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Afterall
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, volume 51 number 1 (Spring 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 51 issue 1 of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that provides in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts. Each issue provides the reader with well-researched contributions that discuss each artist's work from different perspectives. Contextual essays and other texts discussing events, works, or exhibitions further develop the thematic focus of each issue.
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Afterall
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, volume 52 number 1 (Autumn/Winter 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 52 issue 1 of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that provides in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts. Each issue provides the reader with well-researched contributions that discuss each artist's work from different perspectives. Contextual essays and other texts discussing events, works, or exhibitions further develop the thematic focus of each issue.
[more]

front cover of Afterall
Afterall
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, volume 53 number 1 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 53 issue 1 of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that provides in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts. Each issue provides the reader with well-researched contributions that discuss each artist's work from different perspectives. Contextual essays and other texts discussing events, works, or exhibitions further develop the thematic focus of each issue.
[more]

front cover of Afterall
Afterall
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, volume 54 number 1 (Autumn/Winter 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 54 issue 1 of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that provides in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts. Each issue provides the reader with well-researched contributions that discuss each artist's work from different perspectives. Contextual essays and other texts discussing events, works, or exhibitions further develop the thematic focus of each issue.
[more]

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Afterall
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, volume 55-56 number 1 (Spring 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 55-56 issue 1 of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that provides in-depth analysis of art and its social, political, and philosophical contexts. Each issue provides the reader with well-researched contributions that discuss each artist's work from different perspectives. Contextual essays and other texts discussing events, works, or exhibitions further develop the thematic focus of each issue.
[more]

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Ancient Latin Poetry Books
Materiality and Context
Gabriel Nocchi Macedo
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Before the invention of printing, all forms of writing were done by hand. For a literary text to circulate among readers, and to be transmitted from one period in time to another, it had to be copied by scribes. As a result, two copies of an ancient book were different from one another, and each individual book or manuscript has its own history. The oldest of these books, those that are the closest to the time in which the texts were composed, are few, usually damaged, and have been often neglected in the scholarship. Ancient Latin Poetry Books presents a detailed study of the oldest manuscripts still extant that contain texts by Latin poets, such as Virgil, Terence, and Ovid. Analyzing their physical characteristics, their script, and the historical contexts in which they were produced and used, this volume shows how manuscripts can help us gain a better understanding of the history of texts, as well as of reading habits over the centuries. Since the manuscripts originated in various places of the Latin-speaking world, Ancient Latin Poetry Books investigates the readership and reception of Latin poetry in many different contexts, such schools in the Egyptian desert, aristocratic circles in southern Italy, and the Christian élite in late antique Rome. The research also contributes to our knowledge about the use of writing and the importance of the written text in antiquity. This is an innovative approach to the study of ancient literature, one that takes the materiality of texts into consideration.

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Art in Context
Understanding Aesthetic Value
David E. W. Fenner
Ohio University Press, 2008
The various lenses—ethical, political, sexual, religious, and so forth—through which we may view art are often instrumental in giving us an appreciation of the work. In Art in Context: Understanding Aesthetic Value, philosopher David Fenner presents a straightforward, accessible overview of the arguments about the importance of considering the relevant context in determining the true merit of a work of art.

Art in Context is a systematic, historically situated, and historically evidenced attempt to demonstrate the importance of considering contexts that will, in the vast majority of cases, increase the aesthetic experience. While focusing on distance, detachment, aestheticism, art for art’s sake, and formalism can at times be instructive and interesting, such approaches risk missing the larger and often central issue of the piece.

Based on the findings of philosophers and critics, and on artwork throughout
history, Art in Context provides a solid foundation for understanding and valuing a work of art in perspective as well as within the particular world in which it exists.
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The Athenian Adonia in Context
The Adonis Festival as Cultural Practice
Laurialan Reitzammer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Ancient sources and modern scholars have often represented the Athenian festival of Adonis as a marginal and faintly ridiculous private women's ritual. Seeds were planted each year in pots and, once sprouted, carried to the rooftops, where women lamented the death of Aphrodite's youthful consort Adonis. Laurialan Reitzammer resourcefully examines a wide array of surviving evidence about the Adonia, arguing for its symbolic importance in fifth- and fourth-century Athenian culture as an occasion for gendered commentary on mainstream Athenian practices.

Reitzammer reveals correlations of the Adonia to Athenian wedding rituals and civic funeral oration and provides illuminating evidence that the festival was a significant cultural template for such diverse works as Aristophanes' drama Lysistrata and Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Her fresh approach offers a timely contribution to studies of the ways gender and sexuality intersect with religion and ritual in ancient Greece.
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Becoming a Social Science Researcher
Quest and Context
Bruce Parrott
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Becoming a Social Science Researcher is designed to help aspiring social scientists, including credentialed scholars, understand the formidable complexities of the research process. Instead of explaining specific research techniques, it concentrates on the philosophical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of social research. These dimensions have received little coverage in guides written for social science researchers, but they are arguably even more important than particular analytical techniques. Truly sophisticated social science scholarship requires that researchers understand the intellectual and social contexts in which they collect and interpret information. While social science training in US graduate schools has become more systematic over the past two decades, graduate training and published guidance still fall short in addressing this fundamental need.

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Capitalism in Context
Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R.M. Hartwell
Edited by John A. James and Mark Thomas
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Following the approach of R. M. Hartwell, the influential historian of the British Industrial Revolution, these essays explore the cultural contexts and institutional constraints that have shaped growth and development over the past two centuries. Capitalism in Context offers new perspectives on why economic development took place where and when it did.

Thirteen chapters cover: social progress during economic development; the influence of cultural values on social and economic change; economic foundations of development—labor, capital, and technology; and organizational arrangements—property rights, government, and markets. These studies will appeal to economists, historians, and social scientists alike for their wide-ranging treatments of economic development and cultural change.

The contributors are N. F. R. Crafts, Lance E. Davis, Stanley L. Engerman, David W. Galenson, Robert E. Gallman, Stephen Innes, John A. James, Eric L. Jones, Thomas W. Laqueur, Gary D. Libecap, Joel Mokyr, Douglass C. North, Mark Thomas, John J. Wallis, Jeffrey G. Williamson.
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Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context
Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910
Leslie Diane Myrick and Gary Scharnhorst
University of Alabama Press, 2023
The first book-length treatment of Mark Twain’s public persona as depicted in newspaper and magazine illustrations
 
Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 examines the production, reception, and history of Twain’s reputation as a social and political satirist. Myrick and Scharnhorst trace the evolution of Twain’s depiction throughout his life, career, and even death and across more than seventy illustrations—from portrayals of the famous author as a court jester adorned with cap and bells, to a regally haloed king with a royal train—offering a new perspective on his influence and reputation. Although he was among the most photographed figures of the nineteenth century, Myrick and Scharnhorst focus on a medium that Twain, an expert ofself-promotion and brand management, could not control. As a result, Myrick and Scharnhorst have compiled an innovative and incisive visual reception history.

Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twainin Context illustrates the popular and often critical response to many famous and infamous episodes in his career, such as the storm of controversy that surrounded the publication of his anti-imperialist writings at the turn of the twentieth century. Routinely depicted with hair like a fright wig, a beak-like nose, and a cigar in hand, no matter the context or the costume, Twain was instantly recognizable. Yet it was not merely the familiarity of his image that made him a regular feature in visual commentary, but also his willingness to speak out against corruption and to insert himself into controversies of his day.

 
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Charles Johnson in Context
Linda Furgerson Selzer
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage, Charles Johnson belongs to a generation of writers who collectively raised African American literature to a new position of prominence during the late twentieth century. In this book, Linda Furgerson Selzer takes an interdisciplinary approach to Johnson's major fiction, providing fresh insight into his work by placing it within a broad historical context. In addition to Middle Passage (1990), Selzer focuses on three other novels: Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), and Dreamer (1998). She shows how these works reflect Johnson's participation in the larger cultural projects of several significant but often overlooked groups—young black philosophers who challenged the dominant Anglo-American empiricist tradition during the 1960s and 1970s; black Buddhists of the post–civil rights era who sought to translate an ancient religious practice into an African American idiom; and black public intellectuals who attempted to revive a cosmopolitan social ethic during the 1990s. The cultural histories of each of these groups, Selzer argues, provide important contexts for understanding Johnson's evolution as a novelist. In the academic experience of black students who entered philosophy programs during the turbulent 1960s, the spiritual concerns of black Buddhists who have only recently begun to speak more publicly about their faith, and the cultural issues surrounding the emergence of a new cohort of African American public intellectuals, we see the roots of the social, moral, and aesthetic vision that informs what some have described as Johnson's "philosophical fiction." Selzer's probing analysis of the influence of each of these contexts not only enriches our understanding of Charles Johnson's fiction, it also makes a broader contribution to the cultural history of African America during the past half century.
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Children of Social Worlds
Development in a Social Context
Martin Richards
Harvard University Press, 1986

Researchers in child development often study children in isolation--apart from the environmental influences that shape, nurture, or harm them. In Children of Social Worlds, leading social scientists show how much is lost by this approach. Their underlying assumption is that children's psychological development can be understood only in the context of the social worlds in which they grow up and that the disciplinary boundaries of traditional psychology must be expanded. This book offers insights from scholars in a variety of disciplines--anthropology, education, linguistics, economics, medicine, and law, in addition to psychology. The result is a wide-angle perspective on child development based on some of the best research in the field.

The authors look particularly at broad trends and patterns, addressing such issues as the effect of institutions on family life, the changing roles of parents, cross-generational effects on development, the status of children in the legal system, schooling and learning, gender differences, the acquisition of communication skills, and the psychological impact of the nuclear threat. Chapters on cultural and historical definitions of the family add depth to their argument. Included, too, are discussions of emotional development and psychoanalytic theory, topics that are receiving increasing attention. The authors also reflect on the directions that research is likely to take in the future.

This well-balanced, closely integrated volume is full of innovative ideas and is written in a style that will be accessible to both specialists and students. As an incisive and informed evaluation of the field, it is sure to become an essential resource for psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, social policy analysts--all who are concerned with human development in its social context.

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Chimpanzees in Context
A Comparative Perspective on Chimpanzee Behavior, Cognition, Conservation, and Welfare
Edited by Lydia M. Hopper and Stephen R. Ross
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The study of the chimpanzee, one of the human species’ closest relatives, has led scientists to exciting discoveries about evolution, behavior, and cognition over the past half century. In this book, rising and veteran scholars take a fascinating comparative approach to the culture, behavior, and cognition of both wild and captive chimpanzees. By seeking new perspectives in how the chimpanzee compares to other species, the scientists featured offer a richer understanding of the ways in which chimpanzees’ unique experiences shape their behavior. They also demonstrate how different methodologies provide different insights, how various cultural experiences influence our perspectives of chimpanzees, and how different ecologies in which chimpanzees live affect how they express themselves.
 
After a foreword by Jane Goodall, the book features sections that examine chimpanzee life histories and developmental milestones, behavior, methods of study, animal communication, cooperation, communication, and tool use. The book ends with chapters that consider how we can apply contemporary knowledge of chimpanzees to enhance their care and conservation. Collectively, these chapters remind us of the importance of considering the social, ecological, and cognitive context of chimpanzee behavior, and how these contexts shape our comprehension of chimpanzees. Only by leveraging these powerful perspectives do we stand a chance at improving how we understand, care for, and protect this species.
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Collections in Context
The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe
Karen Fresco and Anne D. Hedeman
The Ohio State University Press, 2011

The fourteen essays that comprise Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe interrogate questions posed by French, Flemish, English, and Italian collections of all sorts—libraries as a whole, anthologies and miscellanies assembled within a single manuscript or printed book, and even illustrated ivory boxes.

Collecting became an increasingly important activity during the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, when the decreased cost of producing books made ownership available to more people. But the act of collecting is never neutral: it gathers information, orders material (especially linear texts), and prioritizes everything—in short, collecting both organizes and comments on knowledge. Moreover, the context of a collection must reveal something about identity, but whose? That of the compiler? The reader or viewer? The donor? The patron?
 
With essays by a wide array of international scholars, Collections in Context demonstrates that the very act of collecting inevitably imposes some kind of relationship among what might otherwise be naively thought of as disparate elements and simultaneously exposes something about the community that created and used the collection. Thus, Collections in Context offers unusual insights into how collecting both produced knowledge and built community in early modern Europe.
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Context, Cognition, and Deafness
M. Diane Clark
Gallaudet University Press, 2001
In past studies of the effect of environment and social settings upon the cognitive development of deaf children, results frequently were confounded by conflicting conclusions related to the particpants' varying degrees of hearing loss. Context, Cognition, and Deafness: An Introduction takes an interdisciplinary approach that clarifies these disparate findings by analyzing many methodologies. Editors M. Diane Clark, Marc Marschark, and Michael Karchmer, widely respected scholars in their own right, have assembled work by a varying cast of renowned researchers to elucidate the effects of family, peers, and schools on deaf children. To integrate the often contrasting approaches of clinical and cultural researchers, this sharply focused volume has called upon experts in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, basic visual sensory processes, education, cognition, and neurophysiology to share complementary observations. One of William C. Stokoe's last contributions, "Deafness, Cognition, and Language" leads fluidly into Jeffrey P. Praden's analysis of clinical assessments of deaf people's cognitive abilities. Margaret Wilson expands on the impace of sign language expertise on visual perception. Context, Cognition, and Deafness also shows that theory can intersect practice, as displayed by editor Marschark and Jennifer Lukomski in their research on literacy, cognition, and education. Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer have combined sequential designs in their study of vocabulary learning. Ethan Remmel, Jeffrey G. Bettger, and Amy M. Weinberg explore the theory of mind development. The emotional development of deaf children also received detailed consideration by Colin D. Gray, Judith A. Hosie, Phil A. Russell, and Ellen A. Ormel. Kathryn P. Meadow-Orlans delineates her perspective on the coming of age of deaf children in relation to their education and development. Marschark concludes with insightful impressions on the future of theory and application, an appropriate close to this exceptional, coherent volume. M. Diane Clark is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, PA. Marc Marschark is Professor in the Department of Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY. Michael Karchmer is Professor in the Department of Education Foundations and Research and Director of the Gallaudet Research Institute at Gallaudet University.
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Context in Literary and Cultural Studies
Edited by Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen
University College London, 2019
Context in Literary and Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that deals with the challenges of studying works of art and literature in their historical context today. The relationship between artworks and context has long been a central concern for aesthetic and cultural disciplines, and the question of context has been asked anew in all eras. Developments in contemporary culture and technology, as well as new theoretical and methodological orientations in the humanities, once again prompt us to rethink context in literary and cultural studies. This volume takes up that challenge. 
Introducing readers to new developments in literary and cultural theory, Context in Literary and Cultural Studies connects all disciplines related to these areas to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the challenges different scholarly fields today meet in their studies of artworks in context. Spanning a number of countries and covering subjects from nineteenth-century novels to rave culture, the chapters together constitute an informed, diverse and wide-ranging discussion.  The volume is written for scholarly readers at all levels in the fields of literary studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, art history, film, theater studies, and digital humanities. 
 
