Since the publication of his celebrated first essay on Shakespeare, The Avoidance of Love: A reading of King Lear, Stanley Cavell has continued to explore radically new and provocative interpretations of a number of the plays. This volume collects those writings for the first time and includes pieces not previously published. The essays are bound together by a concern for scepticism. In Coriolanus' disdain, Leontes' and Othello's jealousy, Hamlet's inertia, and Lear's exorbitance, Stanley Cavell sees Shakespeare as offering, for the first time in European letters, a profound diagnosis of the sceptical refusal to acknowledge truths about oneself and one's relations to others, and as exploring the motives and tragic consequences of that refusal. His readings of the plays are subtle and challenging, and the insights they contain often startle by both their originality and their familiarity. As a whole they present a unique point of view on the plays.

Product Description: The Shamanic Handbook of Sacred Tools and Ceremonies is the perfect companion book for all budding and well-practiced shamans, wise men and women who partake in sacred ceremonial, ritual and healing work. It also serves as an excellent introduction into the practical side of earth-centred traditions...read more

Product Description: Montaigne's Essais (1580-1592) are one of the most remarkable works of the European Renaissance. The Essais' innovative open-mindedness is at odds with the dogmatism and intolerance of their times, the decades of civil and religious wars in France, and their tolerant and searching human questions and ethics of difference remain compelling for twenty-first century readers...read more

Product Description: Tartamella casts new light on seemingly quite familiar material — Shakespeare’s Sonnetsand a number of his plays, including Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Antony and Cleopatra. By placing the Sonnets within the context of the literary history of praise poetry, and exploring the underlying influence of early modern skepticism on Shakespeare’s writing, this book truly enhances our understanding of the subtleties and complexities in all of Shakespeare’s work...read more

Product Description: Locating literature at the intersection of distinct areas of thinking on the nature, scope and methods of knowledge - philosophy, theology, science, and the law - this book engages with literary texts across periods and genres to address questions of probability, problems of evidence, the uses of experiment and the poetics and ethics of doubt...read more

Product Description: Seeming Knowledge revisits the question of Shakespeare and religion by focusing on the conjunction of faith and skepticism in his writing. Cox argues that the relationship between faith and skepticism is not an invented conjunction...read more

Product Description: Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Incidents are problems or adverse events such as infections, patient falls, or medical errors that typically lead to unexpected and undesired outcomes. An incident report captures the details associated with an adverse event and allows the agency to investigate the problem so processes can be improved...read more

Product Description: It is now widely understood that Jane Austen's writing and thought were derived directly from her late eighteenth-century childhood, but astonishingly, this is the first study of the influence of the Enlightenment on Jane Austen. Drawing out the Enlightenment principles and ideas which lie behind much of Austen's writing, Peter Knox-Shaw presents a new perspective on the study of Austen's novels...read more

Product Description: This book argues that in the course of grappling with skepticism, Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory and discover an art of doubt.  Topics important to students of Renaissance literature—such as mimesis, exemplarity, pastoral and typology—become transformed, seen now as a set of vital responses to the incursion of skeptical doubt...read more

Product Description: Traditional approaches to understanding sublimity and skepticism have often asserted the primacy and importance of one concept over the other. However, in Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton, David L. Sedley argues that literary and philosophical notions of skepticism and sublimity simultaneously developed and influenced one another...read more

Product Description: Tennyson is not known for his scepticism. This book argues that he should be. It proposes a revaluation of the way in which his work is read. Tennyson has always been understood as a poet who is committed primarily to endorsing spiritual values...read more

Product Description: The final decades of the sixteenth century brought tumultuous change in England. Bitter disputes concerning religious reformation divided Catholics and Protestants, radical reformers, and religious conservatives. The Church of England won the loyalty of many, but religious and political dissent continued...read more

Product Description: In this first study of the role of scepticism in literature, Fred Parker offers a lively and stimulating introduction to key issues in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Parker traces the presence of sceptical thinking in works by Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson, relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of eighteenth-century culture, and discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Reissued with a new preface and a new essay on Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanius, Hamlet and The Winter's Tale, this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers the plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Readers of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare's greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago's malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare's philosophy of doubt...read more

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Product Description: This book studies the major city comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton in the context of the quarrel between theater and philosophy. The book presents deconstructive and materialist readings of Jonson's Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and Middleton's Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside...read more

This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal experience and public expression, an inability that confines them to various forms of solipsism. Russo contends that such Empiricist notions still inform contemporary French novels and criticism. She deftly shows that current forms of linguistic skepticism favored by Blanchot, Sartre, Barthes, and Derrida are in fact the very product of the Empiricist notion of truth these authors claim to have rejected. Instead, she argues for the social and contextual dimension of language and against the illusion of authenticity on which these critics still rely. Her readings recast the debates surrounding postmodernism by placing them in a much-needed historical context.Through a series of lively close readings of Prevost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Constant's Adolphe, and Des Forets's Le Bavard, Russo establishes the continuous legacy of Empiricism across three centuries. Prevost pins his narrator's interpretive difficulties on an inability to know and categorize Oriental reality, Constant grounds his critique of language on the same ethical and political principles that underlie his liberalism, while Des Forets's extreme solipsism pitches him against the Sartrean notion of engagement.

Product Description: Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is Brazil's greatest writer and the most important Latin American writer of the nineteenth century. His subtle criticism of cherished institutions is evident to all readers, and critics have often mentioned his skepticism...read more

Product Description: Book by Morton, Michael