Product Description: More than 130 years from Matthew Arnold’s pronouncement that human beings ‘must be compelled to relish the sublime’, education in the humanities still relies on the ideal of culture as the means of intellectual development. In this distinctive and original work, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper explore the growing tensions and contradictions between this and the contemporary world of work, pleasure, and consumption...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This is an illuminating and thought provoking study of the various meanings of distance. Opening with a discussion of defamiliarisation, which traces the roots of the idea in classical and enlightenment culture, he moves in to fascinating explorations of the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery and myth.

Product Description: Addressed to an idea of central concern at the present time, this book explores the "politics of nature", the demarcations drawn through the concept and its currently contested status. This cultural and historical survey stages an encounter between "nature-endorsing" and "nature-sceptical" perspectives; the one associated with ecological advocacy of nature and the request to respect and conserve it, the other with critiques of its conceptual role in policing social and sexual norms and with the "post-structuralist" focus on its "cultural construction"...read more