The Sentimental Touch' explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture.

This book explains how management became Managerialism and how the language of managerialism was developed.Providing a comprehensive discussion of the managerialism-language interface, the book argues that firstly, managerialism itself has developed its distinctive language; and secondly, the two concepts of managerialism and language mutually depend upon each other. Written from the critical media studies perspective of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, the book reaches beyond simple business communication, illustrating how the language of managerialism is colonising the non-corporate lifeworld. The book concludes by offering fresh ideas on how to move beyond the language of managerialism.

From Robert Lovelace’s uninvited hand-grasps in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to to Basil Hallward’s first encounter with Dorian Gray, literary depictions of touching hands in British literature from the 1740s to the 1890s communicate emotional dimensions of sexual experience that reflect shifting cultural norms associated with gender roles, sexuality​, and sexual expression. But what is the relationship between hands, tactility, and sexuality in Victorian literature? And how do we best interpret ​what those touches communicate between characters? This volume addresses these questions by asserting a connection between the prevalence of violent, sexually charged touches in eighteenth-century novels such as those by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney and growing public concern over handshake etiquette in the nineteenth century evident in works by ​Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Flora Annie Steel. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary analysis with close analyses of paintings, musical compositions, and nonfictional texts​, such as etiquette books and scientific treatises​, to make a case for the significance of tactility to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of selfhood and sexuality. In doing so, it draws attention to the communicative nature of skin-to-skin contact ​as represented in literature and traces a trajectory of meaning from the forceful grips that violate female characters in eighteenth-century novels to the consensual embraces common in Victorian ​and neo-Victorian literature.

A historically informed approach to realist-era American fiction, engaging with contemporary affect theory, evolutionary theory, studies of realism, and studies of affect in American literature

"Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs, A Queer Way of Feeling explores how, in the 1910s, girls coming of age in the United States used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos on personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, adolescent girls from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of mental states, actions, and proclivities self-described as "queer" or "different from the norm." Material testimonies of a forgotten audience, these autobiographical artifacts show how early movie-loving girls engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that would become cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging"--

This book introduces the Map of Meaning which provides a clear, simple and profound framework of the dimensions and process of living and working meaningfully. The Map of Meaning is based on over 20 years' research into the insights and practice of ordinary people as they search for, lose and find meaning. Incorporating the ideas of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, this book describes how human beings wrestle with, and answer, questions such as, "What gives my life and work meaning?", "How can I balance inspiration and reality and maintain positive momentum?" and "How do we integrate meaningfulness into our workplaces?". Innate human knowledge is captured in a practical model that makes understanding and working with issues of meaning clear and accessible to everyone. At an individual level this book helps people to define and stay in contact with what is most important to them as they grapple with the real problems of daily life. It shows how they can stay in charge of keeping the human search for meaning alive, especially in the face of the challenges that exist in organizational life. Because the dimensions of meaning are shared, the second half of the book focuses on how we can bring an awareness of what creates meaningful work into our thinking about the practice and design of organisations. The authors recognize that in the current economic context a simple, yet profound guide for humanity is essential, precisely because organizational life has become so intensely directed towards a singular economic goal. They argue that it is vital that people have an easy, powerful way to reclaim the significance of meaning in their working lives both individually and at a whole of organization level. Updated with new chapter material and case studies, this second edition offers profound insights for anyone who is interested in creating more meaning and purpose in work and organizations – from a CEO to a blue-collar worker or consultant. It is for those searching for ways to re-energize their roles or change their careers. It is for anyone who firmly believes that it must be possible to align our deeper life purposes with our daily actions in the workplace. It is for anyone who is committed to creating workplaces that support and enable the experience of work that feels worth doing.

Uncovers new evidence and presents new ideas that invite us to reconsider our understanding Edith Wharton's life and career.

Nineteenth-century America witnessed some of the most important and fruitful areas of intersection between the law and humanities, as people began to realize that the law, formerly confined to courts and lawyers, might also find expression in a variety of ostensibly non-legal areas such as painting, poetry, fiction, and sculpture. Bringing together leading researchers from law schools and humanities departments, this Companion touches on regulatory, statutory, and common law in nineteenth-century America and encompasses judges, lawyers, legislators, litigants, and the institutions they inhabited (courts, firms, prisons). It will serve as a reference for specific information on a variety of law- and humanities-related topics as well as a guide to understanding how the two disciplines developed in tandem in the long nineteenth century.

The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain's importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.

United States historians have long regarded the U.S. Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. Emblematic of this moment was the post-war search for a "Great American Novel"--a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. While the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments declared the ideal of equality before the law a reality, persistent and increasing inequality challenged idealists and realists alike. The controversy over what full representation should mean sparked debates about the value of cultural difference and aesthetic dissonance, and it led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of "realism" for readers, writers, politics, and law. The dilemmas of incomplete emancipation, which would damage and define American life from the late nineteenth century onwards, would also force novelists to reconsider the definition and possibilities of the novel as a genre of social representation. Legal Realisms examines these transformations in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender and class structure of American society. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée and others, Christine Holbo explores the transformation of the novel's distinctive modes of social knowledge in relation to developments in art, philosophy, law, politics, and moral theory. As Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast, this study shows how violence, prejudice, and exclusion haunted the celebratory literatures of national equality, but it demonstrates as well the way novelists' representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of social justice.