- Table View
- List View
Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture (Elements in Environmental Humanities)
by Louise WestlingThis Element follows the development of humans in constantly changing climates and environments from Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago, to fully modern humans who moved out of Africa to Europe and Asia 70,000 years ago. Biosemiotics reveals meaningful communication among coevolving members of the intricately connected life forms on this dynamic planet. Within this web hominins developed culture from bipedalism and meat-eating to the use of fire, stone tools, and clothing, allowing wide migrations and adaptations. Archaeology and ancient DNA analysis show how fully modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals and Denisovans before emerging as the sole survivors of the genus Homo 35,000 years ago. Their visions of the world appear in magnificent cave paintings and bone sculptures of animals, then more recently in written narratives like the Gilgamesh epic and Euripides' Bacchae whose images still haunt us with anxieties about human efforts to control the natural world.
Deep Learning Approaches for Spoken and Natural Language Processing (Signals and Communication Technology)
by Amitoj Singh Virender Kadyan Mohit Mittal Laith AbualigahThis book provides insights into how deep learning techniques impact language and speech processing applications. The authors discuss the promise, limits and the new challenges in deep learning. The book covers the major differences between the various applications of deep learning and the classical machine learning techniques. The main objective of the book is to present a comprehensive survey of the major applications and research oriented articles based on deep learning techniques that are focused on natural language and speech signal processing. The book is relevant to academicians, research scholars, industrial experts, scientists and post graduate students working in the field of speech signal and natural language processing and would like to add deep learning to enhance capabilities of their work.Discusses current research challenges and future perspective about how deep learning techniques can be applied to improve NLP and speech processing applications;Presents and escalates the research trends and future direction of language and speech processing;Includes theoretical research, experimental results, and applications of deep learning.
Deep Learning and Linguistic Representation (Chapman And Hall/crc Machine Learning And Pattern Recognition Ser.)
by Shalom LappinThe application of deep learning methods to problems in natural language processing has generated significant progress across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. For some of these applications, deep learning models now approach or surpass human performance. While the success of this approach has transformed the engineering methods of machine learning in artificial intelligence, the significance of these achievements for the modelling of human learning and representation remains unclear. Deep Learning and Linguistic Representation looks at the application of a variety of deep learning systems to several cognitively interesting NLP tasks. It also considers the extent to which this work illuminates our understanding of the way in which humans acquire and represent linguistic knowledge. Key Features: combines an introduction to deep learning in AI and NLP with current research on Deep Neural Networks in computational linguistics. is self-contained and suitable for teaching in computer science, AI, and cognitive science courses; it does not assume extensive technical training in these areas. provides a compact guide to work on state of the art systems that are producing a revolution across a range of difficult natural language tasks.
Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice: How Reading C.S. Lewis Can Change Your Life
by Dr Alister E McGrathWhat if you could ask C. S. Lewis his thoughts on the questions we all ask ourselves from time to time - questions about friendship, education, suffering, God ... and the meaning of life itself?Alister McGrath's provocative and perceptive book Deep Magic, Dragons and Talking Mice takes Lewis as the perfect conversation companion for the persistent meaning-of-life questions everyone asks. Lewis travelled from staunch atheism to reluctant belief, from rational scepticism to the appreciation of human desires and imagination, and from Christian apologist during the Second World War to celebrated author of classic children's literature - and as such looked at life's mysteries from many different viewpoints. The questions Lewis thought so deeply about are still relevant today, and all are illuminated by his astonishingly varied body of work. Whether you're new to Lewis, a fan of the Narnia books or a devotee of his apologetic writings, McGrath will lead you into an exploration of life's deepest questions, using one of the twentieth century's most engaging writers as our guide.
Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains
by Susan Naramore MaherTaking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map), the “deep-map” form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality. Maher’s Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.
Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis (Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures)
by Ian N. Gregory Joanna E. TaylorEngland’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.
Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (The Spatial Humanities)
by John Corrigan David J. Bodenhamer Trevor M. HarrisDeep maps are finely detailed, multimedia depictions of a place and the people, buildings, objects, flora, and fauna that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. These depictions may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another. A deep map is a way to engage evidence within its spatio-temporal context and to provide a platform for a spatially-embedded argument. The essays in this book investigate deep mapping and the spatial narratives that stem from it. The authors come from a variety of disciplines: history, religious studies, geography and geographic information science, and computer science. Each applies the concepts of space, time, and place to problems central to an understanding of society and culture, employing deep maps to reveal the confluence of actions and evidence and to trace paths of intellectual exploration by making use of a new creative space that is visual, structurally open, multi-media, and multi-layered.
Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom
by James Crosswhite"Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic," claimed Aristotle. "Rhetoric is the first part of logic rightly understood," Martin Heidegger concurred. "Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication," opined Hans-Georg Gadamer. But in Deep Rhetoric, James Crosswhite offers a groundbreaking new conception of rhetoric, one that builds a definitive case for an understanding of the discipline as a philosophical enterprise beyond basic argumentation and is fully conversant with the advances of the New Rhetoric of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Chapter by chapter, Deep Rhetoric develops an understanding of rhetoric not only in its philosophical dimension but also as a means of guiding and conducting conflicts, achieving justice, and understanding the human condition. Along the way, Crosswhite restores the traditional dignity and importance of the discipline and illuminates the twentieth-century resurgence of rhetoric among philosophers, as well as the role that rhetoric can play in future discussions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. At a time when the fields of philosophy and rhetoric have diverged, Crosswhite returns them to their common moorings and shows us an invigorating new way forward.
Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom
by James Crosswhite“Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic,” claimed Aristotle. “Rhetoric is the first part of logic rightly understood,” Martin Heidegger concurred. “Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication,” opined Hans-Georg Gadamer. But in Deep Rhetoric, James Crosswhite offers a groundbreaking new conception of rhetoric, one that builds a definitive case for an understanding of the discipline as a philosophical enterprise beyond basic argumentation and is fully conversant with the advances of the New Rhetoric of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. Chapter by chapter, Deep Rhetoric develops an understanding of rhetoric not only in its philosophical dimension but also as a means of guiding and conducting conflicts, achieving justice, and understanding the human condition. Along the way, Crosswhite restores the traditional dignity and importance of the discipline and illuminates the twentieth-century resurgence of rhetoric among philosophers, as well as the role that rhetoric can play in future discussions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. At a time when the fields of philosophy and rhetoric have diverged, Crosswhite returns them to their common moorings and shows us an invigorating new way forward.
Deep Time: A Literary History
by Noah HeringmanHow the concept of “deep time” began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesIn this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of “deep time”—most often associated with geological epochs—began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about “the abyss of time” created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history.Heringman considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook’s second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on travel narrative, antiquarian works, and his own fieldwork to lay out the first modern geological timescale; Blake and Johann Gottfried Herder, who used the language of fossils and artifacts to promote ancient ballads and “prehistoric song”; and Darwin’s exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, Heringman shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.
Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain (Southern Literary Studies)
by Thomas Ruys SmithMark Twain’s visions of the Mississippi River offer some of the most indelible images in American literature: Huck and Jim floating downstream on their raft, Tom Sawyer and friends becoming pirates on Jackson’s Island, the young Sam Clemens himself at the wheel of a steamboat. Through Twain’s iconic river books, the Mississippi has become an imagined river as much as a real one. Yet despite the central place that Twain’s river occupies in the national imaginary, until now no work has explored the shifting meaning of this crucial connection in a single volume. Thomas Ruys Smith’s Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain is the first book to provide a comprehensive narrative account of Twain’s intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi. This expansive study traces two separate but richly intertwined stories of the river as America moved from the aftermath of the Civil War toward modernity. It follows Twain’s remarkable connection to the Mississippi, from his early years on the river as a steamboat pilot, through his most significant literary statements, to his final reflections on the crooked stream that wound its way through his life and imagination. Alongside Twain’s evolving relationship to the river, Deep Water details the thriving cultural life of the Mississippi in this period—from roustabouts to canoeists, from books for boys to blues songs—and highlights a diverse collection of voices each telling their own story of the river. Smith weaves together these perspectives, putting Twain and his creations in conversation with a dynamic cast of river characters who helped transform the Mississippi into a vibrant American icon.By balancing evocative cultural history with thought-provoking discussions of some of Twain’s most important and beloved works, Deep Water gives readers a new sense of both the Mississippi and the remarkable writer who made the river his own.
Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature
by Christopher B. TeutonWeaving connections between indigenous modes of oral storytelling, visual depiction, and contemporary American Indian literature, Deep Waters demonstrates the continuing relationship between traditional and contemporary Native American systems of creative representation and signification. Christopher B. Teuton begins with a study of Mesoamerican writings, Diné sand paintings, and Haudenosaunee wampum belts. He proposes a theory of how and why indigenous oral and graphic means of recording thought are interdependent, their functions and purposes determined by social, political, and cultural contexts. The center of this book examines four key works of contemporary American Indian literature by N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Ray A. Young Bear, and Robert J. Conley. Through a textually grounded exploration of what Teuton calls the oral impulse, the graphic impulse, and the critical impulse, we see how and why various types of contemporary Native literary production are interrelated and draw from long-standing indigenous methods of creative representation. Teuton breaks down the disabling binary of orality and literacy, offering readers a cogent, historically informed theory of indigenous textuality that allows for deeper readings of Native American cultural and literary expression.
Deepakam Prathamo Bhag class 6 - NCERT-25: दीपकम् प्रथमो भागः ६वीं कक्षा - एनसीईआरटी - २५
by Rashtriy Shaikshik Anusandhan Aur Prashikshan Parishadदीपकम् प्रथमः भागः यह पुस्तक संस्कृत भाषा के प्रारंभिक शिक्षार्थियों के लिए एक महत्वपूर्ण पाठ्यपुस्तक है, जो वर्णमाला के अध्ययन से लेकर सरल वाक्य-रचना और शब्दज्ञान तक विस्तृत अभ्यास प्रदान करती है। इसमें सबसे पहले स्वर तथा व्यंजन वर्णों का स्पष्ट वर्गीकरण और उनके उच्चारण-स्थान की जानकारी दी गई है। पुस्तक में वर्णों को उनके प्रकार जैसे कण्ठ्य, तालव्य, मूर्धन्य, दन्त्य, ओष्ठ्य आदि के आधार पर समझाया गया है। पाठों के माध्यम से व्याकरण के मूलभूत सिद्धांत जैसे संधि, संयुक्ताक्षर, लट्लकार, शब्दरूप, धातुरूप आदि का अभ्यास करवाया गया है। हर पाठ में "वयं शब्दार्थान् जानीमः", "वयम् अभ्यासं कुर्मः" और "परियोजनाकार्यम्" जैसे अनुभाग विद्यार्थियों को व्यावहारिक अभ्यास के साथ-साथ रचनात्मकता की ओर भी प्रेरित करते हैं। इसके अलावा छात्रों की पारिवारिक और सामाजिक जानकारी को भी संस्कृत में प्रस्तुत करने का अवसर दिया गया है, जैसे नाम, कुल, शिक्षकों व मित्रों के नाम लिखना आदि। कुल मिलाकर, यह पुस्तक विद्यार्थियों को संस्कृत भाषा के मूल तत्वों की समझ विकसित करने में सहायक है और उन्हें अभ्यास के माध्यम से भाषा में प्रवीणता की दिशा में मार्गदर्शन देती है।
Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12
by Kelly GallagherBuilding on twenty years of teaching language arts, the author shows how students can be taught to successfully read a broad range of challenging and difficult texts with deeper levels of comprehension. In this book, the author shares effective, classroom-tested strategies that enable your students to: accept the challenge of reading difficult books; move beyond a "first draft" understanding of the text into deeper levels of reading; consciously monitor their comprehension as they read; employ effective fix-it strategies when their comprehension begins to falter; use meaningful collaboration to achieve deeper understanding of texts; think metaphorically to deepen their reading comprehension; reach deeper levels of reflection by understanding the relevance the book holds for themselves and their peers; use critical thinking skills to analyze real-world issues. The author also provides guidance on effective lesson planning that incorporates strategies for deeper reading.
Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12
by Kelly GallagherDo your students often struggle with difficult novels and other challenging texts? Do you feel that you are doing more work teaching the novel than they are reading it? Building on twenty years of teaching language arts, Kelly Gallagher shows how students can be taught to successfully read a broad range of challenging and difficult texts with deeper levels of comprehension. In Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12 , he shares effective, classroom-tested strategies that enable your students to: Accept the challenge of reading difficult books and move beyond a "first draft" understanding Consciously monitor their comprehension as they read and employ effective "fix-it" strategies when comprehension starts to falter Use meaningful collaboration and metaphorical thinking to achieve deeper understanding of texts Reflect on the relevance the book holds for themselves and their peers by using critical thinking skills to analyze real-world issues Gallagher also provides guidance on effective lesson planning that incorporates strategies for deeper reading. Funny, poignant, and packed with practical ideas that work in real classrooms, Deeper Reading is a valuable resource for any teacher whose students need new tools to uncover the riches found in complex texts.
Defective Inspectors: Crime-fiction Pastiche In Late Twentieth-century French Literature
by Simon KempCrime fiction is a popular target for literary pastiche in France. From the nouveau roman and the Oulipo group to the current avant-garde, writers have seized on the genre to exploit it for their own ends, toying with its traditional plots and characters, and exploring its preoccupations with perception, reason and truth. In the first full-length study of the phenomenon, Simon Kemp's investigation centres on four major writers of the twentieth century, Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922), Michel Butor (b. 1926), Georges Perec (193682) and Jean Echenoz (b. 1947). Out of their varied encounters with the genre, from deconstruction of the classic detective story to homage to the roman noir, Kemp elucidates the complex relationship between the pasticheur and his target, which demands an entirely new assessment of pastiche as a literary form.
Defective Institutions: A Protocol for the Republic (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)
by Jacques LezraDefective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence.Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra’s book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; “race”—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology.To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O’Brien). At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra’s book offers today’s Left a new framework for confronting institutions’ necessity and their necessary abolition.
Defences of Women: Printed Writings 1500-1640: Series 1, Part One, Volume 4 (The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works & Printed Writings, 1500-1640: Series I, Part One)
by Susan Gushee O'MalleyJane Anger her Protection for Women A Mouzell for Melastomus Ester hath hang’d Haman The Worming of a mad Dogge Of the many tracts in defence of women published in early modern England only these four bear women’s names. All four were written in response to misogynist attacks. Of these writers, only Speght (1597-c.1630) is historically identifiable. Two or possibly three of the others use pseudonyms and indeed their gender has not yet been definitely established.
Defending French in Flanders, 1873–1974: Between Liberty and Identity
by David J. HensleyThis book examines the efforts of the French-speaking minority in Flanders, Belgium, to maintain a legal and social presence of the French language in Flemish public life. Chronologically, the study is bookended by two developments, almost exactly a century apart. In 1873, the first laws were passed which required the use of Dutch in some aspects of public administration in Flanders, challenging the de facto use of French among the Flemish ruling class. One hundred and one years later, the last French daily newspaper in Flanders collapsed, marking the end of a once-vibrant French-language public sphere in Flanders. The author contends that the methods and arguments by which French speakers defended the role of French in Flemish public life changed along with the social and political situation of this minority. As the Flemish movement grew over the course of the twentieth century, French speakers’ appeals to the “free choice” of language lost traction, and they put forward claims that they represented an ethnolinguistic minority who deserved protection for their mother tongue. Providing new insights for scholars of European history, and in conversation with the literature on liberalism, national identity, and Francophonie, this book demonstrates how the debate over the role of French in Flanders was at the center of Belgium’s ethnolinguistic conflict – the repercussions of which continue to be felt to this day.