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The Context of Ancient Drama
Eric Csapo and William J. Slater
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Ancient theater has always caught contemporary interest, despite the eclectic nature of the surviving evidence. Tourists wander the remains of buildings at Epidauros and Athens, and generations of people have pondered Medea and Oedipus, yet it can be surprisingly difficult to find reliable, accessible information on these plays and their theaters. The Context of Ancient Drama remedies this situation. It provides, in modern English translation, documents that illustrate all aspects of the drama of antiquity, other than the text of the dramas themselves. For convenience the material is grouped in thematic sections, such as "music," or "judging." The illustrations give well-known examples of the kind of evidence that has survived to us. Plans of theaters are provided, to exemplify the outlines of the buildings' development, and an extensive glossary of terms offers information to the interested amateur and the theater specialist alike. The Context of Ancient Drama will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students and teachers. Theater historians, students of dramatic performance and the visual arts, and students and teachers in literature-in-translation courses will all find much that speaks to them.
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The Context of Casuistry
James F. Keenan, SJ, and Thomas A. Shannon, Editors. Foreword by Albert R. Jonsen
Georgetown University Press, 1995

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The Context Of Self
A Phenomenological Inquiry Using Medicine as a Clue
Richard M. Zaner
Ohio University Press, 1981

This study takes up the challenge presented to philosophy in a dramatic and urgent way by contemporary medicine: the phenomenon of human life. Initiated by a critical appreciation of the work of Hans Jonas, who poses that issue as well, the inquiry is brought to focus on the phenomenon of embodiment, using relevant medical writing to help elicit its concrete dimensions.

The explication of embodiment, aided by critical studies and inquiries into medical phenomena (autism, brain injury, terminal illness) make possible the development of the author’s original phenomenological theory of self, and its concrete relationships with the other self. This study attempts not only to show connections among the works of a number of thinkers in terms of central problems, but to demonstrate the mutual relevance of medicine and philosophy through concrete illustrations and analysis.

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Deaf Children in Public Schools
Placement, Context, and Consequences
Claire L. Ramsey
Gallaudet University Press, 1997
As the practice of mainstreaming deaf and hard of hearing children into general classrooms continues to proliferate, the performances of these students becomes critical. Deaf Children in Public Schools assesses the progress of three second-grade deaf students to demonstrate the importance of placement, context, and language in their development.

       Ramsey points out that these deaf children were placed in two different environments, with the general population of hearing students, and separately with other deaf and hard of hearing children. Her incisive study reveals that although both settings were ostensibly educational, inclusion in the general population was done to comply with the law, not to establish specific goals for the deaf children. In contrast, self-contained classes for deaf and hard of hearing children were designed especially to concentrate upon their particular learning needs. Deaf Children in Public Schools also demonstrates that the key educational element of language development cannot be achieved in a social vacuum, which deaf children face in the real isolation of the mainstream classroom.

       Based upon these insights, Deaf Children in Public Schools follows the deaf students in school to consider three questions regarding the merit of language study without social interaction or cultural access, the meaning of context in relation to their educational success, and the benefits of the perception of the setting as the context rather than as a place. The intricate answers found in this cohesive book offer educators, scholars, and parents a remarkable stage for assessing and enhancing the educational context for the deaf children within their purview.
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Deconstruction in Context
Literature and Philosophy
Edited by Mark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 1986
"There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of  day." – Jacques Derrida

"This invaluable philosophical sampler brings together many of the threads out of which deconstruction is woven. taylor's anthology does not make deconstruction easy; much more usefully, it provides a meticulous guide to the sources – and significance – of the difficulties. – Barbara E. Johnson

"The book will be of great value as a set of readings with authoritative explanation for all those interested in the current relations of literature and philosophy. It is the best book of its kind I know. – J. Hillis Miller, Yale University
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A Dictionary of Turkish Verbs
In Context and By Theme
Ralph Jaeckel and Gülnur Doganata Erciyes. With the Collaboration of Mehmet Süreyya Er
Georgetown University Press, 2006

One of the keys to learning the Turkish language is to understand the importance and function of the verb. The stem of the verb, together with various suffixes of mode, tense, person, along with a subject and/or object, may be the equivalent of an entire English sentence. A Dictionary of Turkish Verbs is an aid to both the beginning and more advanced student of the language by providing approximately 1,000 verbs in context as they appear in up-to-date colloquial Turkish phrases and sentences, or short dialogues in translation.

Contrasting English and Turkish ways of expression, this multipurpose dictionary also helps the English speaker avoid the most common errors—with most verbs cross-referenced to related verbs, synonyms, or antonyms, and to the broader themes or categories of meaning to which they belong. Includes an English-Turkish index and a thesaurus section (using Roget's categories) where verbs of related meaning appear together and a short reference list of verb-forming suffixes. For students at any stage of learning the Turkish language, or for the self-motivated traveler, this unique dictionary will help open the door to greater understanding in an increasingly important area of the world.

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Edith Wharton in Context
Essays on Intertextuality
Adeline R. Tintner
University of Alabama Press, 1999

Tintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James—how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton’s confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially for The Age of Innocence.

Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton’s work. Wharton’s response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton’s sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti’s revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home in The Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton’s use of Tiepolo’s fresco in the church of Scalzi.

Tintner concludes by considering Wharton’s literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton’s personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.

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Emancipating Lincoln
The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory
Harold Holzer
Harvard University Press, 2012

Emancipating Lincoln seeks a new approach to the Emancipation Proclamation, a foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These seventeen hundred words are Lincoln’s most important piece of writing, responsible both for his being hailed as the Great Emancipator and for his being pilloried by those who consider his once-radical effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted.

Harold Holzer, an award-winning Lincoln scholar, invites us to examine the impact of Lincoln’s momentous announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time. Using neglected original sources, Holzer uncovers Lincoln’s very modern manipulation of the media—from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation—in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his “greatest act” in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration across the past century and a half, as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln’s endeavor.

