Liberal Arts Faculty Books

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  Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television

  Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey

  The mean streets that tough, trench-coated detectives travel are so often associated with urban settings—typically New York or Los Angeles—that audiences can easily overlook the presence of the American South in crime fiction and film noir. Recent years have witnessed a growth in the production and popularity of southern noir and detective narratives, with works such as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels and the first season of True Detective attesting to the powerful impact of the southern imaginary on the genre. Edited by Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey, Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television offers the first collection of essays examining the detective genre as transfigured in works dealing with the South. This southern turn foregrounds three vital and interrelated topics: the acknowledgment of race as it relates to slavery, segregation, and discrimination; the role of land as a source of income, an ecologically threatened space, or a place of seclusion; and the continued presence of the southern gothic in recurring elements such as dilapidated plantation houses, swamps, family secrets, and the occult. This wide-ranging volume gives voice to the artists who strive to expose the history and lasting implications of southern settings conditioned by economic exploitation, unquestioned whiteness, and racial trauma. Inspecting the works of writers including John D. MacDonald and Donna Tartt, and visiting scenes from Mayberry and Nashville to New Orleans, the authors of these thoughtful essays probe how southern detective narratives intersect with popular genre forms like neo-noir, hardboiled fiction, the dark thriller, suburban noir, amateur sleuths, journalist-detectives, and television police procedurals. Alongside essays by critics, Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television presents pieces by authors of detective and crime fiction, including Megan Abbott and Ace Atkins, who address the extent to which the South and its artistic traditions influenced their own works. By considering the diversity of authors and characters associated with the genre, this accessible collection provides an overdue examination of the historical, political, and aesthetic contexts out of which the southern detective narrative emerged and continues to evolve.

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  Time Warped: Photography, Temporality, and Modernity

  Kris Belden-Adams

  This book examines the photography’s unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium’s ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.

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  From Garfield to Harding: The Success of Midwestern Front Porch Campaigns

  Jeffrey Bourdon

  How front porch campaigns transformed candidate interaction with the public In 1880, James Garfield decided to try something new: rather than run the typical passive campaign for president, he would welcome voters to his farm. By the end of the campaign, thousands of people—including naturalized voters, African Americans, women, men from various occupations, and young voters—traveled to Garfield’s home, listened to him speak, shook hands, met his family, and were invited inside. The press reported the interactions across the country. Not only did Garfield win, but he started a new campaign technique that then carried three other Republicans to the presidency. Benjamin Harrison followed suit in 1888, and his crowds dwarfed Garfield’s as Indianapolis exploded with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Eight years later, William McKinley ran the most famous front porch campaign from his hometown of Canton, Ohio, with around 750,000 Americans traveling down those streets—including miners’ unions, women’s suffrage groups, and Confederate soldiers to their Union counterparts. Finally, Warren Harding continued the tradition in 1920 and won by a 60 percent popular majority. Using a technique very evident today, Republican campaign managers quickly realized that merchandising their candidate as a brand generated much support. After Harding, presidential candidates began to travel the country extensively themselves to speak personally to the American people.

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  A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself: A Novel

  William Boyle

  Goodfellas meets Thelma and Louise when an unlikely trio of women in New York find themselves banding together to escape the clutches of violent figures from their pasts. After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her eighty-year-old neighbor Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she embarks on a bizarre adventure. Taking off in Enzio’s ’62 Impala, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away by Adrienne at the door. Their neighbor, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her. When Lucia discovers that Adrienne is planning to hit the road with her ex-boyfriend Richie, she figures Rena’s her only way out of a life on the run with a mother she can’t stand. But Richie has massacred a few members of the Brancaccio crime family for a big payday, and he drags even more trouble into the mix in the form of an unhinged enforcer named Crea. The stage is set for an explosion that will propel Rena, Wolfie, and Lucia down a strange path, each woman running from something and unsure what comes next. A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself is a screwball noir about finding friendship and family where you least expect it, in which William Boyle again draws readers into the familiar—and sometimes frightening—world in the shadows at the edges of New York’s neighborhoods.

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  Positivity and Noncommutative Analysis: Festschrift in Honour of Ben de Pagter on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday

  Gerard Buskes, Marcel de Jeu, and Peter Dodds

  Capturing the state of the art of the interplay between positivity, noncommutative analysis, and related areas including partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and operator theory, this volume was initiated on the occasion of the Delft conference in honour of Ben de Pagter's 65th birthday. It will be of interest to researchers in positivity, noncommutative analysis, and related fields. Contributions by Shavkat Ayupov, Amine Ben Amor, Karim Boulabiar, Qingying Bu, Gerard Buskes, Martijn Caspers, Jurie Conradie, Garth Dales, Marcel de Jeu, Peter Dodds, Theresa Dodds, Julio Flores, Jochen Glück, Jacobus Grobler, Wolter Groenevelt, Markus Haase, Klaas Pieter Hart, Francisco Hernández, Jamel Jaber, Rien Kaashoek, Turabay Kalandarov, Anke Kalauch, Arkady Kitover, Erik Koelink, Karimbergen Kudaybergenov, Louis Labuschagne, Yongjin Li, Nick Lindemulder, Emiel Lorist, Qi Lü, Miek Messerschmidt, Susumu Okada, Mehmet Orhon, Denis Potapov, Werner Ricker, Stephan Roberts, Pablo Román, Anton Schep, Claud Steyn, Fedor Sukochev, James Sweeney, Guido Sweers, Pedro Tradacete, Jan Harm van der Walt, Onno van Gaans, Jan van Neerven, Arnoud van Rooij, Freek van Schagen, Dominic Vella, Mark Veraar, Anthony Wickstead, Marten Wortel, Ivan Yaroslavtsev, and Dmitriy Zanin.

