"Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, 'Essential Essays' showcases Adrienne Rich's singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity." - Umschlagrückseite

"Over the past several years, much has been written about property rights in land and natural resources by scholars in many disciplines including economics, political science, history, and law. This book, based on a 2010 Lincoln Institute conference, addresses the tendency in social science literature to oversimplify the concept of property rights by assuming that only two or three forms of property rights are appropriate for the effective use and conservation of resources. Instead it focuses on recent developments in our understanding of how various property systems are applied to and affect the use of scarce natural resources. The chapters explore the multiple aspects of diverse resources in the design and implementation of property rights systems. The volume also includes a foreword by Douglass C. North and a keynote chapter by Thráinn Eggertsson, who discusses issues related to property rights institutions and the environment using six case studies from his native Iceland, where relatively simple and transparent institutions are ideal for identifying social regularities with general applicability. The topics addressed in the other chapters and accompanying commentaries include: the nature and variety of existing property systems; new thinking about the California gold rush; the role of psychological entitlement in property allocation; evolving property regimes governing fisheries; the evolution of zoning; attributes of property regimes governing water resources; the nature of property rights in tradable pollution permits; how regulations sometimes create property; and mechanisms for ameliorating property conflicts that arise from the presence of endangered species on privately owned lands."--Publisher's website.

Booker-winning novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic, John Berger has excelled in a variety of literary fields. This collection of essays takes a definitive look at his career. Berger's essays were ground breaking, polemic, reflective, and radically original. Spanning more than 40 years of intellectual enquiry and political engagement, these essays are viewed chronologically to provide a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of time refracted through the prism of art.

In the three decades since her revolutionary and seminal article "The Character of Hamlet's Mother," Carolyn Heilbrun has been a prophet in the field of women and literature, gender and culture. This collection of graceful and uncompromising essays charts her development as a feminist writer and critic, which has culminated in such groundbreaking works as REINVENTING WOMANHOOD and WRITING A WOMAN'S LIFE. Shakespeare's Gertrude was first among many literary figures illuminated by Heilbrun's feminist sensibility. Others include Homer's Penelope -- an archetypal single parent, weaving herself a new life for which she was given no script; Jo in LITTLE WOMEN, a model of autonomy for generations of female readers; Elizabeth Bennet, remarkable for the promise of friendship in her marriage with Darcy; and Harrriet Vane, outrageously unique on many counts. The consistency and clarity of Heilbrun's vision in matched only by its heterogeneity, as she discusses Margaret Mead and Freud's daughters, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, resistance to feminist studies in academia, mothers and daughters, fiction and myth, tomboys and surrogate sons, and the detective story, of which Heibrun herself (as Amanda Cross) is one of the ablest practitioners. HAMLET'S MOTHER AND OTHER WOMEN will spark recognition, again and again, in readers on their own quest for female redefinition. "[A] witty, learned collection of essays . . . filled with delicate, sometimes startling gems of perception . . . . Provocative." -- New York Newsday

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal essays (for example, "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"), as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time

Contains essays on art and culture.

For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. Lions , translated by Kári Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great preoccupations: metaphors and anecdotes as non-philosophical forms of knowledge. Each of these short texts, sparkling with erudition and humor, is devoted to a peculiar leonine presence--or, in many cases, absence--in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and politics. From Ecclesiastes to the New Testament Apocrypha, Dürer to Henri Rousseau, Aesop and La Fontaine to Rilke and Thomas Mann, the extraordinary breadth of Blumenberg's knowledge and intellectual curiosity is on full display. Lions has much to offer readers, both those already familiar with Blumenberg's oeuvre and newcomers looking for an introduction to the thought of one of Germany's most important postwar philosophers.

Music and religion have, throughout history, walked hand in hand. In the rites and rituals of small tribal religions, great world religions, and more recent New-Age and neo-heathen movements, different kinds of music have been used to celebrate the gods, express belief and help believers get in contact with the divine. This innovative book focuses on how mainstream and counter-cultural groups use religion and music to negotiate the challenges of modernisation and globalisation in the European context: a region under-explored by existing literature on the subject. With its internal ethnic diversity, ever-expanding borders and increasing differentiation, Europe has undergone massive dislocation in recent years. The authors show that, in the midst of such change, rock, pop and dance music may in their various forms be used by their practitioners as resources for new kinds of spiritual and religious identification, even as these forms are used as symbols of the deficiencies of secular society. Focusing on Christianity, Judaism, Islam and New Religious Movements, the book explores such topics as Norwegian Black Metal and Neo-paganism, contemporary Jewish Music in the UK, the French hip hop scene, the musical thinking of Muslim convert Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and European dance music culture. It offers an ideal introduction to leading-edge thinking at the exciting interface of 'music and religion'.

Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria . Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.