, combined with total self-absorption. The cheerful characters roar through their transgressions without a shred of shame or responsibility. This edition prints all of Austen's childhood works, from the earliest comic pieces to the later, more psychologically realistic 'Catharine, or the Bower', which anticipates themes in the adult novels. The volume also includes the comical illustrations her sister Cassandra contributed to 'The History of England'. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
The path to global sustainable development is participatory democratic global governance – the only truly effective path to confronting pandemics, military conflict, climate change, biodiversity loss, and potential overall ecological collapse. Democracy for a Sustainable World explains why global democracy and global sustainable development must be achieved and why they can only be achieved jointly. It recounts the obstacles to participatory democratic global governance and describes how they can be overcome through a combination of right representation and sortition, starting with linking and scaling innovative local and regional sustainability experiments worldwide. Beginning with a visit to the birthplace of democracy in ancient Athens, a hillside called the Pnyx, James Bacchus explores how the Athenians practiced democratic participation millennia ago. He draws on the successes and shortfalls of Athenian democracy to offer specific proposals for meeting today's challenges by constructing participatory democratic global governance for full human flourishing in a sustainable world.
Gathering together all the unpublished mature work of Jane Austen, this volume comprises poems, a novella, unfinished novels, literary spoofs and a series of letters giving advice on how to write fiction. Written between her childhood tales and published novels, 'Lady Susan' is the most complete portrait of clever, charming malice Austen ever penned. With its special bleak atmosphere, 'The Watsons' is a powerful satire of claustrophobic middle-class life, while 'Sanditon', the work she was writing when she died, is an experimental novel exchanging Austen's usual country-house setting for a speculative seaside resort. Along with the poems (the last written just three days before her death), the letters and comic pieces, the novel fragments are beguiling on their own; they also provide a fascinating companion to the published novels. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.
This book introduces relevant and established data-driven modeling tools currently in use or in development, which will help readers master the art and science of constructing models from data and dive into different application areas. It presents statistical tools useful to individuate regularities, discover patterns and laws in complex datasets, and demonstrates how to apply them to devise models that help to understand these systems and predict their behaviors. By focusing on the estimation of multivariate probabilities, the book shows that the entire domain, from linear regressions to deep learning neural networks, can be formulated in probabilistic terms. This book provides the right balance between accessibility and mathematical rigor for applied data science or operations research students, graduate students in CSE, and machine learning and uncertainty quantification researchers who use statistics in their field. Background in probability theory and undergraduate mathematics is assumed.