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  Forensic Analysis of Gunshot Residue, 3D-Printed Firearms, and Gunshot Injuries: Current Research and Future Perspectives

  James Cizdziel and Oscar Black

  As technology continues to advance forward, it is crucial that the forensic disciplines maintain their lead over the criminal element. The field of firearm analysis is one such area that has experienced rapid developments, spurred on by recent technological advancements. With the invention of high resolution 3D-printing, new improvements in instrumental techniques such as Raman Spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry, and improvements in simulation capabilities for ballistic wounding potential, entirely new fields of study have evolved. This book takes an in-depth look at the current state of gunshot residue analysis and wound ballistics, and showcases groundbreaking research in these crucial areas. The ramifications of the availability of 3D-printed firearms are also discussed, with authors submitting evaluations of new and existing forensic methods on trace analysis of GSR and fingerprinting, as well as potential protocol adaptations to better address the unique challenges of 3D-printed firearms. Whereas this book is primarily oriented toward forensic researchers and practitioners, others with an interest in keeping up with developments in forensic science may find it informative and useful.

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  The Bones of Winter Birds

  Ann Fisher-Wirth

  Like “sunlight stroking the birds’ throats so it comes out as song,” Ann Fisher-Wirth’s graceful and sturdy lines unsettle the seemingly familiar. A writer of moral gravity, her distilled attentiveness presses against our all-too-common ambivalence and detachment from the ordinary world. Whether set in Mississippi, California, the Ozarks, or France, the poems in The Bones of Winter Birdsexhibit an abundance of compassion and civility. As Fisher-Wirth praises, laments, lets go, language salvages what might otherwise be missed. It’s with attentiveness and emotional poise that these poems lay everything bare. Despite fear and everyday darkness, “I think we are provided for” she reminds us, a consolation for which I am grateful. This is a beautiful book.—Shara Lessley

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  Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal

  Shennette Garrett-Scott

  Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores this rich period of black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Banking on Freedom offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including extralegal violence and aggressive oversight from state actors who saw black economic autonomy as a threat to both democratic capitalism and the social order. The teller cage and boardroom became sites of activism and resistance as the leadership of president Maggie Lena Walker and other women board members kept the bank grounded in meeting the needs of working-class black women. The first book to center black women’s engagement with the elite sectors of banking, finance, and insurance, Banking on Freedom reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society.

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  Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

  Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu

  During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post–Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

  The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

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  African American Tea Party Supporters: Explaining a Paradox

  Kirk A. Johnson

  To their critics who celebrated the election of America's first African American president, black Tea Party supporters are self-loathing race traitors. In African American Tea Party Supporters: Explaining A Political Paradox, Kirk A. Johnson interviews thirty elected officials, radio personalities, military veterans, and other black Tea Partyers to reveal a group with deep regard for African Americans-and even for Barack Obama-but also divergent perspectives on race, religion, government, and Tea Party racism. Johnson argues when viewed in the context of their family structures and life experiences, black Tea Partyers' unusual political choices are knowable, understandable, and rational.

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  Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South

  Kathryn B. McKee

  Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner’s writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout the late nineteenth century. Reading Reconstruction begins by tracing the historical contexts that defined Bonner’s life in postwar Holly Springs. McKee explores how questions of race, gender, and national citizenship permeated Bonner’s social milieu and provided subject matter for her literary works. Examining Bonner’s writing across multiple genres, McKee finds that the author’s wry but dark humor satirizes the foibles and inconsistencies of southern culture. Bonner’s travel letters, first from Boston and then from the capitals of Europe, show her both embracing and performing her role as a southern woman, before coming to see herself as simply “American” when abroad. Like unto Like, the single novel she published in her lifetime, directly engages with Mississippi’s postbellum political life, especially its racial violence and the rise of Lost Cause ideology. Her two short story collections, including the raucously comic pieces in Dialect Tales and the more nostalgic Suwanee River Tales, indicate her consistent absorption in the debates of her time, as she ponders shifting definitions of citizenship, questions the evolving rhetoric of postwar reconciliation, and readily employs humor to disrupt conventional domestic scenarios and gender roles. In the end, Bonner’s writing offers a telling index of the paradoxes and irresolution of the period, advocating for a feminist reinterpretation of traditional gender hierarchies, but verging only reluctantly on the questions of racial equality that nonetheless unsettle her plots. By challenging traditional readings of postbellum southern literature, McKee offers a long-overdue reassessment of Sherwood Bonner’s place in American literary history.

