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The Manor House
by Jane Holland'I absolutely love this book from start to finish...a really atmospheric read, and brilliant characters.' NetGalley Reader, *****1963. When Eleanor meets famous young poet, Lyndon Chance, he offers a way to flee her abusive father. In return, she must pretend to be Lyndon's wife. He takes her home to a Tudor manor on the Camel Estuary in Cornwall, where she finds herself in the middle of a feud between Lyndon and his twin brother, Oliver. It's soon clear that the old house hides many dark secrets. But could they be a threat to Eleanor?Now. Taylor has come to idyllic Cornwall to research for her Master's thesis, combining her love for conservation with a personal interest in Chance's poetry. Haunted by her own tragic past, Taylor finds Chance's notoriety fascinating. If only the poet's grandson, Julius, wasn't so determined to thwart her attempts to uncover his family secrets. As Eleanor realises she's out of her depth at Estuary House, drawn to Lyndon like a moth to a flame, Taylor and Julius must fight their own attraction - but could shadows from the past tear them all apart?A stunning and richly evocative timeslip, perfect for fans of Lucinda Riley, Santa Montefiore and Kate Morton.
The Mansions of Limbo
by Dominick DunneIn a collection of his essays from Vanity Fair, the best-selling author reveals the life and times of the beautiful--and not-so-beautiful--people.
The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius
by The Estate of James ButricaThe elegist Sextus Propertius (ca 50-ca 16 BC) is generally reckoned among the most difficult of Latin authors. At the root of this difficulty lies a deeply corrupt text and uncertainty over the manuscript transmission; moreover, the manuscripts used in the standard editions of today have been selected without a comprehensive examination of the surviving copies. This study, the fullest survey of the manuscripts so far, considers the affiliation of more than 140 complete or partial witnesses and offers a thorough reassessment of the tradition. The principal novelty is the argument that six Renaissance copies represent an independent third witness to the archetype, revealing passages where corruptions, glosses, or medieval corrections are now accepted as the words of Propertius and suggesting that the archetype was far more corrupt than now commonly supposed. The study is in two parts. In Part One, after a survey of Propertius' fortuna in the Middle Ages, the author considers the affiliation and history of the known manuscripts and editions to 1502, then offers a text and revised apparatus of four elegies; in Part Two he presents detailed descriptions of 143 manuscripts, most of them from personal inspection.
The Many Faces of Creativity: Exploring Synaesthesia through a Metaphorical Lens (Elements in Cognitive Linguistics)
by Jeannette Littlemore Sarah TurnerCreative metaphor has been of central interest to the cognitive linguistic research community in recent years. However, little is known about what propels people to use metaphor in a creative way. In this Element, the authors identify and explore some of the clues that synaesthesia may provide to help us better understand the factors that drive creativity, with a particular focus on creative metaphor. They identify the factors that seem to trigger the production of creative metaphor in synaesthetes, and explore what this can tell us about creativity in the population more generally. Their findings provide insights into the nature of creativity as it relates to metaphor, emotion and embodied experience. They argue that the production of creative metaphor arises from strong affective reactions to sensory and emotional stimuli and that there is an embodied symbiotic relationship between sensory experiences, embodiment, emotion, hyperbole, empathy, metaphor and creativity.
The Many Lives of Catwoman: The Felonious History of a Feline Fatale
by Tim HanleyFor more than 75 years, Catwoman has forged her own path in a clear-cut world of stalwart heroes, diabolical villains and damsels in distress. Sometimes a thief, sometimes a vigilante, sometimes neither and sometimes both, the mercurial Catwoman gleefully defies classification. Her relentless independence across comic books, television and film appearances set her apart from the rest of the superhero world. When female characters were limited to little more than romantic roles, Catwoman used her feminine wiles to manipulate Batman and escape justice at every turn. When male villains dominated Gotham on the small screen, Catwoman entered the mix and outshone them all. When female-led comics were few and far between, Catwoman headlined her own series for over 20 years. True to her nature, Catwoman stole the show everywhere she appeared, regardless of the medium. But her unique path had its downsides as well. Her existence on the periphery of the superhero world made her expendable, and she was prone to lengthy absences. Her villainous origins also made her susceptible to sexualized and degrading depictions from her primarily male creators in ways that most conventional heroines didn't face. Exploring the many incarnations of this cultural icon offers a new perspective on the superhero genre and showcases the fierce resiliency that has made Catwoman a fan favorite for decades.