Holzer shows the faults in applying our own standards to Lincoln’s efforts, but also demonstrates how Lincoln’s obfuscations made it nearly impossible to discern his true motives. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, this concise volume is a vivid depiction of the painfully slow march of all Americans—white and black, leaders and constituents—toward freedom.

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Emanuel Swedenborg--Exploring a "World Memory"
Context, Content, Contribution
Karl Grandin
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2013
In 2010, a scholarly conference on Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas and influence was held at the Center for the History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The conference was a celebration a recently completed digital catalog of the academy’s Swedenborg archive, which in 2006 was designated as part of UNESCO’s World Memory program. This was the first time that an academic conference on Swedenborg was hosted by a non-Swedenborgian institution.

The conference attracted presenters from all over the world, including some top scholars. Papers were divided into three categories. “Content” describes Swedenborg’s thought, from his use of spheres in his scientific writings to his views on sexuality and marriage to analyses of his theological writings. “Context” explores his times, putting Swedenborg in the context of eighteenth-century philosophy and looking at the organization of the earliest Swedenborgian church. “Contribution” looks at Swedenborg’s influence on philosophy and the arts, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Czeslaw Milocz to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William James.

These papers present a rare insight into Swedenborg. Although only a limited number of attendees were invited to the conference, now the research is available to all.
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Enlightenment All the Way to Heaven
Emanuel Swedenborg in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Theology and Philosophy
Friedemann Stengel
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2023
Enlightenment All the Way to Heaven: Emanuel Swedenborg in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Theology and Philosophy is an English translation of Friedemann Stengel’s 2009 German habilitation (qualifying) thesis, which was published by Mohr Siebeck Tübingen in 2011, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts. In this volume, Stengel provides a survey of Swedenborg’s philosophical influences, as well as an assessment of Swedenborg’s own influence on the German theology of his time, thereby giving the reader new insight into the nature of the Enlightenment. Exploring Swedenborg’s many inspirations, from Plato to Aristotle, Augustine to Descartes, and Malebranche to Leibniz, just to name a few, Stengel shows the breadth of their impact on Swedenborg and the resultant sophistication of the Swedish prophet’s ideas.

By broadening the conversation surrounding Swedenborg’s source and reception histories, Stengel hopes to counter the reductive lenses through which certain of Swedenborg’s experiences have been filtered. In the author’s own words, “this will serve to highlight the perspectives contained within the historical discourse, tracing their seminal influence on later religious and philosophical discussions that, in turn, gave rise, from the eighteenth century onward, to the psychohistorical interpretations of associated supernatural phenomena such as Swedenborg’s visionary propensity.”

Enlightenment All the Way to Heaven is the twenty-fourth installment in the Swedenborg Studies scholarly series.
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Folklore by the Fireside
Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia
By Alessandro Falassi
University of Texas Press, 1980

For centuries, social life in rural Tuscany has centered around the veglia, an evening gathering of family and friends at the hearth. Folklore by the Fireside is a thorough and insightful study of this custom—from the tales, riddles, lullabies, and folk prayers performed as the small children are put to bed to the courtship songs and dances later in the evening to the anti-veglia male gossip, card games, and protest songs originating in the tavern.

Alessandro Falassi skillfully correlates the veglia to the rites of passage and family values of an agrarian society. Although the impact of mass media and other factors has tended to weaken the tradition, even today Tuscan children are taught to behave and adolescents are guided along the conventional path to adulthood, courtship, and marriage through veglia folklore.

This is the first work to deal systematically with Tuscan folklore from a semiotic and structural viewpoint and to examine the veglia as a means of handing down traditional values. It is important not only for its careful, detailed description but also for its rigorous methodology and theoretical richness.

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From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico
Religious Globalization in the Context of Empire
David Charles Wright-Carr
University Press of Colorado, 2023
From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico compares the Christianization of the Roman Empire with the evangelization of Mesoamerica, offering novel perspectives on the historical processes involved in the spread of Christianity. Combining concepts of empire and globalization with the notion of religion from a postcolonial perspective, the book proposes the method of analytical comparison as a point of departure to conceptualize historical affinities and differences between the ancient Roman Empire and colonial Mesoamerica.

An international team of specialists in classical scholarship and Mesoamerican studies engage in an interdisciplinary discussion involving ideas from history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, iconography, and philology. Key themes include the role of religion in processes of imperial domination; religion’s use as an instrument of resistance or the imposition, appropriation, incorporation, and adaptation of various elements of religious systems by hegemonic groups and subaltern peoples; the creative misunderstandings that can arise on the “middle ground”; and Christianity’s rejection of ritual violence and its use of this rejection as a pretext for inflicting other kinds of violence against peoples classified as “barbarian,” “pagan,” or “diabolical.”

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico presents a sympathetic vantage point for discussing and attempting to decipher past processes of social communication in multicultural contexts of present-day realities. It will be significant for scholars and specialists in the history of religions, ethnohistory, classical antiquity, and Mesoamerican studies.

Publication supported, in part, by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Contributors: Sergio Botta,Maria Celia Fontana Calvo, Martin Devecka, György Németh, Guilhem Olivier, Francisco Marco Simón, Paolo Taviani, Greg Woolf, David Charles Wright-Carr, Lorenzo Pérez Yarza
Translators: Emma Chesterman, Benjamin Adam Jerue, Layla Wright-Contreras
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From Text to Context
The Turn to History in Modern Judaism
Ismar Schorsch
University Press of New England, 2003
Essays examining the emergence of Jewish scholarship during the period 1818 - 1919, concentrating on the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
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From Text to Context
The Turn to History in Modern Judaism
Ismar Schorsch
Brandeis University Press, 1994
Essays examining the emergence of Jewish scholarship during the period 1818 - 1919, concentrating on the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
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Gendering the Renaissance
Text and Context in Early Modern Italy
Meredith K. Ray
University of Delaware Press, 2023
The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.
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German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence
Susanne Kuss
Harvard University Press, 2017

Germany fought three major colonial wars from 1900 to 1908: the Boxer War in China, the Herero and Nama War in Southwest Africa, and the Maji Maji War in East Africa. Recently, historians have emphasized the role of German military culture in shaping the horrific violence of these conflicts, tracing a line from German atrocities in the colonial sphere to those committed by the Nazis during World War II. Susanne Kuss dismantles such claims in a close examination of Germany’s early twentieth-century colonial experience. Despite acts of unquestionable brutality committed by the Kaiser’s soldiers, she finds no direct path from Windhoek, site of the infamous massacre of the Herero people, to Auschwitz.

In German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence Kuss rejects the notion that a distinctive military culture or ethos determined how German forces acted overseas. Unlike rival powers France and Great Britain, Germany did not possess a professional colonial army. The forces it deployed in Africa and China were a motley mix of volunteers, sailors, mercenaries, and native recruits—all accorded different training and motivated by different factors. Germany’s colonial troops embodied no esprit de corps that the Nazis could subsequently adopt.