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  Dead Sea Media

  Shem Miller

  In Dead Sea Media Shem Miller offers a groundbreaking media criticism of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although past studies have underappreciated the crucial roles of orality and memory in the social setting of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Miller convincingly demonstrates that oral performance, oral tradition, and oral transmission were vital components of everyday life in the communities associated with the Scrolls. In addition to being literary documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls were also records of both scribal and cultural memories, as well as oral traditions and oral performance. An examination of the Scrolls’ textuality reveals the oral and mnemonic background of several scribal practices and literary characteristics reflected in the Scrolls.

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  Country Dark

  Chris Offutt

  Chris Offutt’s long-awaited return to fiction after nearly two decades, Country Dark is a fierce noir-inflected novel about a good man pushed by circumstance into crime.

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  Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

  Paul J. Polgar

  Paul Polgar recovers the racially inclusive vision of America's first abolition movement. In showcasing the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and their African American allies during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras, he unearths this coalition's comprehensive agenda for black freedom and equality. By guarding and expanding the rights of people of African descent and demonstrating that black Americans could become virtuous citizens of the new Republic, these activists, whom Polgar names "first movement abolitionists," sought to end white prejudice and eliminate racial inequality. Beginning in the 1820s, however, colonization threatened to eclipse this racially inclusive movement. Colonizationists claimed that what they saw as permanent black inferiority and unconquerable white prejudice meant that slavery could end only if those freed were exiled from the United States. In pulling many reformers into their orbit, this radically different antislavery movement marginalized the activism of America's first abolitionists and obscured the racially progressive origins of American abolitionism that Polgar now recaptures. By reinterpreting the early history of American antislavery, Polgar illustrates that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are as integral to histories of race, rights, and reform in the United States as the mid-nineteenth century.

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  Conflict in Aristotle's Political Philosophy

  Steven Skultety

  Offers a careful analysis of how Aristotle understands civil war, partisanship, distrust in government, disagreement, and competition, and explores ways in which these views are relevant to contemporary political theory. Do only modern thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes accept that conflict plays a significant role in the origin and maintenance of political community? In this book, Steven Skultety argues that Aristotle not only took conflict to be an inevitable aspect of political life, but further recognized ways in which conflict promotes the common good. While many scholars treat Aristotelian conflict as an absence of substantive communal ideals, Skultety argues that Aristotle articulated a view of politics that theorizes profoundly different kinds of conflict. Aristotle comprehended the subtle factors that can lead otherwise peaceful citizens to contemplate outright civil war, grasped the unique conditions that create hopelessly implacable partisans, and systematized tactics rulers could use to control regrettable, but still manageable, levels of civic distrust. Moreover, Aristotle conceived of debate, enduring disagreement, social rivalries, and competitions for leadership as an indispensable part of how human beings live well together in successful political life. By exploring the ways in which citizens can be at odds with one another, Conflict in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy presents a dimension of ancient Greek thought that is startlingly relevant to contemporary concerns about social divisions, constitutional crises, and the range of acceptable conflict in healthy democracies.

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  Conducting Men's Choirs

  Donald L. Trott

  Inspired by Debra Spurgeon’s pioneering book Conducting Women’s Choirs, this companion resource, compiled and edited by Donald Trott, brings together the expertise of eighteen acknowledged authorities on men’s choirs. Conducting Men’s Choirs addresses the unique challenges, considerations, and joys of making music with male singers. The book is organized into three major sections, the first of which contains historical essays on male choirs in the United States. The chapters in this section span a range of relevant topics, including glee clubs in colleges and universities, an examination of some of the nation’s most esteemed and accomplished male choirs, and the role of male community choruses in America.

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  William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity

  Jay Watson

  William Faulkner has enjoyed a secure reputation as American modernism's foremost fiction writer, and as a landmark figure in international literary modernism, for well over half a century. Less secure, however, has been any scholarly consensus about what those modernist credentials actually entail. Over recent decades, there have been lively debates in modernist studies over the who, what, where, when, and how of the surprisingly elusive phenomena of modernism and modernity. This book broadens and deepens an understanding of Faulkner's oeuvre by following some of the guiding questions and insights of new modernism studies scholarship into understudied aspects of Faulkner's literary modernism and his cultural modernity. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity explores Faulkner's rural Mississippians as modernizing subjects in their own right rather than mere objects of modernization; traces the new speed gradients, media formations, and intensifications of sensory and affective experience that the twentieth century brought to the cities and countryside of the US South; maps the fault lines in whiteness as a racial modernity under construction and contestation during the Jim Crow period; resituates Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County within the transnational counter-modernities of the Black Atlantic; and follows the author's imaginative engagement with modern biopolitics through his late work A Fable, a novel Faulkner hoped to make his 'magnum o.' By returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner's modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity aims to spark further reappraisal of a distinguished and quite dazzling body of fiction. Perhaps even make it new.

