'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Smart mobile systems such as microsystems, smart textiles, smart implants, and sensor-controlled medical devices, together with their related networks, have become important enablers for telemedicine and ubiquitous pervasive health to become next-generation health services. This book presents the proceedings of pHealth 2020, held as a virtual conference from 14 – 16 September 2020. This is the 17th in a series of international conferences on wearable or implantable micro and nano technologies for personalized medicine, which bring together expertise from medical, technological, political, administrative, and social domains, and cover subjects including technological and biomedical facilities, legal, ethical, social, and organizational requirements and impacts, and the research necessary to enable future-proof care paradigms. The 2020 conference also covers AI and robots in healthcare; bio-data management and analytics for personalized health; security, privacy and safety challenges; integrated care; and the intelligent management of specific diseases including the Covid-19 pandemic. Communication and cooperation with national and regional health authorities and the challenges facing health systems in developing countries were also addressed. The book includes 1 keynote, 5 invited talks, 25 oral presentations, and 8 short poster presentations from 99 international authors. All submissions were carefully and critically reviewed by at least two independent experts and at least one member of the Scientific Program Committee; a highly selective review process resulting in a full-paper rejection rate of 36%. The book will be of interest to all those involved in the design and provision of healthcare and also to patients and citizen representatives.

This monograph presents analyses of filled and unfilled pauses, cut-offs, repair, discourse markers and other phenomena often referred to as disfluencies in the context of advanced language learners' PowerPoint presentations. It adopts a multimodal perspective to demonstrate the functions of these elements in interaction. Paired with gaze shifts, pointing gestures and posture shifts, they act as facilitators of joint visual orientation, mutual understanding, and accountable actions. Therefore, this volume suggests the name cofluency to reflect their potential functionality. Cofluencies are essential elements of multimodal chunks and multimodal patterns, and these are building blocks of a multimodal turn-taking mechanism for presentations. These concepts are illustrated and discussed based on excerpts from naturally occurring classroom data.

In Gestures of Concern Chris Ingraham shows that while gestures such as sending a “Get Well” card may not be instrumentally effective, they do exert an intrinsically affective force on a field of social relations. From liking, sharing, posting, or swiping to watching a TED Talk or wearing an “I Voted” sticker, such gestures operate as much through affective registers as they do through overt symbolic action. Ingraham demonstrates that gestures of concern are central to establishing the necessary conditions for larger social or political change because they give the everyday aesthetic and rhetorical practices of public life the capacity to attain some socially legible momentum. Rather than supporting the notion that vociferous public communication is the best means for political and social change, Ingraham advances the idea that concerned gestures can help to build the affective communities that orient us to one another with an imaginable future in mind. Ultimately, he shows how acts that many may consider trivial or banal are integral to establishing those background conditions capable of fostering more inclusive social or political change.

This 1999 book is concerned with the pictorial language of gesture revealed in Anglo-Saxon art, and its debt to classical Rome. Reginald Dodwell was an eminent art historian and former Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. In this, his last book, he notes a striking similarity of both form and meaning between Anglo-Saxon gestures and those in illustrated manuscripts of the plays of Terence. He presents evidence for dating the archetype of the Terence manuscripts to the mid-third century, and argues persuasively that their gestures reflect actual stage conventions. He identifies a repertory of eighteen Terentian gestures whose meaning can be ascertained from the dramatic contexts in which they occur, and conducts a detailed examination of the use of the gestures in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The book, which is extensively illustrated, illuminates our understanding of the vigour of late Anglo-Saxon art and its ability to absorb and transpose continental influence.

A discussion of the poetry of John Ashbery. Showing that a sense of occasion - the sense that the poem should be fit for its occasion - was a binding principle for the poets of the New York School, David Herd traces the development of Ashbery's poetry in the light of this idea. The book is a study of Ashbery's career and also a history of the period in which that career has taken shape. The development of Ashbery's poetic is set against such culturally defining issues as: the institutionalisation of literature; the rise and fall of the avant-garde; mass culture; Vietnam; the absence of a divine presence; the erosion of tradition; the growth of celebrity; and the emergence of AIDS. Ashbery's responses to such issues are set against the work of Lowell, Berryman, O'Hara, Koch, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Oppen and Larkin.

In this engaging study, H. William Rice illuminates the mystery that is Ralph Ellison: the author of one complex, important novel who failed to complete his second; a black intellectual who remained notably reticent on political issues during the desegregation of his native South. Rice guides his reader to a greater understanding of Ralph Ellison, his oeuvre, and the American novel.

The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W Somerset Maugham, told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist. It is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.

Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, this “witty, compelling” novel (The Boston Globe) by the internationally acclaimed author of The Razor’s Edge is a dazzling ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leave the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham's sympathetic eye Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in human lives it sometimes demands.