Belying its reputation for Teutonic efficiency, the German military’s conduct of operations in Africa and China was improvisational and often haphazard. Local conditions—geography, climate, the size and capabilities of opposing native populations—determined the nature and extent of the violence German soldiers employed. A deliberate policy of genocide did not guide their actions.

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Getting Doctors to Listen
Ethics and Outcomes Data in Context
Philip J. Boyle, Editor
Georgetown University Press

This book examines why physicians are often surprisingly reluctant to follow guidelines for treating patients based on research data. It assesses the merits of these concerns—which include worries about legal liability, financial incentives, the scientific validity of the data, and the objectivity of the issuer of the guidelines. It also proposes ways of developing more useful data and more effective guidelines that would reduce their objections.

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Hegel's Critique of Liberalism
Rights in Context
Steven B. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In Hegel's Critique of Liberalism, Steven B. Smith examines Hegel's critique of rights-based liberalism and its relevance to contemporary political concerns. Smith argues that Hegel reformulated classic liberalism, preserving what was of value while rendering it more attentive to the dynamics of human history and the developmental structure of the moral personality. Hegel's goal, Smith suggests, was to find a way of incorporating both the ancient emphasis on the dignity and even architectonic character of political life with the modern concern for freedom, rights, and mutual recognition. Smith's insightful analysis reveals Hegel's relevance not only to contemporary political philosophers concerned with normative issues of liberal theory but also to political scientists who have urged a revival of the state as a central concept of political inquiry.
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History and Context in Comparative Public Policy
Douglas E. Ashford
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

Douglas E. Ashford joins a growing number of scholars who have questioned the behavioralist assumptions of much policy science. The essays in this volume show why policy analysis cannot be confined to prevailing methods of social science. Policy-making behavior involves historical, contextual, and philosophical factors that also raise critical questions about the concepts and theory of the discipline. Ashford asks difficult questions about the contextual, conjunctural, and unintentional circumstances that affect actual decision-making. His bridging essays summarize opposing viewpoints and conflicting interpretations to help form a new agenda for comparative policy analysis.

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Human Rights, Culture and Context
Anthropological Perspectives
Richard A. Wilson
Pluto Press, 1998

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The International Monetary Fund and Latin America
The Argentine Puzzle in Context
Claudia Kedar
Temple University Press, 2013

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played a critical role in the global economy since the postwar era. But, claims Claudia Kedar, behind the strictly economic aspects of the IMF’s intervention, there are influential interactions between IMF technocrats and local economists—even when countries are not borrowing money.

In The International Monetary Fund and Latin America, Kedar seeks to expose the motivations and constraints of the operations of both the IMF and borrowers. With access to never-before-seen archive materials, Kedar reveals both the routine and behind-the-scenes practices that have depicted International Monetary Fund–Latin American relations in general and the asymmetrical IMF-Argentina relations in particular.

Kedar also analyzes the “routine of dependency” that characterizes  IMF-borrower relations with several Latin American countries such as Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The International Monetary Fund and Latin America shows how debtor countries have adopted IMF’s policies during past decades and why Latin American leaders today largely refrain from knocking at the IMF’s doors again.

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Intimate Fathers
The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care
Barry S. Hewlett
University of Michigan Press, 1993
This systematic study of non-Western fathers' roles in infant care focuses on the Aka pygmies of central Africa
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Into Sūr’s Ocean
Poetry, Context, and Commentary
John Stratton Hawley
Harvard University Press

Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition was published in 2015 as the fifth volume of the Murty Classical Library of India. That book contains Kenneth Bryant’s critical reconstructions of 433 poems of Surdas that circulated in the sixteenth century, when this great Hindi poet lived, and it includes facing-page, English verse translations by John Stratton Hawley. The name traditionally assigned to these poems is Sursagar, meaning Sur’s Ocean.

Into Sūr’s Ocean: Poetry, Context, and Commentary picks up many threads from that volume, and provides a substantial introduction to the poet, his medium, and his oeuvre; an overview of editions, including Bryant’s; an analysis of the challenges Hawley faced as translator; and poem-by-poem commentary. Each commentary is a brief, independent essay. This book offers a deep—and rewarding—dive into Sur’s Ocean.

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James Agee in Context
New Literary, Visual, Cultural, and Historical Essays
Michael A. Lofaro
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the many new works by James Agee uncovered and published in the last twenty years. These previously unknown primary works have, in turn, encouraged a parallel explosion of critical evaluation and reevaluation by scholars, to which James Agee in Context is the latest contribution.

This superb collection from well-known James Agee scholars features myriad approaches and contexts for understanding the author’s fiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. The essays bring the reader from the streets of James Agee’s New York to travel with the author from Alabama to Hollywood to Havana. Contributors explore overlapping and sometimes unique subjects, themes, and accomplishments (or lack thereof) in Agee’s uncovered works and highlight the diversity of interest that Agee’s complete body of work inspires. The insightful scholarship on influence examines connections between Agee and Wright Morris, Helen Levitt, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Crane. Such juxtapositions serve to illustrate how Agee drew on literary influences as a young man, how he used his work as a journalist to craft fiction as he was about to turn thirty, and his influence upon others. The volume concludes with three poems and a short story by Agee, all previously unknown.

It seems astonishing that so much remains to be discovered about this protean author, his materials, and his circle. Yet, the recovery and analysis of neglected texts and information mined from newspapers and magazines proves the extent to which Agee kept his mind and his work, as he himself put it, “patiently concentrated upon the essential quietudes of the human soul.”

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Japanese Law in Context
Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics
Curtis J. Milhaupt
Harvard University Press, 2001
This is a wide-ranging selection of 130 readings in Japanese law. The essays, extracted from previously published books and articles, cover subjects including historical context, the civil law tradition, the legal services industry, dispute resolution, constitutional law, contracts, torts, criminal law, family law, employment law, corporate law, and economic regulation. This unique collection of readings is accompanied by the texts of the Japanese constitution and other basic laws.
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John and Judaism
A Contested Relationship in Context
R. Alan Culpepper
SBL Press, 2017

A window into early Judaism and Christianity

The Gospel of John was written during the period of the emergence of Christianity and its separation from Judaism and bears witness to their contested relationship. This volume contains eighteen cutting-edge essays written by an international group of scholars who interpret for students and general readers what the book tells us about first-century Judaism, the separation of the church from Judaism, and how John's anti-Jewish references are being interpreted today.

Features:

  • A debate over the process that led to the separation of the church from Judaism, and John's place in that process
  • A review of recent interpretations of John's anti-Jewish references
  • An assessment of the current status of Jewish Christian relations
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Jung in Context
Modernity and the Making of a Psychology
Peter Homans
University of Chicago Press, 1979
This provocative account of the origins, influences, and legacy of Jungian psychology is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when first published in 1979. By delineating the social, personal, religious, and cultural contexts of Jung's system of psychology, Homans identifies the central role of depth psychology in the culture of modernity. In this new edition, Homans has added an extensive foreword linking the core of Jungian psychology to contemporary works it has shaped—such as those of M. Scott Peck and Clarissa Pinkola Estes—that proclaim the power of Jungian concepts and theories to heal the alienated and isolated self in today's world.

