Treating the cultural giants of the 20th century, this volume traces their reading habits and intellectual development, as well as their contributions to Western culture. Suggesting the literary influences on these figures, the book includes 355 entries on people from a broad range of fields, including scientists, politicians, business figures, writers, religious leaders, and figures from the performing arts and popular culture.

This collection of essays examines the interrelations between illness, disability, health, society, and culture. The contributors examine how "narratives" have emerged and been utilized within these areas to help those who have experienced d injury, disability, dementia, pain, grief, or psychological trauma to express their stories. Encompassing clinical case studies, ethnographic field studies and autobiographical case studies, Health, Illness and Culture offers a broad overview and critical analysis of the present state of "illness narratives" within the fields of health and social welfare.

In this comprehensive Companion over fifty of the very best of modern scholars - including Patrick Collinson, Germaine Greer, Richard Harries, Arthur Kinney, Andrew Hadfield , Jean Howard, and Judith Anderson - come together to offer an original and far-reaching survey of English Renaissance literature and culture. The first part of the volume considers pertinent issues such as humanism, English reformations, the development of the language, court culture, and playhouses, in terms of the way in which these aspects of Renaissance culture influenced literary production. There are provocative essays on canonical genres such as love poetry and Jacobean tragedy , but also accounts of popular and occasional drama and verse, and on the visual arts.

The first section of this book deals with translations as agents of change. Gideon Toury is a prominent figure in effecting the shift of focus from the translated text to the relationship between translations and the cultures that generate them. One of the ways he highlights translations as products of the host culture is through the study of psuedo-translations (or fictitious translations).

Since its first publication in 1938, The Theater and Its Double by the French artist and philosopher Antonin Artaud has continued to provoke, inspire, enrage, enliven, challenge, and goad any number of theatrical debates in its call for a "Theater of Cruelty." A trio of theatrical manifestos, the book is an aggressive attack on many of the most treasured beliefs of both theater and Western culture. According to Artaud, the theater's "double" is similar to its Jungian "shadow," the unacknowledged, unconscious element that completes it but is in many ways its opposite.