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  To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice

  Jessica Wilkerson

  Launched in 1964, the War on Poverty quickly took aim at the coalfields of southern Appalachia. There, the federal government found unexpected allies among working-class white women devoted to a local tradition of citizen caregiving and seasoned by decades of activism and community service. Jessica Wilkerson tells their stories within the larger drama of efforts to enact change in the 1960s and 1970s. She shows white Appalachian women acting as leaders and soldiers in a grassroots war on poverty--shaping and sustaining programs, engaging in ideological debates, offering fresh visions of democratic participation, and facing personal political struggles. Their insistence that caregiving was valuable labor clashed with entrenched attitudes and rising criticisms of welfare. Their persistence, meanwhile, brought them into unlikely coalitions with black women, disabled miners, and others to fight for causes that ranged from poor people's rights to community health to unionization. Inspiring yet sobering, To Live Here, You Have to Fight reveals Appalachian women as the indomitable caregivers of a region--and overlooked actors in the movements that defined their time.

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  The Revolution Within: State Institutions and Unarmed Resistance in Palestine

  Yael Zeira

  Why do some individuals participate in risky, anti-regime resistance whereas others abstain? The Revolution Within answers this question through an in-depth study of unarmed resistance against Israeli rule in the Palestinian Territories over more than a decade. Despite having strong anti-regime sentiment, Palestinians initially lacked the internal organizational strength often seen as necessary for protest. This book provides a foundation for understanding participation and mobilization under these difficult conditions. It argues that, under these conditions, integration into state institutions - schools, prisons and courts - paradoxically makes individuals more likely to resist against the state. Diverse evidence drawn from field research - including the first, large-scale survey of participants and non-participants in Palestinian resistance, Arabic language interviews, and archival sources - supports the argument. The book's findings explain how anti-regime resistance can occur even without the strong civil society organizations often regarded as necessary for protest and, thus, suggest new avenues for supporting civil resistance movements.

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  From Slaveship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel

  Patrick Alexander

  In his cogent and groundbreaking book, From Slave Ship to Supermax, Patrick Elliot Alexander argues that the disciplinary logic and violence of slavery haunt depictions of the contemporary U.S. prison in late twentieth-century Black fiction. Alexander links representations of prison life in James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk to his engagements with imprisoned intellectuals like George Jackson, who exposed historical continuities between slavery and mass incarceration. Likewise, Alexander reveals how Toni Morrison’s Beloved was informed by Angela Y. Davis’s jail writings on slavery-reminiscent practices in contemporary women’s facilities. Alexander also examines recurring associations between slave ships and prisons in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, and connects slavery’s logic of racialized premature death to scenes of death row imprisonment in Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying. Alexander ultimately makes the case that contemporary Black novelists depict racial terror as a centuries-spanning social control practice that structured carceral life on slave ships and slave plantations—and that mass-produces prisoners and prisoner abuse in post–Civil Rights America. These authors expand free society’s view of torment confronted and combated in the prison industrial complex, where discriminatory laws and the institutionalization of secrecy have reinstated slavery’s system of dehumanization.

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  Gravesend: A Novel

  William Boyle

  In this masterful work of neo-noir, William Boyle expertly captures the grit and desperation of a neighborhood in flux, and spotlights the neighbors who find themselves caught up in the crimes of the past. Some worship him and some want him dead, but either way, tensions run high when “Ray Boy” Calabrese is released from prison. It’s been sixteen years since Ray Boy’s actions led to the death of a young man. The victim's brother, Conway D'Innocenzio, is a 29-year-old Brooklynite wasting away at a local Rite Aid, stuck in the past and drawn into a darker side of himself when he hears of Ray Boy’s freedom. But even with the perfect plan in place, Conway can’t bring himself to take the ultimate revenge on Ray Boy, which sends him into a spiral of self-loathing and soul-searching. Meanwhile, Alessandra, a failed actress, returns to her native Gravesend after the death of her cancer-stricken mother, torn between the desperate need to escape back to Los Angeles as quickly as possible and the ease with which she could sink back into neighborhood life. Alessandra and Conway are walking eerily similar paths—staring down the rest of their lives, caring for their aging fathers, lost in the youths they squandered—and each must decide what comes next. In the tradition of American noir authors like Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy, William Boyle’s Gravesend brings the titular neighborhood to life in this story of revenge, desperation, and escape.

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  The Lonely Witness: A Novel

  William Boyle

  When a young woman with a sordid past witnesses a murder, she finds herself fascinated by the killer and decides to track him down herself. Amy was once a party girl, but she now lives a lonely life, helping the house-bound to receive communion in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn. She stops in at one of the apartments on her route, where Mrs. Epifanio, the elderly woman who lives there, says she hasn’t seen her usual caretaker, Diane, in a few days. Supposedly, Diane has the flu—or so Diane’s son Vincent said when he first dropped by and vanished into Mrs. E’s bedroom to do no-one-knows-what. Amy’s brief interaction with Vincent in the apartment that day sets off warning bells, so she assures Mrs. E that she’ll find out what’s really going on with both him and his mother. She tails Vincent through Brooklyn, eventually following him and a mysterious man out of a local dive bar. At first, the men are only talking as they walk, but then, almost before Amy can register what has happened, Vincent is dead. For reasons she can’t quite understand, Amy finds herself captivated by both the crime she witnessed and the murderer himself. She doesn’t call the cops to report what she’s seen. Instead, she collects the murder weapon from the sidewalk and soon finds herself on the trail of a killer. Character-driven and evocative, The Lonely Witness brings Brooklyn to life in a way only a native can, and opens readers’ eyes to the harsh realities of crime and punishment on the city streets.

