The 13 essays in this title, most of which focus on the 18th century, survey diverse cultural artefacts that include memoirs, histories, plays, poems, courtesy manuals, children's tales, novels, paintings and even resin! The essays explore relationships between character, context and text and engage various genres and geographies.

In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to 17 rabbits. This study recreates the story of this incident and shows how it illuminates 18th-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.

This collection of essays re-examines the dynamics of Jewish indentity and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, from the perspective of visual culture, especially manuscript illustration.

Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.

Imagining the Self, Constructing the Past celebrates the various ways in which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are adapted, recollected, and represented in our own day and age. Most of the chapters fit broadly into one of three categories: namely, the representation of the self in medieval and early modern history and literature; the recollection and utilization of the past in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; and the role of the medieval and the early modern in our own society. Overall, the contributions to this volume bear witness to the importance of representation to our understanding of ourselves, each other, and our shared past.

Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly) Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; “Rivers” portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.

Digital self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds and futures. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present and characterized by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, which attends to its past, present and possible future. Building on social science approaches, the book accounts for the concerns of scholars working in design, philosophy and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking, and questions the status of big data. In doing so it proposes an agenda for future research and design that puts people at its centre.

80% of the average person's inner mental chatter is negative. But everyone has the power to change theirs. Want to achieve your goals, be more content with yourself, and live your best life? Don't let negative thinking hold you back. Changing how you talk to yourself in your thoughts is the most effective way to change your approach to your exercise routine, diet, relationships, work and life. After reading this book you will know how to: Apply better mental strategies and tricks to daily life through changing negative thinking into positive thinking Use simple exercises to expand your thinking Declutter your mind of unproductive thoughts Finally achieve the things you couldn't motivate yourself to do before Approach your relationships to others and yourself with better understanding with self love Stop racing thoughts Stop worrying Gain distance and necessary perspective from your thoughts

This book examines the idea of the self in Anglophone literatures from British colonies in Africa and the subcontinent, and in the context of intercultural encounter, literary hybridity and globalization. The project examines texts by eight authors across the colonial, postwar and post-9/11 eras – Olaudah Equiano, Sake Dean Mahomet, Henry Callaway, R.C. Temple, Amos Tutuola, G.V. Desani, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Aravind Adiga – in order to map different strategies of selfhood across four fields of literature: autobiographical life writing, folk anthology, postwar fabulism, and contemporary realism. Drawing on historical analysis, psychological inquiry, comparative linguistics, postcolonial criticism and social theory, this book responds to a renewed emphasis on the narrative strategies and creative choices involved in a literary construction of the self. Threaded through this investigation is an analysis of the effects of globalization, or the intensification of intercultural and dialogic complexity over time.

Frank E. Burdett is a survivor from seriousness. This is no laughing matter and only needs a simple explanation. Frank decided to divorce himself from all seriousness in an effort to gain control of his sense of humour. Once he attained his sense of humour he realised that the amount of absurdity and nonsense that abounds in society can only be diagnosed, in the gentlest of terms, as over-seriousness of epidemic proportions. Frank has researched and evaluated the importance of nurturing your sense of humour in order to balance the well-being of people everywhere, especially against the high degrees of stress, both emotional and work-associated challenges that attack everyone today. He came to the conclusion that people of all persuasions have completely lost the knack of being able to step aside and have a good and free laugh at themselves. Therefore, the time has come for you to learn to laugh at yourself and live longer! Frank knows the effects of harrowing trauma, being attacked, mauled and carried away by a man-eating tiger and, curing himself of spreading melanoma cancer of the neck/shoulder, both lungs, liver and bowel cancer. He had been diagnosed by orthodox medicine as stage IV and given six months to live. He tuned to find an alternative cure. He has now been four years free of cancer. Frank devised a technique whereby, even you, can benefit and learn to laugh at yourself. You have nothing to lose, except your overpowering seriousness. Frank spent three years delving into the properties of laughing at yourself and he soon realised that there is more to laughing than showing a set of teeth. Laughing at yourself allows you the complete freedom to see stress and serious-ness in their proper light, as a threat to your long-lasting happiness. This is your opportunity to take a real look at yourself by using Franks technique to step on the path towards learning the Art of Happiness. You either want to be free from the pangs of stress and seriousness, or you do not! Your choice!