Why do spies have such cachet in the twentieth century? Why do they keep reinventing themselves? What do they mean in a political process? This book examines the tradition of the spy narrative from ...its inception in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Ranging from John le Carré's bestsellers to Elizabeth Bowen's novels, from James Bond to John Banville's contemporary narratives, Allan Hepburn sets the historical contexts of these fictions: the Cambridge spy ring; the Profumo Affair; the witch-hunts against gay men in the civil service and diplomatic corps in the 1950s.
Instead of focusing on the formulaic nature of the genre,Intrigueemphasizes the responsiveness of spy stories to particular historical contingencies. Hepburn begins by offering a systematic theory of the conventions and attractions of espionage fiction and then examines the British and Irish tradition of spy novels. A final section considers the particular form that American spy narratives have taken as they have cross-fertilized with the tradition of American romance in works such as Joan Didion'sDemocracyand John Barth'sSabbatical.
This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies,Materia ...Magicaidentifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence.
Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used.Materia Magicaapproaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite.
Materia Magicadevelops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.
In this first book-length study of imperial villages, Beat Kümin provides unprecedented insights into the micro-political cultures of rural communities and popular desires for local autonomy in the ...pre-modern German lands.
Bodies of tomorrow Vint, Sherryl
Bodies of tomorrow,
c2007, 20070224, 2006, 2000, 2007, 2006-01-01
eBook
Bodies of Tomorrowargues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world.
The Holy Roman Empire was one of the oldest and largest states in early modern Europe. This book breaks new ground in its collective exploration of the Empire's political and diplomatic, social and ...cultural relations and of transnational interactions.
Roman {2}-domination Chellali, Mustapha; Haynes, Teresa W.; Hedetniemi, Stephen T. ...
Discrete Applied Mathematics,
05/2016, Volume:
204
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, we initiate the study of a variant of Roman dominating functions. For a graph G=(V,E), a Roman {2}-dominating function f:V→{0,1,2} has the property that for every vertex v∈V with ...f(v)=0, either v is adjacent to a vertex assigned 2 under f, or v is adjacent to least two vertices assigned 1 under f. The weight of a Roman {2}-dominating function is the sum ∑v∈Vf(v), and the minimum weight of a Roman {2}-dominating function f is the Roman {2}-domination number. First, we present bounds relating the Roman {2}-domination number to some other domination parameters. In particular, we show that the Roman {2}-domination number is bounded above by the 2-rainbow domination number. Moreover, we prove that equality between these two parameters holds for trees and cactus graphs with no even cycles. Finally, we show that associated decision problem for Roman {2}-domination is NP-complete, even for bipartite graphs.
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The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy ...Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.
Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the ...past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.
Since antiquity, the she-wolf has served as the potent symbol of Rome. For more than two thousand years, the legendary animal that rescued Romulus and Remus has been the subject of historical and ...political accounts, literary treatments in poetry and prose, and visual representations in every medium. In She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon, Cristina Mazzoni examines the evolution of the she-wolf as a symbol in western history, art, and literature, from antiquity to contemporary times. Used, for example, as an icon of Roman imperial power, papal authority, and the distance between the present and the past, the she-wolf has also served as an allegory for greed, good politics, excessive female sexuality, and, most recently, modern, multi-cultural Rome. Mazzoni engagingly analyzes the various role guises of the she-wolf over time in the first comprehensive study in any language on this subject.
Il volume miscellaneo che qui si presenta è stato pensato da amici e colleghi non solo come omaggio a Paolo Mastandrea, ma anche e soprattutto come illustrazione delle innumerevoli prospettive aperte ...dai suoi studi: l’indagine dei meccanismi dell’intertestualità nel mondo antico; l’analisi filologica di tradizioni controverse; i numerosi problemi storico-letterari offerti dai testi della Tarda Antichità latina; l’esame della ricezione umanistica e rinascimentale dell’eredità classica. Non si è naturalmente trascurato il contributo cruciale portato dallo studioso alla teorizzazione e allo sviluppo, fin dagli anni Novanta, di strumenti informatici di ricerca testuale, la cosiddetta ‘galassia Musisque Deoque’, di cui si tiene conto in molti dei lavori presenti nel volume.