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  Language and Classification: Meaning-Making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics

  Allison Burkette

  This volume adopts a practice-based approach to examine the different ways in which classification is communicated and negotiated in different environments within archaeology. The book looks specifically at the archaeological classification of ceramics as a lens through which to examine the discursive and social practices inherent in the classification and categorization process, with perspectives from such areas as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology forming the foundation of the book’s theoretical framework. The volume then looks at the process of classification in practice in a variety of settings, including a university course on ceramics classification, an archaeological field school, an intensive petrography course, and archaeometry laboratory at a nuclear research reactor, and highlights participant observation and audiovisual data taken from fieldwork practice completed in these environments. This volume offers a valuable contribution to the growing literature on language and material culture, making this a key resource for students and scholars in sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistics, archaeology, discourse analysis, and anthropology.

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  Exploring Linguistic Science: Language Use, Complexity, and Interaction

  Allison Burkette and William A. Kretzschmar Jr.

  Exploring Linguistic Science introduces students to the basic principles of complexity theory and then applies these principles to the scientific study of language. It demonstrates how, at every level of linguistic study, we find evidence of language as a complex system. Designed for undergraduate courses in language and linguistics, this essential textbook brings cutting-edge concepts to bear on the traditional components of general introductions to the study of language, such as phonetics, morphology and grammar. The authors maintain a narrative thread throughout the book of 'interaction and emergence', both of which are key terms from the study of complex systems, a new science currently useful in physics, genetics, evolutionary biology, and economics, but also a perfect fit for the humanities. The application of complexity to language highlights the fact that language is an ever-changing, ever-varied product of human behavior.

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  Thibaut de Champagne. Les Chansons. Textes et mélodies.

  Christopher Callahan, Marie-Genviève Grossel, and Daniel E. O'Sullivan

  Pour la première fois, l'édition bilingue des poésies et la transcription des mélodies musicales d'un des plus grands trouvères du Moyen Age ! Thibaut IV, comte de Champagne et de Brie et roi de Navarre, dit " Thibaut le chansonnier ", compte parmi les trouvères les plus originaux et les plus prolifiques. Célébré par Dante, ce poète et mélodiste de talent s'avère un maître avisé de tous les genres lyriques pratiqués à son époque. Cette nouvelle édition présente les textes accompagnés de leur mélodie et d'une traduction en français moderne, et note non seulement les variantes des mélodies concordantes mais aussi les mélodies isolées. Cet ouvrage reflète ainsi les fruits des décennies de travaux philologiques et musicologiques.

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  Dizionario dei sogni nel medioevo: Il somniale Danielis in manoscritti letterari

  Valerio Cappozzo

  The Medieval Dream Dictionary is composed of entries coming from Latin and vernacular Italian versions of the Somniale Danielis – known as The Dreambook of Daniel the Prophet – which range from the ninth century to the first printed editions through 1550. This manual illustrates more than 3200 years of the history of dream interpretation from Ancient Egypt to today’s web pages. The Dictionary, which gathers this material for the first time, provides not only a better understanding of the medieval and Renaissance oneiric imaginary, but will also allow a practical introduction to the study of literary and artistic dream symbolism.

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  Il canto della ragione: 19 domande su Francesco De Sanctis

  Valerio Cappozzo

  Intervista a Valerio Cappozzo A cura di Valeria Noli "Un uccello, capace di volare come la fantasia, è posato su un ramo, solido come la realtà. L’immagine sulla copertina di questo libretto è metaforica: da un lato la natura, dall’altro il mondo delle idee. Con un analogoUn uccello, capace di volare come la fantasia, è posato su un ramo, solido come la realtà. L’immagine sulla copertina di questo libretto è metaforica: da un lato la natura, dall’altro il mondo delle idee. Con un analogo approccio dialettico, ispirato alla concretezza, Francesco De Sanctis mette diversi elementi nella sua concezione filosofica e storica. Questa fu influenzata anche dal lascito di Giambattista Vico, ben presente alla cultura napoletana del tempo. La degnità LXIV della sua Scienza nuova recita infatti: “L’ordine dell’idee dee procedere secondo l’ordine delle cose”. Un ottimo punto di partenza per lavorare sul rapporto tra letteratura e vita nazionale negli anni attorno all’Unità d’Italia. L’identità italiana era ancora un frutto acerbo e il critico riteneva fosse presto per scrivere unastoria della cultura nazionale. Credeva che ci volesse almeno un’altra generazione per approfondirne i molteplici aspetti. Qualcosa, però, gli fece cambiare idea: il primo volume della Storia della letteratura italiana uscìinfatti nel 1870, il secondo nel 1871. Certamente i tempi rendevano urgente una storia delle idee su cui costruire un’identità nazionale. De Sanctis si rivolgeva agli studenti con un analogo atteggiamento dialettico: erano al contempo destinatari e protagonisti degli appunti che dettava loro.". [dalla Prefazione di Valeria Noli]