The Many Lives of Cy Endfield
by Brian NeveCy Endfield (1914-1995) was a filmmaker who was also fascinated by the worlds of close-up magic, science, and invention. After directing several distinctive low-budget films in Hollywood, he was blacklisted in 1951 and fled to Britain rather than "name names” before HUAC, the U. S. House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee. The Pennsylvania-born Endfield made films that exhibit an outsider’s eye for his adopted country, including the working-class "trucking” drama Hell Drivers and the cult film Zulu--a war epic as politically nuanced as it is spectacular. Along the way he encountered Orson Welles, collaborated with pioneering animator Ray Harryhausen, published a book of his card magic, and co-invented an early word processor that anticipated today’s technology. The Many Lives of Cy Endfield is the first book on this fascinating figure. The fruit of years of archival research and personal interviews by Brian Neve, it documents Endfield’s many identities: among them second-generation immigrant, Jew, Communist, and exile. Neve paints detailed scenes not only of the political and personal dramas of the blacklist era, but also of the attempts by Hollywood directors in the postwar 1940s and early 1950s to address social and political controversies of the day. Out of these efforts came two crime melodramas (what would become known as film noir) on inequalities of class and race: The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury (also known as Try and Get Me!). Neve reveals the complex production and reception histories of Endfield’s films, which the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum saw as reflective of "an uncommon intelligence so radically critical of the world we live in that it’s dangerous. ” The Many Lives of Cy Endfield is at once a revealing biography of an independent, protean figure, an insight into film industry struggles, and a sensitive and informed study of an underappreciated body of work.
The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown
by Martha CutterOn March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Box Brown,” as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until his death in 1897.The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown is the first book to show how subversive performances were woven into Brown’s entire life, from his early days practicing magic in Virginia while enslaved, to his last shows in Canada and England in the 1890s. It recovers forgotten elements of Brown’s history to illustrate the ways he made himself a spectacle on abolitionist lecture circuits via outlandish performances, and then fell off these circuits and went on to reinvent himself again and again. Brown’s stunts included creating a moving panoramic picture show about his escape; parading through the streets dressed as a “Savage Indian” or “African Prince”; convincing hypnotized individuals that they were sheep who would gobble down raw cabbage; performing magic, dark séances, and ventriloquism; and even climbing back into his “original” box to jump out of it on stage.In this study, Martha J. Cutter analyzes contemporary resurrections of Brown’s persona by leading poets, writers, and visual artists. Both in Brown’s time and in ours, stories were created, invented, and embellished about Brown, continuing to recreate his intriguing, albeit fragmentary and elusive, story. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown fosters a new understanding not only of Brown’s life but of modern Black performance art that provocatively dramatizes the unfinished work of African American freedom.
The Many-Headed Muse
by Pauline A. LevenThis is the first monograph entirely devoted to the corpus of late-classical Greek lyric poetry. Not only have the dithyrambs and kitharodic nomes of the New Musicians Timotheus and Philoxenus, the hymns of Aristotle and Ariphron, and the epigraphic paeans of Philodamus of Scarpheia and Isyllus of Epidaurus never been studied side by side, they have also remained hidden behind a series of critical prejudices - political, literary and aesthetic. Professor LeVen's book provides readings of these little-known poems and combines engagement with the style, narrative technique, poetics and reception of the texts with attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. In examining the protean notions of tradition and innovation, the book contributes to the current reevaluation of the landscape of Greek poetry and performance in the late classical period and bridges a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and the Hellenistic periods.
The Many-Minded Man: The "Odyssey," Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic (Myth and Poetics II)
by Joel ChristensenIn The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences—both ancient and modern—a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate.By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, The Many-Minded Man addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, Christensen reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.
The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife
by Ptolemy Tompkins Eben AlexanderThe author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Proof of Heaven teams up with the sages of times past, modern scientists, and with ordinary people who have had profound spiritual experiences to show the reality of heaven and our true identities as spiritual beings.When Proof of Heaven was published, some readers contacted Dr. Eben Alexander to argue that his near-death experience was impossible. But many more have written to say his story resonated with them in profound ways. Thanks to them, Dr. Alexander came to realize that sharing his story has allowed people to rediscover what so many in ancient times knew: there is more to life--and to the universe--than this single earthly life. Dr. Alexander met and heard from thousands of individuals whom his story has affected. He, with coauthor Ptolemy Tompkins, also studied what the world's religious traditions, philosophers, and scientists have had to say about the soul's survival of death. He has been deeply surprised at how often those voices from the past sync up with what he hears from people today. In The Map of Heaven, he shares some of the stories that people have told him and links them to what the world's spiritual traditions and its latest scientific insights have to say about the journey of the soul. Part metaphysical and scientific detective story, part manual for living, The Map of Heaven explores humankind's spiritual history and the progression of modern science from its birth in the seventeenth century, showing how we forgot, and are now at last remembering, who we really are and what our destiny truly is.
