If we were able to listen under water, what would we hear? What would we learn? How would it change us? With erudition and charm, marine scientist and orator Bill François takes us on a deep dive into the secret lives of the world’s aquatic creatures, from musical whales and immortal eels to the cod that discovered America and the herring that almost caused a military conflict —to name but a few. We hear the songs of seahorses and scallops, eavesdrop on the conversations of lobsters, and swim in the glow of the fluorescent jellyfish. A poetic blend of ancient myths, modern science, and storytelling through the ages, Eloquence of the Sardine is an invitation and guide to a dreamlike underwater world where the legends are often more believable than the incredible reality. This is nature writing at its best —informative, captivating, and accessible, with a personal angle, about an endlessly fascinating and still mysterious subject. A seafood platter or a day at the beach will never be the same.

By turning from the traditional sources of evidence and giving recognition to the importance of the growth of the secular movement during the late 11th and early 12th centuries, Bond is able to observe how increasing autonomy for many regional courts and schools meant a distancing from traditional christian' theories and practices and the ...

"An outstanding book, one of the most intelligent, penetrating, and intellectually rigorous studies of pictorial theory in the literature of art history."--Michael Fried, author of Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot "Jacqeline Lichtenstein's groundbreaking contribution to intellectual history reconstructs the history of the age-old debate between philosophy and rhetoric, discourse and images, drawing and color, truth and delight. She shows how, in opposition to the Platonic suspicion of eloquence and colour, 17th-century French aesthetics discovers that painting involves deception more than imitation and delight rather than logic. Impressively erudite, Lichtenstein is also a seductive writer. A book about the pleasure of seeing and the pleasure of reading."--Thomas Pavel, author of The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought

Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality—was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts—by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus—form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance. In this classic work, Martha Nussbaum maintains that these Hellenistic schools have been unjustly neglected in recent philosophic accounts of what the classical "tradition" has to offer. By examining texts of philosophers such as Epicurus, Lucretius, and Seneca, she recovers a valuable source for current moral and political thought and encourages us to reconsider philosophical argument as a technique through which to improve lives. Written for general readers and specialists, The Therapy of Desire addresses compelling issues ranging from the psychology of human passion through rhetoric to the role of philosophy in public and private life.

It is regarded as a truism that the King James Bible is one of the finest pieces of English prose. Yet few people are aware that the King James Bible was generally scorned or ignored as English writing for a century and a half after its publication. The reputation of this Bible is the central, most fascinating, element in a larger history, that of literary ideas of the Bible as they have come into and developed in English culture; and the first volume of David Norton's magisterial two-volume work surveys and analyses a comprehensive range of these ideas from biblical times to the end of the seventeenth century, providing a unique view of the Bible and translation.

Foreign Bodies analyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us.

Human communication has traditionally revealed important aspects of identity such as gender, age and race. However, such information is now often masked by computer-mediated communications. This text examines the various ways modern technology is challenging conventional notions of gender identity.

The Eloquence of Effort echoes the merits of conscientious toil. It provides an insightful look into the benefits of sustained socio-economic effort. To convincingly argue that dreams are only achievable through mind-numbing toil, the writer draws heavily from biographical, philosophical, economic, religious, historical and scientific data. Work is the mission; the multiple rewards are the byproducts, he argues. Moreover, the pleasure resides in the effort, not the results. Against the dark backdrop of malignancies inflicted on society by unrepentant leeches, the benefit of conscientious work is sharply focused. The reader is imperceptibly nudged into a higher plane of reality: namely, purposeful effort, regardless of its nature, is supremely rewarding. The writer forces the realization that regardless of the outcome, effort is never wasted. Conversely, indolence is the bane of progress and the root cause of economic crimes. Indeed, corruption in all its diabolical forms is nothing but laziness masquerading as diligence and embraced by vacuous minds craving the most for the least. Analysis of biographical data sustains the thesis that industry prolongs life; inaction truncates it – a finding supported by the second Law of Thermodynamics. The persuasiveness of the arguments is supported by a wealth of references. Together they form the final authority; they have given resonance to the arguments contained herein.