"Jung in Context is an intellectual triumph. . . . Utilizes the resources of biography, psychology, sociology, and theology to probe the genesis of a psychological system which is currently enjoying a wide following. . . . A splendid job."—Lewis R. Rambo, Psychiatry

"Anyone seeking an introduction to Jung's thought will find a masterful précis here."—Jan Goldstein, Journal of Sociology

"An unusually perceptive and clearly written book. . . . An important advance in the understanding of Jung, and Homans's methodology sets the stage for all future efforts to understand psychological innovators."—Herbert H. Stroup, Christian Century
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Market Failure in Context
Alain Marciano and Steven G. Medema, special issue editors
Duke University Press

This volume explores the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which twentieth-century notions of market failure were developed. Markets can fail to perform in ways that best promote the larger interests of society: this idea is as old as economics itself and is one of the most crucial issues with which economic thinkers have had to grapple. However, while the history of the theory of market failure has received some critical examination, little attention has been paid to the larger contexts in which these theoretical analyses emerged. Contributors to this volume directly examine these contexts to gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for the influence of external ideas and events on the development of economic theories and to stimulate additional scholarship around this important facet of the history of economics.

Contributors. Nahid Aslanbeigui, Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W. Bateman, Sebastian Berger, David Colander, J. Daniel Hammond, Marianne Johnson, Thomas C. Leonard, Alain Marciano, Steven G. Medema, Guy Oakes, Malcolm Rutherford, John D. Singleton

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Meaning and Context in the Thanksgiving Hymns
Linguistic and Rhetorical Perspectives on a Collection
Trine Bjørnung Hasselbalch
SBL Press, 2015

A new reading strategy for the Thanksgiving Hymns

Hasselbalch asserts that current theories about the social background of Thanksgiving Hymns are unable to explain its heterogeneous character. Instead the author suggests a reading strategy that leaves presumptions about the underlying social contexts aside to instead consider the collection’s hybridity as a clue to understanding the collection as a whole.

Features:

  • Systemic Functional Linguistics applied to four Hodayot
  • Analysis that highlights the role of a mediator in the agency of God
  • An approach that highlights the unity of the collection
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Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition
Methods, Theory, and Practice
Cristina Sanz, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2005

How do people learn nonnative languages? Is there one part or function of our brains solely dedicated to language processing, or do we apply our general information-processing abilities when learning a new language? In this book, an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and researchers presents an overview of the latter approach to adult second language acquisition and brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the latest research on this subject.

Clearly organized into four distinct but integrated parts, Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition first provides an introduction to information-processing approaches and the tools for students to understand the data. The next sections explain factors that affect language learning, both internal (attention and awareness, individual differences, and the neural bases of language acquisition) and external (input, interaction, and pedagogical interventions). It concludes by looking at two pedagogical applications: processing instruction and content based instruction.

This important and timely volume is a must-read for students of language learning, second language acquisition, and linguists who want to better understand the information-processing approaches to learning a non-primary language. This book will also be of immense interest to language scholars, program directors, teachers, and administrators in both second language acquisition and cognitive psychology.

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Motives for Allusion
Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music
Christopher Alan Reynolds
Harvard University Press, 2003

When a critic pointed out to Brahms that the finale theme in his First Symphony was remarkably similar to the Ode to Joy theme in Beethoven's Ninth, he is said to have replied: "Yes indeed, and what's really remarkable is that every jackass notices this at once." Not every musical borrowing is quite so obvious; but the listener who does perceive one is always left wondering: what does the similarity mean? In this illuminating book Christopher Reynolds gives us answers to that complex question.

Reynolds identifies specific borrowings or allusions in a wide range of nineteenth-century music. He shows the kinds of things composers do with borrowed musical ideas, and discusses why a composer would choose to deploy such allusions. A rich historical background for the practice emerges from his analysis. Musical borrowing touches directly on issues of central importance for nineteenth- and twentieth-century composition: notions of creativity and originality, the constraints of tradition and innovation, musical symbolism and the listener's ear. In clarifying what it can mean when one piece of music invokes or refers to another, Reynolds expands our understanding of what we hear.

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Music and Context
Essays in Honor of John Milton Ward
Anne Dhu Shapiro
Harvard University Press, 1985