Defending Hypatia
by Robert GouldingWhy should mathematics, the purest of sciences, have a history? Medieval mathematicians took little interest in the history of their discipline. Yet in the Renaissance the history of mathematics flourished. This book explores how Renaissance scholars recovered and reconstructed the origins of mathematics by tracing its invention in prehistoric Antiquity, its development by the Greeks, and its transmission to modern Europe via the works of Euclid, Theon and Proclus. The principal architects of this story -- the French philosopher and University of Paris reformer Peter Ramus, and his critic, the young Oxford astronomy lecturer Henry Savile - worked out diametrically opposed models for the development of the mathematical arts, models of historical progress and decline which mirrored each scholar's larger convictions about the nature of mathematical thinking, the purpose of the modern university, and the potential of the human mind. In their hands, the obscure story of mathematical history became a site of contention over some of the most pressing philosophical and pedagogical debates of the sixteenth century.
Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity
by Patrick CurryA scholar explores the ideas within The Lord of the Rings and the world created by J. R. R. Tolkien: &“A most valuable and timely book&” (Ursula K. Le Guin, Los Angeles Times–bestselling author of Changing Planes). What are millions of readers all over the world getting out of reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Defending Middle-earth argues, in part, that the appeal for fans goes far deeper than just quests and magic rings and hobbits. In fact, through this epic, Tolkien found a way to provide something close to spirit in a secular age. This thoughtful book focuses on three main aspects of Tolkien&’s fiction: the social and political structure of Middle-earth and how the varying cultures within it find common cause in the face of a shared threat; the nature and ecology of Middle-earth and how what we think of as the natural world joins the battle against mindless, mechanized destruction; and the spirituality and ethics of Middle-earth—for which the author provides a particularly insightful and resonant examination. Includes a new afterword
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights
by Nadine StrossenTraditional explanations of why pornography must be defended from would-be censors have concentrated on censorship's adverse impacts on free speech and sexual autonomy. In contrast, Nadine Strossen focuses on the women's rights-centered rationale for defending pornography.
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights
by Nadine StrossenA new edition of a groundbreaking, feminist defense of pornography as free speechNamed a Notable Book by The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Defending Pornography examines a key question that has divided feminists for decades: is censoring pornography good or bad for women? Nadine Strossen makes a powerful case that increasing government power to censor sexual expression, beyond the limits that the First Amendment sensibly permits (for example, outlawing child pornography) would do more harm than good for women and others who have traditionally been marginalized due to sex or gender, She explains how the very anti-porn laws pushed by some feminists have led to the censorship of LGBTQ+ and feminist works, and she examines the startling connections between anti-porn feminists and right-wing fundamentalists. In an illuminating new Preface, Strossen lays out the multiple current assaults on sexual expression, which continue to come from across the ideological spectrum. She shows that freedom for such expression remains an essential prerequisite for the equality, safety, and dignity of women and sexual/gender minorities.
Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel
by Nicole Mansfield WrightA critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to "rights" to safeguard the status of the powerful.As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and the enslaved. In promoting their agenda, these authors resuscitated literary modes regarded at the time as derivative or passé—including romance, the gothic, and epistolarity—or invented subgenres that are neglected today due to widespread revilement of their politics (the proslavery novel).Although these authors are not typically considered alongside one another in scholarship, they are united by their firsthand experience of legal conflict: each felt that their privilege was degraded through lengthy disputes. In examining the work of these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors, Wright traces a broader reactionary framework in the Anglophone literary legacy. Each novel seeks to reshape and manipulate public perceptions of who merits legal agency: the right to initiate a lawsuit, serve as a witness, seek counsel from a lawyer, and take other legal actions. As a result, Defending Privilege offers a counterhistory to scholarship on the novel's capacity to motivate the promulgation of human rights and champion social ascendance through the upwardly mobile realist character.
Defending Slavery: A Brief History With Documents
by Paul FinkelmanHow the American South attempted to justify the violation of human rights.