A Journey Through Marital Tales: 52 Storybooks surveys marriage as contract, comedy, ordeal, aspiration, and social institution across an unusually broad transnational archive. Its stories and dramatic selections move from satirical intrigue and drawing-room wit to domestic realism, psychological conflict, sentimental romance, and pointed social critique. Comic reversals, contested inheritances, illicit desires, estranged spouses, and the pressures of respectability recur throughout, while...

The Pleasures of a Single Life, Or, The Miseries of Matrimony offers readers a vibrant exploration of the contrasting joys and tribulations surrounding the institution of marriage, and the alternatives that lay beyond its confines. Ranging from satirical poems to reflective essays, the collection weaves a tapestry of literary styles that probe the societal expectations and individual yearnings of the eighteenth century. This anthology deftly navigates themes of personal freedom, societal c...

Across the world, most people are religious or spiritual, and many have a strong relational-emotional bond (attachment relationship) with God(s). This Element summarizes social-scientific theory and research on these relationships. Part I outlines basic principles of attachment and religion/spirituality. Part II describes normative (human-universal) processes and patterns. It explains how God and other supernatural beings often serve as irreplaceable relational caregivers (attachment figur...

This is a book about life after death as provided to me through journaling and a series of extraordinary events by my wife, Suzette Delashmet Shockley, after her demise. When these events started to happen, I, having not known or even though about life after someone has passed was in disbelief. I researched and kept an open mind. Because of these happenings and my research, I now know that when a person loses a good friend, a spouse, a child, or other loving relationship, the deceased pers...

From the late 1920s onwards, forced collectivisation, state-directed industrialisation, mass purging and the party's control of culture, refashioned Russia and gave birth to a new type of society. The 'second revolution' and its aftermath remodelled the Soviet State and the Bolshevik party, restructured all institutions and reconstituted all social relationships. Millions found their lives changed forever. Nothing was untouched and no one was unaffected. Presiding over these momentous chan...