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This book argues that the private appropriation of human knowledge through intellectual property gives rise to power relations, which colonise the collective mind as well as individual minds. In so doing these power relations destroy the social fabric necessary for producing and reproducing knowledge. Besides the direct impact on political-economic relations, the privatisation of knowledge distresses collective memory. The book concludes that although individual, social, and collective memories can only exist in tandem, the atrophy of the social and collective dimensions of the mind results in a sort of social dementia. The Privatisation of Knowledge is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of economic philosophy. It is also ideal for researchers of Marxian social science.
In the 1970s, queer Jews became excited by the developments of the Gay Liberation Movement in both the US and Europe. Until then, they were not able to express their queerness in Jewish communities and hoped for new inclusive spaces. Yet, they quickly realized that the movement was not as welcoming as anticipated. Thus, they started to organize: in February 1972, the world’s first queer Jewish group became publicly visible in London with its symposium "The Jewish Homosexual in Society." The Jewish Gay Group began tackling the exclusion of non-heteronormative Jews in British Jewish and queer communities. Soon after, two more queer Jewish groups formed: Beit Haverim ("House of Friends") in P...
The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577, 1587), issued under the name of Raphael Holinshed, was the crowning achievement of Tudor historiography, and became the principal source for the historical writings of Spenser, Daniel and, above all, Shakespeare. While scholars have long been drawn to Holinshed for its qualities as a source, they typically dismissed it as a baggy collection of materials, lacking coherent form and analytical insight. This condescending verdict has only recently given way to an appreciation of the literary and historical qualities of these chronicles. The Handbook is a major interdisciplinary undertaking which gives the lie to Holinshed's detractors, and p...
Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I's 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When publis...
Existentialism is back Carpe diem – ‘seize the day’ – is one of the oldest pieces of life advice in Western history. But its true spirit has been hijacked by ad men and self-help gurus, reduced to the instant hit of one-click online shopping, or slogans like ‘live in the now’. We need to reclaim it to make sense of our complex, confusing times. The last great expression of carpe diem was in the electrifying existential philosophy of the 1940s. Today it’s an idea that challenges us to confront our mortality and live with greater passion and intention rather than scroll mindlessly on our phones or allow freedom to become a mere choice between brands. In Carpe Diem Regained, Roman Krznaric reinvents existentialism for our age of information and choice overload. An essential and empowering work of contemporary philosophy, the book unveils the surprising ways of seizing the day that humankind has discovered over the centuries, ones we urgently need to revive. Carpe diem is the existentialism for our times.
The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert’s ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic marked a founding moment in feminist literary history as much as feminist literary theory. In their extensive study of nineteenth-century women’s writing, Gubar and Gilbert offer radical re-readings of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Mary Shelley tracing a distinctive female literary tradition and female literary aesthetic. Gubar and Gilbert raise questions about canonisation that continue to resonate today, and model the revolutionary importance of re-reading influential texts that may seem all too familiar.
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Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a perfect example of creative thinking. The book redefines feminism's struggle against patriarchy as part of a much broader issue: the damaging effects of all our assumptions about gender and identity. Looking at the factionalism of contemporary (1980s) feminism, Butler saw a movement split by identity politics. Riven by arguments over what it meant to be a women, over sexuality, and over class and race, feminism was falling prey to internal problems of identity, and was failing to move towards broader solidarity with other liberation movements such as LGBT. Butler turned these issues on their head by questioning the basis that supposedly fundamental and fix...