Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Fakultät III Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften), course: Victorian Britain, language: English, abstract: This coursework reflects on Thomas Arnold's reforms at Victorian public schools and their influence on British society. Thomas Hughes's famous semi-autobiographical "Tom Brown's Schooldays" is used to show how the...

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, course: Authorship of the Closet, language: English, abstract: This paper is an analysis of Henry James's short novel "The Beast in the Jungle". The analysis is based on the story's imagery, its stylistic means (especially sentence structure) and its point of view. It reveals how these aspects contribute to the reader's confusion and deliberately makes seve...

This volume features new research about the philosophy of plant intelligence and plant cognition, one of the most intriguing and complex current debates at the intersection of biology, cognitive science and philosophy.The debate about plant cognition is marked by deep disagreements. Some theorists are confident that the empirical evidence supports the ascription of cognitive capacities to plants. Others hold that such claims are overblown, and defend more traditional, non-cognitive...

In The English Jeremy Paxman sets out to find about the English. Not the British overall, not the Scots, not the Irish or Welsh, but the English. Why do they seem so unsure of who they are?Jeremy Paxman is to many the embodiment of Englishness yet even he is sometimes forced to ask: who or what exactly are the English? And in setting about addressing this most vexing of questions, Paxman discovers answers to a few others. Like:Why do the English actually e...

According to Wikiedia: "Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud's family and ancestry were Jewish. Freud always considered himself a Jew even though he rejected Judaism and had a critical view of religion. Interested in philosophy as a student, Freud later turned away from it and became a neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, Aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy. Freud went on to develop theories a...

A renowned cognitive neuroscientist?s fascinating and highly informative account of how the brain acquires readingHow can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the ?reading paradox?: Our cortex is the product of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing, so how did ...

In 1920 New Zealanders were shocked by the news that the brilliant, well-connected mayor of genteel Whanganui had shot a young gay poet, D' Arcy Cresswell, who was blackmailing him. They were then riveted by the trial that followed. Mackay was sentenced to hard labour and later left the country, only to be shot by a police sniper during street unrest in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. Mackay had married into Whanganui high society, and the story has long been the town' s dark secret. ...

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She...

Biography is one of the most popular, best-selling, and widely-read of literary genres. But why do certain people and historical events arouse so much interest? How can biographies be compared with history and works of fiction? Does a biography need to be true? Is it acceptable to omit or conceal things? Does the biographer need to personally know the subject? Must a biographer be subjective? In this Very Short Introduction Hermione Lee considers the cultural and historical backgr...

In this spiritual sequel to his influential Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling.“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story.Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution...

Humanity's greatest feat is our incredible ability to learn. Even in their first year, infants acquire language, visual and social knowledge at a rate that surpasses the best supercomputers. But how, exactly, do our brains learn?In How We Learn, leading neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene delves into the psychological, neuronal, synaptic and molecular mechanisms of learning. Drawing on case studies of children who learned despite huge difficulty and trauma, he explains why yo...

This is a landmark intellectual history of Britain’s working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers’ memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose uncovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew. A new preface addresses the continuing relevance of the book amidst the upheavals of the present day.“An astonishing book.”—Ian Sansom, The Guardian“A passionate work of histo...