Ghostly Fragments

Ghostly Fragments gathers the essays of the late Barbara C. Hodgdon, a renowned scholar of Shakespeare and performance studies. Her influential publications over thirty years reflected a remarkable intelligence, wit, and originality, as did her lectures and conference papers. Richard Abel and Peter Holland have selected essays that represent the wide sweep of Hodgdon’s scholarship, including unpublished pieces and those from hard-to-access sources. The essays reveal a thinker and writer who grows more self-reflective over time, with a distinctive, engaging, often wryly humorous voice that is accessible even to nonspecialist readers. Following a general introduction by Peter Holland, the book’s five subsections (Teaching Shakespeare, Analyzing Stage Performances, Editing Shakespeare Texts, Analyzing Shakespeare Films, and “Shopping” in the Archives) are introduced in turn by scholars Miriam Gilbert, W.B. Worthen, Margaret Jane Kidnie, Richard Abel, and Pascale Aebischer. Collectively, the pieces confirm the originality and élan of Hodgdon’s thinking and writing over time, and reveal her as a natural essayist and stylist, with a distinctive engaging voice. The collection is unique in not only bringing together so much of Hodgdon's work in one place (with an extensive bibliography of her published work) but also in demonstrating how groundbreaking and influential that work has been in the field.

Ghost Research is archaeological work that requires specific field practices. This book introduces the investigative techniques of a "ghost archaeology". This is defined as a scientific discipline of the "ordinary", a search for the repetitive patterns of cultural behavior that can be unearthed during an field investigation. Six case studies of cultural hauntings are presented which illustrate the usefulness of archaeological methodology and techniques in field research. The investigation of ghostly presence at Gettysburg, in the anthracite coal region, at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and a Civil War haunting in Petersburg, Virginia are cited. These investigations show how potential evidential data can be uncovered, if only the investigators would maintain an archaeological sensibility in their fieldwork operations.

This book offers a radical alternative to the positive orientation of popular psychology. This positive orientation has been criticized numerous times. However, there has yet to be a coherent alternative proposed. We all know today that life hurts and that there is no ultimate remedy to this pain. The positive approach feels to us as dishonest and irrelevant. We require a new, more negative, perspective and practice, one that is honest and does not pretend to offer an escape from the agonies of the world. This book offers in three main chapters a ‘depressive realist’ perspective that explores the structural role of negativity and tragedy in relation to the individual psyche, society, and nature. It explores the possibility of ‘negative psychoanalysis’ which takes into account the tragedy of human existence instead of adopting escapist positions.

A Place More Void takes its name from a scene in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, wherein an elderly soothsayer has a final chance to warn Caesar about the Ides of March. Worried that he won’t be able to deliver his message because of the crowded alleyways, the soothsayer devises a plan to find and intercept Caesar in “a place more void.” It is precisely such an elusive place that this volume makes space for by theorizing and empirically exploring the many yet widely neglected ways in which the void permeates geographical thinking. This collection presents geography’s most in-depth and sustained engagements with the void to date, demonstrating the extent to which related themes such as gaps, cracks, lacks, and emptiness perforate geography’s fundamental concepts, practices, and passions. Arranged in four parts around the themes of Holes, Absences, Edges, and Voids, the contributions demonstrate the fecundity of the void for thinking across a wide range of phenomena: from archives to alien abductions, caves to cryptids, and vortexes to vanishing points. A Place More Void gathers established and emerging scholars who engage a wide range of geographical issues and who express themselves not only through archival, literary, and socio-scientific investigations, but also through social and spatial theory, political manifesto, poetry, and performance art.

A mesmerizing poetry collection by "an ecstatic surrealist on imaginal hyperdrive" (Eliot Weinberger).

“It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist’s dream.” So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors—climatic, biological, social—is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: “habitat loss,” “human rights abuses,” “climate change.” The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig’s keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors’ ruminations: Roland Barthes’s suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs’s retort to critics that for him words are alive like animals and don’t like to be kept in pages—cut them and the words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig’s Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century.

'Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas' examines Gustav Mahler's career-long engagement with sonata form. It argues that a dynamic, process-based sonata-form concept factors into all of his early and middle-period symphonies, informing not just their schematic design, but also their narrative/expressive character.

Provides new definitions of the Gothic in a variety of artistic contexts Explores a range of Gothic from architecture through literature to music and the technological artsProvides an opportunity to hear new thinking from established scholars as well as showcasing work by new scholarsHighlights new definitions of the Gothic from a wide variety of perspectivesThe Gothic in all its artistic forms and ramifications is traced from the medieval to the twenty-first century. From architecture, painting and sculpture through music, ballet, opera and dance to installation art and the graphic novel, each of the 33 chapters reflects on and weighs in on the ways in which the Gothic is taken up in the art forms and modes under examination. An Introduction discusses Gothic as a changing cultural form across the centuries with deep psychological roots. This is followed by sections on: architectural arts; the visual arts; music and the performance arts; the literary arts; and media and cultural arts.

The Gate of Fire continues Tom Harlan's remarkable fantasy epic, following the increasingly dangerous conflicts both military and sorcerous. The sorcerer Dahak plots from his hidden citadel to regain the Peacock Throne. Prince Maxian, having raised both Julius Ceasar and Alexander the Great from the dead, now considers how to use them to free Rome from the curse of the Oath. Thyatis has fled with the widowed Queen of Persia to a hidden island; Dwyrin's thaumaturgic unit is shattered as Zoe discovers the destruction of Palmyra and, as its new queen, vows revenge against Rome. And in Mecca, Ahmet's friend and Palmyra's lieutenant Mohammed receives a vision, and a command, and the power to strive against the forces of darkness. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Annotation. Contemporary Chinese history from the Great Leap Famine of the 1950s to the 1990s is traced in this text. This era saw great changes in the way that communities were run, including the reintroduction of the headman-ship system.