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Neighborhood Poverty
Context and Consequences for Children
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Russell Sage Foundation, 1997
Perhaps the most alarming phenomenon in American cities has been the transformation of many neighborhoods into isolated ghettos where poverty is the norm and violent crime, drug use, out-of-wedlock births, and soaring school dropout rates are rampant. Public concern over these destitute areas has focused on their most vulnerable inhabitants—children and adolescents. How profoundly does neighborhood poverty endanger their well-being and development? Is the influence of neighborhood more powerful than that of the family? Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children approaches these questions with an insightful and wide-ranging investigation into the effect of community poverty on children's physical health, cognitive and verbal abilities, educational attainment, and social adjustment. This two-volume set offers the most current research and analysis from experts in the fields of child development, social psychology, sociology and economics. Drawing from national and city-based sources, Volume I reports the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between children and community. As the essays demonstrate, poverty entails a host of problems that affects the quality of educational, recreational, and child care services. Poor neighborhoods usually share other negative features—particularly racial segregation and a preponderance of single mother families—that may adversely affect children. Yet children are not equally susceptible to the pitfalls of deprived communities. Neighborhood has different effects depending on a child's age, race, and gender, while parenting techniques and a family's degree of community involvement also serve as mitigating factors. Volume II incorporates empirical data on neighborhood poverty into discussions of policy and program development. The contributors point to promising community initiatives and suggest methods to strengthen neighborhood-based service programs for children. Several essays analyze the conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the measurement of neighborhood characteristics. These essays focus on the need to expand scientific insight into urban poverty by drawing on broader pools of ethnographic, epidemiological, and quantitative data. Volume II explores the possibilities for a richer and more well-rounded understanding of neighborhood and poverty issues. To grasp the human cost of poverty, we must clearly understand how living in distressed neighborhoods impairs children's ability to function at every level. Neighborhood Poverty explores the multiple and complex paths between community, family, and childhood development. These two volumes provide and indispensible guide for social policy and demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary social science to probe complex social issues.
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Of Time and the Enterprise
North American Family Farm Management in a Context of Resource Marginality
John Bennett
University of Minnesota Press, 1982
Of Time and the Enterprise was first published in 1982.Of Time and the Enterprise is the result of 12 years’ research in the Canadian sector of the northern Great Plains -- a 7,000-square-mile region that was one of the last areas in North America to be populated by agricultural settlers. This late settlement permitted a reconstruction of the area’s history and economic and social development unparalleled in the literature.This book has several dimensions. It is, first, a meticulous study of the North American family farm. Bennett considers such aspects of the family farm as the ways that family members relate to one another and how the various members, especially the wife, participate in management of the enterprise. The book is also a study of agricultural management as an adaptive process. Farm operators must juggle the demands of their families, communities, and the national market in determining the conduct of the business. Finally, the book is a study of the development process on a recent frontier and thus has many implications for agricultural and community development in the Third World.As the first detailed study of entrepreneurial agriculture in North America, Of Time and the Enterprise combines quantitative and qualitative analysis and looks at the family farm as a form of social behavior, not merely as a form of economic performance. Bennett presents a new interpretation of decision-making, resource allocation, and the influence of family, community, and cultural traditions which he argues must be seen as part of a larger social system.
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Optimizing Structure in Context
Scrambling and Information Structure
Hye-Won Choi
CSLI, 1999
This book examines the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles. Using Optimality Theory, Optimizing Structure in Context demonstrates how these principles from different modules of grammar interact and thus resolve conflicts among themselves to yield the most optimal output, that is, a sentence with a particular word order, in a given semantic and discoursal context. This way, it explains various meaning-related effects associated with scrambling such as definiteness effect and focus effect. While developing constraints in the discourse domain, it also proposes a new model of information structure based on basic discourse features. By expanding the core idea of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory to interactions 'between' modules of grammar as well as 'between', this book provides a model of interface theory.
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Out of Context
Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges
Daniel Balderston
Duke University Press, 1993
In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature.
Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas.
Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and—until now—hermetic authors of our time.
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Patristic Exegesis in Context
Exploring the Genres of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation
Miriam De Cock
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The essays of Patristic Exegesis in Context examine the biblical exegesis of early Christians beyond the formal genre of biblical commentary. The past couple of decades have seen a broadening of perspective on the study of patristic exegesis; the phenomenon is increasingly situated within its various literary contexts and genres, and the definition of what counts as patristic exegesis is therefore widened. This volume thus situates itself within this emerging scholarly tradition, which aims not to give an account of exegetical strategies and methodologies as found primarily in exegetical commentaries and homilies, but to demonstrate the highly sophisticated nature of biblical exegesis in other genres, and the manifold uses to which this exegesis was put. Ancient Christian authors lived and breathed scripture; it served as their primary source of theological and liturgical vocabulary, their way of processing the world, their social ethic, and their mode of constructing self and communal identity. Scripture therefore permeates all ancient Christian literature, regardless of genre, and the various contexts in which interpretation of scripture took place resulted in a wide variety of uses of the church’s authoritative texts. The essays in this volume demonstrate the interpretive skill, creativity, and sophistication of early Christian authors in a myriad of other early Christian genres, such as poetry, paraphrase, hymns, martyr accounts, homilies, prophetic vision accounts, monastic writings, argumentative treatises, encomia, apocalypses, and catenae. Accordingly, the volume aims to help the modern person, who is used to hearing the Bible explained in explicitly expository situations (for example, in academic commentaries or religious sermons) to become more habituated to ancient ways of interacting with and expounding the biblical text. These essays attempt to contextualize various types of patristic exegesis, in order for us to glimpse the complex and diverse uses of the Bible in this period.
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Persuasive Gaming in Context
Teresa de La Hera
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The rapid developments of new communication technologies have facilitated the popularization of digital games, which has translated into an exponential growth of the game industry in the last decades. The ubiquitous presence of digital games has resulted in an expansion of the applications of these games from mere entertainment purposes to a great variety of serious purposes. In this edited volume, we narrow the scope of attention by focusing on what game theorist Ian Bogost has called "persuasive games", that is, gaming practices that combine the dissemination of information with attempts to engage players in particular attitudes and behaviors. This volume offers a multifaceted reflection on persuasive gaming, that is, on the process of these particular games being played by players. The purpose is to better understand when and how digital games can be used for persuasion, by further exploring persuasive games and some other kinds of persuasive playful interaction as well. The book critically integrates what has been accomplished in separate research traditions to offer a multidisciplinary approach to understanding persuasive gaming that is closely linked to developments in the industry by including the exploration of relevant case studies.
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The Place of Stone Monuments
Context, Use, and Meaning in Mesoamerica’s Preclassic Transition
Julia Guernsey
Harvard University Press, 2010

This volume considers the significance of stone monuments in Preclassic Mesoamerica, focusing on the period following the precocious appearance of monumental sculpture at the Olmec site of San Lorenzo and preceding the rise of the Classic polities in the Maya region and Central Mexico.

By quite literally “placing” sculptures in their cultural, historical, social, political, religious, and cognitive contexts, the seventeen contributors utilize archaeological and art historical methods to understand the origins, growth, and spread of civilization in Middle America. They present abundant new data and new ways of thinking about sculpture and society in Preclassic Mesoamerica, and call into question the traditional dividing line between Preclassic and Classic cultures. They offer not only a fruitful way of rethinking the beginnings of civilization in Mesoamerica, but provide a series of detailed discussions concerning how these beginnings were dynamically visualized through sculptural programming during the Preclassic period.

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Psychosomatic Families
Anorexia Nervosa in Context
Salvador Minuchin, Bernice L. Rosman, and Lester Baker
Harvard University Press, 1978

Salvador Minuchin is widely recognized as one of the preeminent family therapists in the world. He has been described, in the American Journal of Psychotherapy, as “a most original innovator, a superb clinician, and an outstanding teacher.” Now, in this pioneering work, he and his co-authors apply the effectiveness of family therapy techniques to an illness that has long resisted treatment—anorexia nervosa.

The purpose of their book is threefold: to develop a new theory of psychosomatic disease, to confirm it with scientific data, and to show it unfolding in actual therapeutic situations with anorectic patients. Drawing upon their own clinical experience and illustrating their views with case studies, they advance a new approach that places the locus of the illness not in the individual but in the family. Their method, which has been highly successful, requires the active involvement of the therapist as an agent of change within the family, stimulating crises that are severe enough to shake up the system and allow it to reform in new and healthier patterns.

This book has revolutionary implications, not just for anorectic patients but for those suffering from all other psychosomatic disease. Whereas such illnesses to date have often eluded treatment, the approach through family therapy holds out the promise of future successes.

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Putting Inequality in Context
Class, Public Opinion, and Representation in the United States
Christopher Ellis
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Rising income inequality is highlighted as one of the largest challenges facing the United States, affecting civic participation and political representation. Although the wealthy often can and do exert more political influence, this is not always the case. To fix political inequality, it is important to understand exactly how class divisions manifest themselves in political outcomes, and what factors serve to enhance, or depress, inequalities in political voice.

Christopher Ellis argues citizens’—and legislators’—views of class politics are driven by lived experience in particular communities. While some experience is formally political, on an informal basis citizens learn a great deal about their position in the broader socioeconomic spectrum and the social norms governing how class intersects with day-to-day life. These factors are important for policymakers, since most legislators do not represent “the public” at large, but specific constituencies.

Focusing on U.S. congressional districts as the contextual unit of interest, Ellis argues individuals’ political behavior cannot be separated from their environment, and shows how income’s role in political processes is affected by the contexts in which citizens and legislators interact. Political inequality exists in the aggregate, but it does not exist everywhere. It is, rather, a function of specific arrangements that depress the political influence of the poor. Identifying and understanding these factors is a crucial step in thinking about what reforms might be especially helpful in enhancing equality of political voice.


