The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues tha...

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary continental philosophy and critical theory. His work covers a broad array of topics from biblical criticism to Guantanamo Bay and the ‘war on terror’.Alex Murray explains Agamben’s key ideas, including:an overview of his work from first publication to the presentclear analysis of Agamben’s philosophy of language and lifetheories of ethics and ‘witnessin...

British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection...

The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde puts Wilde the Icon into an expansive literary and dramatic context. It offers a readable guide to Wilde studies for the early twenty-first century. Its chapters reflect Wilde's status as a queer writer while filling in the gaps that this focus have left and looking forward to the next generation of critical studies on Wilde. It is designed to appeal to students and those with a general interest in Wilde, as well as professional academics. Its co...

The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s.Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to write...

Alex DiPrima paints a fresh portrait of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the most well-known gospel minister of the nineteenth century. By providing social, historical, and religious context, DiPrima helps us comprehend the scope of Spurgeon’s ministry in London. Combining academic expertise with popular presentation, this short biography of the famed Prince of Preachers will be the go-to introduction to Spurgeon for years to come.

A dialogue between Socrates and Meno probes the subject of ethics. Can goodness be taught? If it can, then we should be able to find teachers capable of instructing others about what is good and bad, right and wrong, or just and unjust. Socrates and Meno are unable to identify teachers of ethics, and we are left wondering how such knowledge could be acquired. To answer that puzzle, Socrates questions one of Meno's servants in an attempt to show that we know fundamental ideas by recollectin...

Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself.This book attempts to spark public discussion by...

Steely Dan's songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity.Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people ...

The second volume of the Science Fiction Omnibus! Featuring the following masterpieces of sci-fi: WE'RE CIVILIZED!, by Mark Clifton & Alex Apostolides WITH THESE HANDS, by C.M. Kornbluth WHERE THERE'S HOPE, by Jerome Bixby WEAK ON SQUARE ROOTS, by Russell Burton VIGORISH, by Walter Bupp THE MEMORY OF MARS, by Raymond Jones THE MATHEMATICIANS, by Arthur Feldman THE INVADERS, by Murray Leinster THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA, by Allan Danzig THE DAY TIME STOPPED MOVING, by Bradner Buckner I AM A NUC...

11 gripping thrillers from some of BBC Radio's best contemporary writers, including BAFTA- winner Neil McKayInventive, intriguing and atmospheric, this eclectic selection of crime, mystery and psychological dramas immerses us in a series of diverse worlds where nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is quite what they seem.Wide in scope and disparate in style, the stories range from a police procedural and a dark, dystopian eco-thriller to a shocking ...

Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners make grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literar...