Jonathan Taylor - Böcker

This volume considers the relationship between the Gothic and theories of post-colonialism. Contributors explore how writers such as Salman Rushdie, Arunhati Roy and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala use the Gothic for post-colonial ends. Post-colonial theory is applied to earlier Gothic narratives in order to re examine the ostensibly colonialist writings of William Beckford, Charlotte Dacre, H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker.

Cuneiform script on tablets of clay is, as far as we know, the oldest form of writing in the world. The choice of clay as writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia meant that records of all kinds could survive down to modern times, preserving fascinating documents from ancient civilization, written by a variety of people and societies. From reading these tablets we can understand not only the history and economics of the time but also the beliefs, ideas and superstitions. This fascinating book will bring the world in which the cuneiform was written to life for the non-expert reader, revealing how ancient inscriptions can lead to a new way of thinking about the past. It will explain how this pre-alphabetic writing really worked and how it was possible to use cuneiform signs to record so many different languages so long ago. Richly illustrated with a wealth of fresh examples ranging from elementary school exercises to revealing private letters or beautifully calligraphic literature for the royal library, we will meet people that aren’t so very different from ourselves. We will read the work of many scribes – from mundane record keepers to state fortune tellers, using tricks from puns to cryptography. For the first time cuneiform tablets and their messages are not remote and inaccessible, but wonderfully human documents that resonate today.

In this unique collection of essays, published writers offer an intimate view of how their work has been informed, shaped and transformed by their literary, political, philosophical or personal influences. Providing models of the critical commentaries that all students of creative writing must write, each essay from contemporary authors of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, scripts and digital writing demonstrates how what writers write is determined by what they have read, and what they read is then determined by what they are writing. As writers reflect on their process of moving from sources of inspiration to a finished and original piece of writing, they reveal their anxieties, passions, discoveries and motivations, offering fascinating insights into the imagination’s journey. Introductory chapters explore why writers reflect on their own work, and place this practice in wider contexts, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding process, influence, and inspiration.As illuminating for aspiring writers as it is for students reflecting on their research and process as part of writing courses, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary will change the way writers talk about and engage with other texts.

In this unique collection of essays, published writers offer an intimate view of how their work has been informed, shaped and transformed by their literary, political, philosophical or personal influences. Providing models of the critical commentaries that all students of creative writing must write, each essay from contemporary authors of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, scripts and digital writing demonstrates how what writers write is determined by what they have read, and what they read is then determined by what they are writing. As writers reflect on their process of moving from sources of inspiration to a finished and original piece of writing, they reveal their anxieties, passions, discoveries and motivations, offering fascinating insights into the imagination’s journey. Introductory chapters explore why writers reflect on their own work, and place this practice in wider contexts, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding process, influence, and inspiration.As illuminating for aspiring writers as it is for students reflecting on their research and process as part of writing courses, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary will change the way writers talk about and engage with other texts.

Winner of the 2025 Arnold Bennett Book PrizeThese are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk. Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

God is dead,' Nietzsche famously declared in The Gay Science; but this book will investigate God's surprising persistence and resurrection in the works of even the most seemingly atheistic of writers, who continue to deploy Judaic and Christian narratives and tropes even as they radically rewrite them in the face of new cultural, political and scientific imperatives. Contributors explore the range, power and implication of Christian and Jewish heresies in canonical Anglo-American writers -- including Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, T S Eliot, John Steinbeck and Jim Crace -- as well as in some less familiar texts: the Mormon Scriptures of Joseph Smith and various Victorian rewritings of the Book of Esther. A polemical essay by Michelene Wandor reflects on conceptions of Jewishness, which she finds in need of heretical renewal. Valentine Cunningham's provocative introduction argues that the acts of literary writing and reading are necessarily heretical. A coda to the book, Between Heresy and Superstition', takes as its motto Thomas Huxley's observation in 1881 that It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.' Contributions offer readers a rare opportunity of witnessing an extended academic exchange -- exploring the process by which former heresies may indeed risk ossification as new kinds of doctrinal conformity. Bryan Cheyette's critique of the Christian Albums' of Bob Dylan is answered by Kevin Mills's essay which uncovers heretical possibility even in this most seemingly orthodox part of Dylan's work. The revitalisation of heresy in literary interpretations, as well as in our religious thinking, forms the guiding objective of this exciting critical book.

This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace's much-cited dream in 1812 of 'a vast intelligence' which can 'embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom' and for which the future and the past are equally calculable. Laplace sets out THE echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience and the classic statement of a deterministic universe. The author investigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. In particular, it aims to retrace some of the ways in which LaplacianNewtonian models of scientific 'intelligence' come to inform nineteenth-century writers' views of themselves and their own modes of observation. The author also explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward to more modern conceptions of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Chaos Theory and Einsteinian Cosmology. Oddly enough, contemporary science would seem to realise Carlyle's vision of a 'Natural-Supernaturalism', fusing Laplace's mechanical vision with Romanticism. This book covers a vast array of topics, including Philosophy, Wagner's music and music in general, Jungian analysis, and ends with the 'omniscient' narrator in Charles Dickens's 'The Old Curiosity Shop', as an example of what came to be the dominant mode of narration in later Victorian fiction.

Shortlisted for the 2013 East Midlands Book AwardEntertaining Strangers is a tragi-comedy about the eccentric Edwin Prince – a depressive intellectual obsessed with high culture and ants – and the mysterious, homeless narrator Jules, who gradually unravels Edwin’s impossible relationships with his landlady, neurotic mother, psychotic brother, domineering ex-wife, dead grandfather and, above all, his ant-farm. At the same time, Jules continually experiences traumatic memories full of fire and water, and gradually a terrible pre-history emerges from beneath all of the other stories, which seems somehow to shape both Jules’s fiery dreams and Edwin’s obsessions – a great fire, massacre and one girl's drowning in Smyrna, 75 years earlier.

It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield – texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called ‘superiority theories’ of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance, marketing, and astrophysics in the past twenty years.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance, marketing, and astrophysics in the past twenty years.