Reading The Animal Text In The Landscape Of The Damned

Reading the animal text in the landscape of the damned looks at the diverse texts of our everyday world relating to nonhuman animals and examines the meanings we imbibe from them. It describes ways in which we can explore such artefacts, especially from the perspective of groups and individuals with little or no power. This work understands the oppression of nonhuman animals as being part of a spectrum incorporating sexism, racism, xenophobia, economic exploitation and other forms of oppression. The enquiry includes, physical landscapes, the law, womens rights, history, slavery, language use, economic coercion, farming, animal experimentation and much more. Reading the animal text in the landscape of the damned is an academic work but is accessible, theoretically based but robustly practical and it encourages the reader to take this enquiry further for both themselves and for others.

The Quaker World is an outstanding, comprehensive and lively introduction to this complex Christian denomination. Exploring the global reach of the Quaker community, the book begins with a discussion of the living community, as it is now, in all its diversity and complexity. The book covers well-known areas of Quaker development, such as the formation of Liberal Quakerism in North America, alongside topics which have received much less scholarly attention in the past, such as the history of Quakers in Bolivia and the spread of Quakerism in Western Kenya. It includes over sixty chapters by a distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors and is organised into three clear parts: Global Quakerism Spirituality Embodiment Within these sections, key themes are examined, including global Quaker activity, significant Quaker movements, biographies of key religious figures, important organisations, pacifism, politics, the abolition of slavery, education, industry, human rights, racism, refugees, gender, disability, sexuality and environmentalism. The Quaker World provides an authoritative and accessible source of information on all topics important to Quaker Studies. As such, it is essential reading for students studying world religions, Christianity and comparative religion, and it will also be of interest to those in related fields such as sociology, political science, anthropology and ethics.

This title was first published in 2003. This text explores the "dark, pessimistic truth that pervades the pages of modern texts", setting a theme of Dante's "Inferno" against the work of modern authors including Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, Camus, Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. The author's thesis is that these writers exhibit a hostility towards the reader, an anger that the reader should continue to be so deludedly happy when the writer has become so mortifyingly enlightened. At its most characteristic, Reilly demonstrates, modern fiction seems to achieve a savage satisfaction in inflicting this pain, to an extent that could be described as sadistic. Reilly traces what he calls this "punitive spirit" to a character in the "Inferno", Vanni Fucci, who suffering himself does his best to make Dante suffer too. Through the study he uses the "Inferno" as a guide to the prevailing attitudes in modern fiction, revealing a parallel between the prohibition of pity within the medieval poem and in the pages of modern texts.

Examines the works of three Victorian writers, looks at the ways they subverted and affirmed their society, and discusses women's higher education in nineteenth century England.

"Zimbabwe stands at the epicentre of the global HIV epidemic. Families are severely depleted by death and migration. HIV infection is often lived in secrecy despite obvious physical manifestations. This study seeks to describe the specificity of the Zimbabwean context as it affects the lives of HIV-positive children in the eastern town of Mutare at a time of severe crisis in the state, marked by impoverishment, organised violence and mass death." -- Book jacket.

The book examines how men and women in Manenberg township, on Cape Town’s inner periphery, manoeuvre to re-define themselves as gendered persons deserving of dignity, through the quotidian practices of ordentlikheid or respectability. Salo shows how reclamation of dignity is an intergenerational and gendered process that is messy and uneven, involves the expression of often-brutal physical and social exclusion of individuals through embodied and social violence. Theoretically, the narrative makes visible the careful, painstaking processes of place making and claiming dignity by men and women in a place represented as a wasteland in the dominant discourse of grand apartheid and in the contemporary neo-liberal turn in Cape Town.

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.