The Map: A Beginner's Guide to Doing Research in Translation Studies
by Jenny Williams Andrew ChestermanThe Map is a practical guidebook introducing the basics of research in translation studies for students doing their first major research project in the field. Depending on where they are studying, this may be at advanced undergraduate (BA) or at postgraduate (MA/PHD) level. The book consists of ten chapters. Chapter 1 offers an overview of 12 research areas in translation studies in order to help students identify a topic and establish some of the current research questions relating to it. Chapter 2 is designed to assist students in planning their research project and covers topics such as refining the initial idea, determining the scope of the project, checking out resources, reading critically, keeping complete bibliographic records, and working with a supervisor. Chapters 3 to 7 provide some of the conceptual and methodological tools needed in this area of research, with detailed discussion of such topics as theoretical models of translation, types of research, asking questions, making claims, formulating hypotheses, establishing relations between variables, and selecting and analyzing data. Chapters 8 and 9 are about presenting one's research, in writing as well as orally. Finally, chapter 10 deals with some of the criteria commonly used in research assessment, especially in the assessment of theses. The authors provide detailed guidance on further reading throughout. This is an essential reference work for research students and lecturers involved in supervising research projects and degrees.
The March of Days: Optimistic Realism through the Seasons of Life
by Patricia M. BoyerAlthough Patricia M. Boyer won a scholarship to McMaster University with the highest mathematics marks in Ontario and graduated at age 19, literature and languages were her specialty. She first worked as a public librarian, next as a secondary school teacher, then as a newspaper editor. A community leader in arts and theatre, Patricia was devoted to human rights action in her local community and around the world, church work, drama, the education of children with disabilities, and music. Each week she wrote a newspaper column inspired by episodes in the world around her, both local and global. She rewarded readers through articles infused with learning from literature, astute sensibility to human psychology, and balanced insights on the tragedies and comedies of life’s passing parade. Patricia Boyer summed up her approach to life as "optimistic realism". This collection of the best of her celebrated columns, organized through the twelve months of the year or "the march of days", includes reflections on seasonal celebrations, changing atmospheres of nature, and calendar milestones in the human cycle. A number of these concise yet poignant writings will move many readers with nostalgia as they evoke the happy events and tragic developments of the Sixties and Seventies. All of them, however, convey the wisdom of a woman whose message of optimistic realism endures like a timeless guide to living a satisfying life in the real world today.
The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History
by Bob PerelmanLanguage writing, the most controversial avant-garde movement in contemporary American poetry, appeals strongly to writers and readers interested in the politics of postmodernism and in iconoclastic poetic form. Drawing on materials from popular culture, avoiding the standard stylistic indications of poetic lyricism, and using nonsequential sentences are some of the ways in which language writers make poetry a more open and participatory process for the readers. Reading this kind of writing, however, may not come easily in a culture where poetry is treated as property of a special class. It is this barrier that Bob Perelman seeks to break down in this fascinating and comprehensive account of the language writing movement. A leading language writer himself, Perelman offers insights into the history of the movement and discusses the political and theoretical implications of the writing. He provides detailed readings of work by Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein, among many others, and compares it to a wide range of other contemporary and modern American poetry. A variety of issues are addressed in the following chapters: "The Marginalization of Poetry," "Language Writing and Literary History," "Here and Now on Paper," "Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice," "Write the Power," "Building a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the World (Trade Center)," "This Page Is My Page, This Page Is Your Page: Gender and Mapping," "An Alphabet of Literary Criticism," and "A False Account of Talking with Frank O'Hara and Roland Barthes in Philadelphia."
The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories
by Andrea BachnerWhat imaginaries, tropes, and media have shaped how we theorize? The Mark of Theory argues that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theory.As a trope that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints and phonographic grooves to marks on a page, inscription provides an imaginary that orients and irritates theoretical thought. Tracing inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century to today, The Mark of Theory offers a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought. Navigating poststructuralism’s attention to figurative language as well as media theory’s attention to objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation, the book works through core questions for how we theorize. Across a range of disciplines and scholarly conversations—from literature and media to anthropology, race and gender, art, psychoanalysis, sound, and ultimately ethics—sites of inscription come to constitute the past legacy of a thought to come, a prehistory of our current moment.In focusing on materiality and mediation The Mark of Theory shows how inscriptive practices shape conceptual thought, as well as political and ethical choices. By contextualizing the fraught relationship between materiality and signification, The Mark of Theory lays the ground for a politics of theory that begins there where theory and politics are no longer conflated.
The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (Garland Library of Medieval Literature #No. 22)
by Debra HassigThe medieval bestiary was a contribution to didactic religious literature, addressing concerns central to all walks of Christian and secular life. These essays analyze the bestiary from both literary and art historical perspectives, exploring issues including kinship, romance, sex, death, and the afterlife.