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  The Smugglers’ World:Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela

  Jesse Cromwell

  The Smugglers' World examines a critical part of Atlantic trade for a neglected corner of the Spanish Empire. Testimonies of smugglers, buyers, and royal officials found in Venezuelan prize court records reveal a colony enmeshed in covert commerce. Forsaken by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. They found a solution in exchanging cacao, a coveted luxury, for the necessities of life provided by contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. Jesse Cromwell paints a vivid picture of the lives of littoral peoples who normalized their subversions of imperial law. Yet laws and borders began to matter when the Spanish state cracked down on illicit commerce in the 1720s as part of early Bourbon reforms. Now successful merchants could become convict laborers just as easily as enslaved Africans could become free traders along the unruly coastlines of the Spanish Main. Smuggling became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry; persistent local need elevated the practice to a communal ethos, and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures and even violent political protests. Negotiations between the Spanish state and its subjects over smuggling formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century.

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  Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

  Cristin Ellis

  From the eighteenth-century abolitionist motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” to the Civil Rights-era declaration “I AM a Man,” antiracism has engaged in a struggle for the recognition of black humanity. It has done so, however, even as the very definition of the human has been called into question by the biological sciences. While this conflict between liberal humanism and biological materialism animates debates in posthumanism and critical race studies today, Antebellum Posthuman argues that it first emerged as a key question in the antebellum era. In a moment in which the authority of science was increasingly invoked to defend slavery and other racist policies, abolitionist arguments underwent a profound shift, producing a new, materialist strain of antislavery. Engaging the works of Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman, and Dickinson, Cristin Ellis identifies and traces the emergence of an antislavery materialism in mid-nineteenth century American literature, placing race at the center of the history of posthumanist thought. Turning to contemporary debates now unfolding between posthumanist and critical race theorists, Ellis demonstrates how this antebellum posthumanism highlights the difficulty of reconciling materialist ontologies of the human with the project of social justice.

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  Mississippi

  Ann Fisher-Wirth and Maude Schuyler Clay

  "The imperishable quiet at the heart of form." This quietness to be found by contemplating the photographs of Maude Schuyler Clay was at the heart of Ann Fisher-Wirth's poetic process, which involved listening—listening to the voices that spoke their stories somehow in connection, however oblique, with the photographs. Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian; Fisher-Wirth has lived there for 30 years, so the images and words represent long, complicated accumulations and recombinations of visual and linguistic experience.

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  Complete Science Communication: A Guide to Connecting with Scientists, Journalists, and the Public

  Ryan C. Fortenberry

  Science communication is a rapidly expanding area, and a key component of many final year undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Authored by a highly regarded chemist and science communicator, this textbook pulls together all aspects of science communication. Complete Science Communication focusses on four major aspects of science communication: writing for non-technical audiences and science journalism; writing for technical audiences and peer-reviewed journal writing; public speaking of science; and public relations. It first showcases how writing in a journalistic style is done and provides a guide for colloquially communicating science. Then, the art of writing scientific papers is conjoined to this idea to make technical manuscripts more digestible, readable, and, hence, citable. These ideas are next taken into the spoken word so that the scientist can engage in telling their science like that natural human art of campfire stories. Finally, all of these communication concepts are wrapped together in a discussion of public relations, providing the scientist with an appreciation for the marketing directors and news disseminators with whom they will work. Written in an accessible way, this textbook will provide science students with an appreciative understanding of communication, marketing, journalism, and public relations. They can incorporate these aspects into their own practices as scientists, allowing them to liaise with practitioners in the communication field.

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  Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum: A Musical and Metaphysical Analysis

  Michael Gardiner

  The Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century music-drama, is one of the first known examples of a large-scale composition by a named composer in the Western canon. Not only does the Ordo’s expansive duration set it apart from its precursors, but also its complex imagery and non-biblical narrative have raised various questions concerning its context and genre. As a poetic meditation on the fall of a soul, the Ordo deploys an array of personified virtues and musical forces over the course of its eighty-seven chants. In this ambitious analysis of the work, Michael C. Gardiner examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the music-drama and considers how they are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions (absorptions related to medieval Platonism and its various theological developments) which lie at the core of the work’s musical design and text. This is achieved primarily through Gardiner’s musical network model, which implicates mode into a networked system of nodes, and draws upon parallels with the medieval interpretation of Platonic ontology and Hildegard’s correlative realization through sound, song, and voice.

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  Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays in Honor of Charles Reagan Wilson

  Darren Grem, Ted Ownby, and James G. Thomas Jr.

  Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson’s research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson’s seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson’s model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South’s religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region’s fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson’s groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South’s complicated history and culture.

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  Bound for Work: Labor, Mobility, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique, 1940-1965

  Zachary Kagan Guthrie

  Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. Kagan Guthrie’s holistic approach to migrant labor yields several important conclusions. First, he highlights the importance of workers’ choices, explaining not just why people moved but why they moved in the ways they did: how they calculated the benefits of one destination over another, and how they decided when circumstances made it necessary to move again. Second, his attention to mobility gives a much clearer view of the mechanisms of power available to colonial authorities, as well as the limits to their effectiveness. Finally, Kagan Guthrie suggests a new explanation for the divergent trajectories of southern and sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of World War II.

