An entertaining biography of Charles Dickens by one of our finest actors Acclaimed actor and writer Simon Callow captures the essence of Charles Dickens... in a sparkling biography that explores the central importance of the theatre to the life of the greatest storyteller in the English language. From his early years as a child entertainer in Portsmouth to his reluctant retirement from 'these garish lights' just before his death, Dickens was obsessed with the stage. Not only was he a dazzling mimic who wrote, acted in and stage-managed plays, all with fanatical perfectionism; as a writer he was a compulsive performer, whose very imagination was theatrical, both in terms of plot devices and construction of character. Like many actors, Dickens felt the need to be completed by contact with his audience. He was the original 'celebrity' author, who attracted thousands of adoring fans to his readings in Britain and across the Atlantic, in which he gave voice to his unforgettable cast of characters. In Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, Callow brings his own unique insight to a life driven by performance and showmanship. He reveals an exuberant and irrepressible talent, whose 'inimitable' wit and personality crackle off the page.

Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin's concept of each epoch dreaming the epoch that is to follow, Grahame Smith argues that Dickens' novels can be... regarded as proto-filmic in the detail of their language as well as their larger formal structures. This possibility arises from Dickens' creative engagement with the city as metropolis, as it emerges in the London of the 1830s, plus his immersion in the visual entertainments of his day, such as the panorama, as well as technological advances such as the railway which anticipates cinema in some of its major features. The book offers a new way of reading Dickens, through the perspective of a form which he knew nothing of, while simultaneously suggesting an account of his part in the manifold forces that led to the appearance of film towards the end of the 19th century.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive... readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental... questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Ozick’s latest work of fiction brings together four long stories, including the novella-length "Dictation," that showcase this incomparable writer’s... sly humor and piercing insight into the human heart. Each starts in the comic mode, with heroes who suffer from willful self-deceit. From self-deception, these not-so-innocents proceed to deceive others, who don’t take it lightly. Revenge is the consequence—and for the reader, a delicious if dark recognition of emotional truth.The glorious novella "Dictation" imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of those authors’ fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of James’s Miss Bosanquet, high-spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity.Ozick is at her most devious, delightful best in these four works, illuminating the ease with which comedy can glide into calamity.

Now available in English for the first time, Dictatorship is Carl Schmitt’s most scholarly book and arguably a paradigm for his entire work. Written... shortly after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Schmitt analyses the problem of the state of emergency and the power of the Reichspräsident in declaring it. Dictatorship, Schmitt argues, is a necessary legal institution in constitutional law and has been wrongly portrayed as just the arbitrary rule of a so-called dictator. Dictatorship is an essential book for understanding the work of Carl Schmitt and a major contribution to the modern theory of a democratic, constitutional state. And despite being written in the early part of the twentieth century, it speaks with remarkable prescience to our contemporary political concerns.

This is a concise, readable, yet rigorous history of Iraq since the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the Cold War to the present day by a well-regarded and... serious Iraqi intellectual. Abdullah takes the reader through a chronological journey, exploring how Hussein came to power, the consequences of the Iran-Iraq war; how Hussein's regime developed; the war in Kuwait; the devastation of Iraqi society under international sanctions; the US and allies' invasion; the future implications for Iraqi society. Abdullah undercuts the widespread view that Iraq as a nation state is an artificial construct. Finally, the book also explores the relationship between Iraq's economy and the 'globalized' economy of the post-1989 period.

Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that... transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.

For the pastor or serious layperson, the realm of biblical interpretation can be a confusing maze of personalities, communities, methods, and theories.... This maze can often result in obscuring the main goal of interpreting Scripture: hearing and knowing God better. The Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible is a groundbreaking reference tool that introduces readers to key names, theories, and concepts in the field of biblical interpretation. It discusses these approaches and evaluates their helpfulness in enabling Christians to hear what God is saying to the church through Scripture. The contributors come from a variety of backgrounds, and the dictionary covers a broad range of topics with both clarity and depth.

The updated edition of this quick-reference short-entry dictionary defines more than 2,500 accounting, auditing, compliance, and tax-related terms.... General areas covered include financial accounting and reporting, managerial and cost management, auditing and financial statement analysis, compliance, and information technology (IT) terms. Also included are many terms from related business disciplines that the accountant must know, such as finance, personal finance, investments, Internet, economics, quantitative tools, and international finance.

The acclaimed, best-selling Japanese grammar dictionary series now complete! A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar, the third volume in the... widely-acclaimed, bestselling Japanese grammar dictionary series, is designed to introduce students of Japanese to advanced-level Japanese grammar expressions and help them deepen their understanding of the critical and subtle differences in meaning and usage between the target expressions and other synonymous expressions. Following the same format as the previously published volumes, A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar, the book offers approximately 230 Japanese grammar items that are believed to be highly important for students striving to master advanced-level Japanese and also for instructors who teach Japanese at that level. This book is especially useful when reading advanced-level materials such as newspapers, professional journals, technical/business/legal documents, academic papers, and literature.

Essential for all aviation industry professionals, this comprehensive dictionary explores more than 10,000 aviation-specific terms, phrases, and... acronyms. Nearly 500 illustrations, tables, and lists supplement the detailed explanations of aviation terminology gathered from 14 CFR Part 1, the AIM Pilot/Controller glossary, and government publications. Indispensable for anyone involved with aviation, and especially useful for newcomers or those who speak English as a second language, this reference also includes valuable appendices that contain the periodic table, the phonetic alphabet, and Morse code.