The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture)
by Paul CrosthwaiteIn the twenty-first century, leading publishers are under intense pressure from their conglomerate owners and shareholders to generate growth and profits. This book shows how these pressures have transformed the contemporary novel. Paul Crosthwaite argues that recent British and American authors have internalized the market logics of the financial sector and book trade, resulting in the production of works of 'market metafiction' in which authors reflect obsessively on their writing's positioning in the literary marketplace. The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction reveals the entanglement of fictional narrative and market dynamics to be the central phenomenon of contemporary literary culture. It engages with work by key authors including Iain Sinclair, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis, Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Anne Billson, Hari Kunzru, Barbara Browning, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Joshua Cohen, Sheila Heti, and Garth Risk Hallberg.
The Market and its Critics: Socialist Political Economy in Nineteenth Century Britain (Routledge Revivals)
by Noel ThompsonThe Market and Its Critics, first published in 1988, considers the reaction of socialist writers to the growth of the market economy in nineteenth century Britain, and examines in detail the diverse elements of the critique which they formulated. Dr Thompson looks at the theoretic and thematic continuities and discontinuities over the century, structuring his study around the idea of a changing socialist response to the market economy. Much of the literature in question is comprehensive, perceptive and acute. However, the writers invariably discounted the possibility of the market playing a role in a future socialist or communist commonwealth. The solutions they posited to the problem were inapplicable to the increasingly industrial economy of the time. It was this that left their writing vulnerable to attack, and which had profound consequences both for the fate of the socialist political economy in nineteenth century Britain and its subsequent evolution in the twentieth century.
The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe (Studies in American Popular History and Culture)
by Jonathan HartmannEdgar Allan Poe is today considered one of the greatest masters and most fascinating figures of the American literary world. However, an examination of Poe's essays and criticism throughout his prose publishing career (1831-1849) reveals that the author himself played a vital role in the creation and manipulation of his own reputation. During his twenties and thirties, Poe promoted his writing to magazine editors in the United States and in Europe through several strategies. He painted a Romantic and patriotic self-portrait in his fiery literary reviews, even as he played up his own connections, both real and imaginary, to literary celebrities including Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, George Gordon Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Through recycling plots, atmosphere, and language (including his own) from American and British magazines, he built stories and essays which were linked in a complex network of references to each other and their author. Teachers and students alike will enjoy this single-volume treatment of Poe’s self-promotional tales and criticism.
The Markets for News: Enduring Structures in the Age of Business Model Disruptions (Disruptions)
by Helle SjøvaagIn the face of ongoing digitisation, The Markets for News examines how certain established economic features of the news industry have persisted and what makes them such stable frameworks for journalistic organisations. Drawing on an analysis of Scandinavian news industries, this text revises journalism’s economic foundations in the context of the algorithmically driven platform economy. Exploration of features such as journalism’s two-sided market model, the network effect of platforms, and chain ownership, leads to a discussion about how journalism faces disruption from the introduction of artificial intelligence in the production, dissemination, and sale of news. As journalism undergoes transformations due to revenue losses, this book recognises a return to certain enduring features of journalism’s organisational form, in particular the chain ownership form, that enables scale in adapting to platform logics and economics. This text serves as a basis for a theoretical discussion about strategic media management and critical political economy in the age of digital disruption. This is an insightful book for academics and researchers in the fields of journalism, media industries, media policy and, communication studies.
The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction
by John PhillipsWere it not for the Marquis de Sade's explicit use of language and complete disregard for the artificially constructed taboos of a religious morality he despised, the novelty and profundity of his thought, and above all, its fundamental modernity, would have long since secured him a place alongside the greatest authors and thinkers of the European Enlightenment. This Very Short Introduction aims to disentangle the 'real' Marquis de Sade from his mythical and demonic reputation of the past two hundred years. Phillips examines Sade's life and work: his libertine novels, his championing of atheism, and his uniqueness in bringing the body and sex back into philosophy.
The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism
by Erin Graff ZivinThe Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida’s work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality.Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: across his writings, Derrida grapples with the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism, and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; and a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is much more than a simple marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that.The essays collected in The Marrano Specter cut across the grain of traditional Hispanism, but also of the humanistic disciplines broadly conceived. Their vantage point—the theoretical, philosophically inflected critique of disciplinary practices—poses uncomfortable, often unfamiliar questions for both hispanophone studies and the broader theoretical humanities.
The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature
by Naomi SeidmanFor nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the "love match." Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of "the love religion" was always partial. In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.
The Martian Chronicles (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)
by SparkNotesThe Martian Chronicles (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Ray Bradbury Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: *Chapter-by-chapter analysis *Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols *A review quiz and essay topicsLively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers
The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
by John Durham PetersWhen we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true--environments are media. Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world. A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence--from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google--The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us. Peters's book will not only change how we think about media but provide a new appreciation for the day-to-day foundations of life on earth that we so often take for granted.
The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700 (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture)
by Rebecca BushnellLong before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.