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  The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon

  Jaime Harker

  In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women’s liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature. With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors—like Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker—as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the south in a formative role.

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  Heavy: An American Memoir

  Kiese Laymon

  *Named a Best Book of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* *WINNER of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and FINALIST for the Kirkus Prize * In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.

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  Agencia, historia y el empoderamiento femenino

  Diane Marting, Eva Paris-Huesca, and Yamile Silva

  Queremos remarcar que la esencia de este volumen lo constituyen unos trabajos de enorme calidad, de investigadoras de larga y reconocida trayectoria y otras más jóvenes que están iniciando o comenzado a consolidar su carrera académica. El proyecto cuenta con un conjunto muy amplio y variado de trabajos académicos y creativos que incluyen una polifonía de voces e identidades y recogen una multiplicidad de abordajes teóricos posibles. Es por ello que decidimos estructurarlo de acuerdo a cuatro ejes temáticos. El presente volumen recoge un total de 22 ensayos que incluyen estudios sobre autoras de Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, España, México, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico y la República Dominicana.

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  The Patagonian Sublime: The Green Economy and Post-Neoliberal Politics

  Marcos Mendoza

  The Patagonian Sublime provides a vivid, accessible, and cutting-edge investigation of the green economy and New Left politics in Argentina. Based on extensive field research in Glaciers National Park and the mountain village of El Chaltén, Marcos Mendoza deftly examines the diverse social worlds of alpine mountaineers, adventure trekkers, tourism entrepreneurs, seasonal laborers, park rangers, land managers, scientists, and others involved in the green economy. Mendoza explores the fraught intersection of the green economy with the New Left politics of the Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner governments. Mendoza documents the strategies of capitalist development, national representation, and political rule embedded in the “green productivist” agenda pursued by Kirchner and Fernández. Mendoza shows how Andean Patagonian communities have responded to the challenges of community-based conservation, the fashioning of wilderness zones, and the drive to create place-based monopolies that allow ecotourism destinations to compete in the global consumer economy.

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  Oceanic

  Aimee Nezhukumatathil

  In her fourth collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil hums a bright blue note—a sensuous love song to the Earth and its inhabitants. Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash of painted fingernails. With unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the natural world—the extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. This is a poet ecstatically, emphatically, naming what it means to love a world in peril.

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  Hurtin’ Words: Debating Family Problems in the Twentieth-Century South

  Ted Ownby

  When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different conclusions about causes and solutions. In the civil rights period, many embraced an ideal of Christian brotherhood as a way of transcending divisions. Opponents of civil rights denounced "brotherhoodism" as a movement that undercut parental and religious authority. Others, especially in the African American community, rejected the idea of family crisis altogether, working to redefine family adaptability as a source of strength. Rather than attempting to define the experience of an archetypal "southern family," Ownby looks broadly at contexts such as political and religious debates about divorce and family values, southern rock music, autobiographies, and more to reveal how people in the South used the concept of the family as a proxy for imagining a better future or happier past.

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  Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams

  Dustin Parsons

  In Exploded View "graphic" essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. As with a graphic novel, the story is not only in the text but also in how that text interacts with the images that accompany it. Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons's childhood. Parsons's father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop had countless manuals with "exploded view" parts directories that the young Parsons flipped through constantly. Whether rebuilding a transmission, putting together a diesel engine, or assembling a baby cradle, his father had a visual guide to help him. In these essays, Parsons uses the same approach to understanding his father as he navigates the world of raising two young biracial boys. This memoir distinguishes itself from others in its "graphic" elements-the appropriated diagrams, instructions, and "exploded view" inventory images-that Parsons has used. They help guide the reader's understanding of the piece, giving them a visual anchor for the story, and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold. This mixture of the machine-like and the lyrical helps the reader understand the author's world more fully-a world where art comes in the form of a welding torch, where creativity involves finding new ways to use old machines, and where delineating between right-brain and left-brain thinking isn't so easy.

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  Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory

  Karen Raber

  Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category “human” is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism. Karen Raber, a leading scholar in the field, clearly and cogently guides the reader through complex theoretical terrain, providing fresh, exciting readings of plays including Othello, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida and Henry IV Part 1.

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  Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Historical and Comparative Study

  Mohammed Bashir Salau

  A work of synthesis on plantation slavery in nineteenth century Sokoto caliphate, engaging with major debates on internal African slavery, on the meaning of the term "plantation," and on comparative slavery A large-scale study of plantation slavery in West Africa with a focus on the nineteenth-century Sokoto caliphate, this book draws on diverse sources including oral testimony, Arabic material, and extant scholarly works about the caliphal state. Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Historical and Comparative Study offers new views on various fundamental issues including the definition of blackness in the Sokoto caliphate, the meaning of the term "plantation," the significance of plantation slavery in the caliphal state, and the role of slavery in the context of African states. Author Mohammed Bashir Salau analyzes key themes in the history of plantation slavery, especially plantation management and the acquisition, treatment, and control of slaves. Building on this analysis, Salau points to previously unknown ways in which the caliphal state prevented the development of serfdom, arguing that while social and economic factors played a role in the rise of slavery in the Sokoto caliphate, conscious political choice was the major factor for the rise and maintenance of plantation slavery. This study will be of major interest to students and scholars of slavery in Africa in general and in the Sokoto Caliphate in particular; in addition, through its comparative discussion it contributes to the literature on second slavery.