 
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Quantifiers, Deduction, and Context
Edited by Makoto Kanazawa, Christopher Piñon, and Henriëtte de Swart
CSLI, 1996
This volume is an outgrowth of the second Workshop on Logic, Language and Computation held at Stanford in the spring of 1993. The workshop brought together researchers interested in natural language to discuss the current state of the art at the borderline of logic, linguistics and computer science. The papers in this collection fall into three central research areas of the nineties, namely quantifiers, deduction, and context. Each contribution reflects an ever-growing interest in a more dynamic approach to meaning, which focuses on inference patterns and the interpretation of sentences in the context of a larger discourse. The papers apply either current logical machinery - such as linear logic, generalised quantifier theory, dynamic logic - or formal analyses of the notion of context in discourse to classical linguistic issues, with original and thought-provoking results deserving of a wide audience.
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Reading Etty Hillesum in Context
Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary Author
Edited by Klaas Smelik, Gerrit van Oord, and Jurjen Wiersma
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914—1943) have a special place among the Jewish-Dutch testimonies of the Shoah, somuch so that Etty Hillesum studies has become its own field. This book offers the most important contributions from the pastfifteen years of international research into Hillesum’s work and life, studying her ethical, philosophical, spiritual, and literary existential search.
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Research Interviewing
Context and Narrative
Elliot G. Mishler
Harvard University Press, 1986

Interviews hold a prominent place among the various research methods in the social and behavioral sciences. This book presents a powerful critique of current views and techniques, and proposes a new approach to interviewing. At the heart of Elliot Mishler’s argument is the notion that an interview is a type of discourse, a speech event: it is a joint product, shaped and organized by asking and answering questions.

This view may seem self-evident, yet it does not guide most interview research. In the mainstream tradition, the discourse is suppressed. Questions and answers are regarded as analogues to stimuli and responses rather than as forms of speech; questions and the interviewer’s behavior are standardized so that all respondents will receive the same “stimulus”; respondents’ social and personal contexts of meaning are ignored. While many researchers now recognize that context must be taken into account, the question of how to do so effectively has not been resolved. This important book illustrates how to implement practical alternatives to standard interviewing methods.

Drawing on current work in sociolinguistics as well as on his own extensive experience conducting interviews, Mishler shows how interviews can be analyzed and interpreted as narrative accounts. He places interviewing in a sociocultural context and examines the effects on respondents of different types of interviewing practice. The respondents themselves, he believes, should be granted a more extensive role as participants and collaborators in the research process.

The book is an elegant work of synthesis—clearly and persuasively written, and supported by concrete examples of both standard interviewing and alternative methods. It will be of interest to both scholars and clinicians in all the various fields for which the interview is an essential tool.

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Social Policies and Decentralization in Cuba
Change in the Context of 21st Century Latin America
Jorge I. Domínguez
Harvard University Press

Cuba has long been a social policy pioneer in Latin America. Since the 1959 revolution, its government has developed ambitious social policies to address health care, higher education, employment, the environment, and broad social inequalities, among other priorities. Cuban strategies emphasized universal rights and benefits, provided free of financial cost to users, and implemented under centralized and unitary policy design.

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, funds for these policies came under strain, although systematic efforts have been made to sustain them. Poverty rates and inequality have risen. Access to higher education has become more difficult. Access to health care has become less reliable. Environmental policies are both more salient and more difficult to sustain. The government has resisted privatization policies, but has sought to decentralize the implementation of various policies, fostering non-state cooperatives as well. At the same time, many Latin American governments have experimented with new social policies that, in this century, reduced poverty rates significantly and in some countries somewhat reduced various inequalities.

Still facing severe economic challenges, Cuba may look to learn from the policies of its Latin American neighbors, in some instances for the first time ever. This book analyzes these issues comparatively and in depth.

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A Story of South Africa
J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context
Susan Gallagher
Harvard University Press, 1991

With the publication of Age of Iron--winner of Britain's richest fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year for 1990--J. M. Coetzee is now recognized as one of the foremost writers of our day. In this timely study of Coetzee's fiction, Susan Gallagher places his work in the context of South African history and politics. Her close historical readings of Coetzee's six major novels explore how he lays bare the "dense complicity between thought and language" in South Africa.

Following a penetrating description of the unique difficulties facing writers under apartheid, Gallagher recounts how history, language, and authority have been used to marginalize the majority of South Africa's people. Her story reaches from the beginnings of Afrikaner nationalism to the recent past: the Sharpeville massacre, the jailing of Nelson Mandela, and the Soweto uprising.

As a result of his rejection of liberal and socialist realism, Coetzee has been branded an escapist, but Gallagher ably defends him from this charge. Her cogent, convincingly argued examination of his novels demonstrates that Coetzee's fictional response is "apocalyptic in the most profound Biblical sense, obscurely pointing toward ineffable realities transcending discursive definition." Viewing Coetzee's fiction in this context, Gallagher describes a new kind of novel "that arises out of history, but also rivals history." This analysis reveals Coetzee's novels to be profound responses to their time and place as well as richly rewarding investigations of the storyteller's art.

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Susan Glaspell in Context
American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48
J. Ellen Gainor
University of Michigan Press, 2003

Susan Glaspell in Context not only discusses the dramatic work of this key American author -- perhaps best known for her short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and its dramatic counterpart, Trifles -- but also places it within the theatrical, cultural, political, social, historical, and biographical climates in which Glaspell's dramas were created: the worlds of Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemia, of the American frontier, and of American modernism.

J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Cornell University. Her other books include Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (co-edited with Jeffrey D. Mason) from the University of Michigan Press.
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Theatermachine
Tadeusz Kantor in Context
Edited by Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context is an in-depth, multidisciplinary compendium of essays that examine Kantor’s work through the prism of postmemory and trauma theory and in relation to Polish literature, Jewish culture, and Yiddish theater as well as the Japanese, German, French, Polish, and American avant-garde. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theater and contemporary developments in critical theory—particularly Bill Brown’s thing theory, Bruno Latour’s actor network theory, and posthumanism—provide a previously unavailable vocabulary for discussion of Kantor’s theater.
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Victorian Science in Context
Edited by Bernard Lightman
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Victorians were fascinated by the flood of strange new worlds that science was opening to them. Exotic plants and animals poured into London from all corners of the Empire, while revolutionary theories such as the radical idea that humans might be descended from apes drew crowds to heated debates. Men and women of all social classes avidly collected scientific specimens for display in their homes and devoured literature about science and its practitioners.

Victorian Science in Context captures the essence of this fascination, charting the many ways in which science influenced and was influenced by the larger Victorian culture. Contributions from leading scholars in history, literature, and the history of science explore questions such as: What did science mean to the Victorians? For whom was Victorian science written? What ideological messages did it convey? The contributors show how practical concerns interacted with contextual issues to mold Victorian science—which in turn shaped much of the relationship between modern science and culture.
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front cover of Words and the Grammar of Context
Words and the Grammar of Context
Paul Kay
CSLI, 1997


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