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  Dimensions of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Beliefs

  Jas M. Sullivan, Jonathan Winburn, and William E. Cross Jr.

  A multidimensional perspective captures the complexities of African American racial identity. While the dynamics of racial oppression limit the range of attitudes blacks may construct and hold, their basic humanity introduces additional attitudinal variance that is nearly boundless. Rather than claim it is possible to conceptualize and measure every iteration of blackness, modern social theorists such as Robert Sellers and William Cross Jr. contend that one should systematically “sample” the unmanageable range of different identity frames found among blacks. In Dimensions of Blackness, the authors suggest there is no single, solitary way to express black racial identity. They move away from blackness as binary and instead reveal what happens when black racial identity is conceptualized with “difference of opinion.” Using a multidimensional perspective this book explores whether black racial identity differences among blacks influence political attitudes and behavior.

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  Registres du Consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin, 1557; vol. XII

  Isabella M. Watt and Jeffrey R. Watt

  Like the two previous tomes, volume 12 of the registers of the Consistory of Geneva, which covers 1557, provides ample evidence of the growing power of Calvin and the Consistory. This is the longest volume to date, which itself reflects the institution’s increasing efforts to impose discipline in Geneva. Having received the right to administer oaths to witnesses only the previous year, the Consistory in 1557 began prosecuting those who were guilty of perjury before it. Calvin and his colleagues continued to attack laziness and begging, and authorities showed a growing concern for the dissipation of assets. Actions against illicit sexuality remained among the most common heard by the Consistory. Although Calvin and his associates condemned domestic abuse, wife-beaters almost never were subject to anything beyond admonitions. The Consistory now enjoyed the exclusive right to determine who had the right to take communion, and those who were excluded from the Supper had to repent and ask for readmission within a year or run the risk of being banished.

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  Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945

  Ian Whittington

  Writing the Radio War positions the Second World War as a critical moment in the history of cultural mediation in Britain. Through chapters focusing on the middlebrow radicalism of J.B. Priestley, ground-breaking works by Louis MacNeice and James Hanley at the BBC Features Department, frontline reporting by Denis Johnston, and the emergence of a West Indian literary identity in the broadcasts of Una Marson, Writing the Radio War explores how these writers capitalised on the particularities of the sonic medium to communicate their visions of wartime and postwar Britain and its empire. By combining literary aesthetics with the acoustics of space, accent, and dialect, writers created aural communities that at times converged, and at times contended, with official wartime versions of Britain and Britishness.

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  Photography and Failure: One Medium's Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs and Disappointments

  Kris Belden-Adams

  Throughout photography's history, failure has played an essential, recurring part in the development and perceived value of this medium. Exploring a range of failures – individual and institutional, technological and historiographical – Photography and Failure asks what it means to fail and considers how this narrative of failure has shaped our understanding of photography. From the trial-and-error beginnings of photochemistry to poor business decisions influenced by fickle public opinion and taste, the founders and early practitioners of photography frequently faced bankruptcy and ignominy. Alongside these individual 'failures', this collection of essays examines the role of museums in rediscovering, preserving and presenting photographs within institutions, as well as technological limitations, such as the problematic panoramic lens or the digital, archival failures of Snapchat. Moving beyond the physical photograph and these processes, the book also investigates the limitations of photographs themselves, as purveyors of truth, time, space, documentary realism and social change, whether these failures are used to effect or not. Finally, the book probes the historiographical failures affecting the discipline, drawing on key debates, such as the perceived over-emphasis on European and American photography, and the place of photography theory in contemporary art practice. Blurring the boundaries between traditional binaries of art and non-art photography, amateur and professional practice, and individual and corporate perspectives, Photography and Failure presents a new approach to understanding and evaluating photographic history.

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  The Laban Workbook for Actors: A Practical Training Guide with Video

  Katya Bloom, Barbara Adrian, Tom Casciero, and Jennifer Mizenko

  The Laban Workbook is a compendium of unique exercises inspired by the concepts and principles of movement theorist and artist, Rudolf Laban. Written by five internationally recognized movement experts, this textbook is divided into single-authored chapters, each of which includes a short contextual essay followed by a series of insight-bearing exercises. These expert views, honed in the creation of individual approaches to training and coaching actors, provide a versatile range of theory and practice in the creative process of crafting theatre. Readers will learn: Enhanced expressivity of body and voice; Clearer storytelling, both physical and vocal, facilitating the embodiment of playwrights' intentions; Imaginative possibilities for exploring an existing play or for creating devised theatre. Featuring many exercises exploring the application of Laban Movement Studies to text, character, scene work, and devised performances - as well as revealing the creative potential of the body itself - The Laban Workbook is ideal for actors, teachers, directors and choreographers.