Studying puritan literature requires a sense of the erratic paths that seventeenth-century New England writing take in the world as well as the material contexts that give rise to more or less stable texts gathered up in anthologies and modern editions. The aim of this chapter is to elaborate the ways that the logic of manuscript culture informs puritan literary culture across material genres, using the poet Anne Bradstreet’s unusual case to elucidate typical means of manuscript practice, production, and circulation. A bit of knowledge of manuscript culture, its generic and practical conventions, and its role in the larger world of “colonial mediascapes” can go a long way in enabling new insights and more nuanced readings of puritan texts derived from various original sources.

The dialectical relation of long-form scholarly work and short-form blogs, social media and other contemporary public writing about how the political meanings of sex in Chaucer’s time speak vividly to our own experience cannot simply be dismissed as crudely instrumentalist or naively transhistoricist. Such approaches can provide a powerful justification for why we teach Chaucer and for his cultural significance today. Flagging the Canterbury Tales as “our cultural legacy” in the context of current considerations of “rape culture” is a rhetorical move that makes a claim for the continued liveliness and urgency of past literatures by showing how the past still inheres in the present, how present discourses can suddenly make the past newly familiar, how the past is still lively.

This chapter canvasses information available in the Arab/Islamic canon on the subject of violence exercised against women in the early Islamic period. The Qur’anic verse in Surat al-Nisa’ (4:34) which gives the husband the right to correct a disobedient or recalcitrant wife, generated a massive exegetical. This chapter begins with a discussion of the exegetical tradition pertaining to this verse and comments on the divergences between the Islamic legal schools and the differences of textual interpretations between theologians and jurisconsults. The second section refers to anecdotes that reveal the conflicts and tensions in private relations, the harmfulness of domestic intimacy, and the dynamics of household violence. The final section discusses episodes describing public violence against women, especially in the streets of Baghdad, the ʿAbbāsid capital. Beyond the rich exegetical tradition, the information tends to be scarce and fragmentary and relies mostly on literary texts makes it difficult to disentangle fact from fiction. The material draws for us, nevertheless, illustrations of certain widespread conceptions in Muslim medieval literary approaches to violence against women and the social context in which the textual edifice was constructed.

terrorist attacks. Since the skyline of New York City had been substantially altered, post–9/11 American literature often framed the attacks and their consequences within this new, ideologically charged geography. Imagining New York after 9/11 soon turned into a twofold task for writers: trying to find words for the inexplicable events while at the same time avoiding to simply echo or resound the overused images, well–trodden rhetorical pathways, and hegemonic political messages that had rooted themselves firmly within the public consciousness and collective memory of Ground Zero.

This chapter contains a broad overview of the technical and environmental issues to be addressed in the construction of onshore wind energy projects. The former include ecological considerations, including birds and mammals; the requirements of typical pre-construction ornithological surveys are described with an example. Public safety and acceptance is discussed in the context of catastrophic damage to wind turbines, visual impact, shadow flicker, and noise nuisance. In the last case, equations and simple rules for noise assessment are given in the context of typical planning guidelines. Sound power levels for a range of commercial wind turbines are compared, and empirical relationships are given relating noise to rated output, rotor size, and tip speed. Risks to aviation are discussed, covering aircraft collision and interference to radar systems, including both primary and secondary surveillance radars. The concept of ‘stealthy’ wind turbine blades is discussed and described in outline. Other siting criteria include avoidance of RF and microwave communications beams and television interference. Rules are given to avoid interference, while minimising required separation distances.

The chapter defines TV’s immediacy effects. Television started out as a live medium. Although shows were soon pre-produced and recorded, an aesthetic of liveness, retained by shooting sitcoms and talk shows in front of studio audiences, has remained integral to TV culture. It sets TV apart from earlier visual media, particularly film, and is pivotal for the medium’s reality effects. Although “television” means to “see at a distance,” the initial promise of TV was that it would erase the distance between the viewers and the depicted events. Because event, transmission, and reception occur simultaneously during a live broadcast, it possesses not only temporal immediacy but also evokes a sense of spatial proximity and actuality. TV live coverage seems to bring the world home or to transport the viewers to the site of action. By presenting on- and off-screen worlds as directly connected, live TV blurs the boundary between public and private spheres, between fiction and fact, and creates the impression that the viewers participate in the broadcasted events. Since American TV is a commercial medium, the cultural dominance of TV results in a pervasive commodification of experience.

A remuneration system typically comprises three main elements: base pay, benefits and performance-related pay. In designing any remuneration system careful attention should be paid to three key considerations: first, the relative role that each of these three components will play in total remuneration; second, the practices that will be drawn on to configure each component; and third, the target level of total remuneration for each position. Any discussion of remuneration practice must consider what, for most employees, is the primary component of their total remuneration, namely base pay.

The legitimacy of administrative process is advanced in part by accountability processes that involve robust stakeholder participation. Yet empirical studies reveal that the administrative state is becoming increasingly inhospitable to meaningful engagement by some stakeholders, due in part to the size and complexity of the rulemaking process. This chapter argues that at least part of the blame for the resulting incomprehensible rules can be attributed to the design of administrative process itself. Despite its commitment to accountability and participation, there are few-to-no requirements to ensure that rulemaking deliberations involve cooperative communication. Indeed, there are a number of ways that legal requirements tacitly encourage incomprehensibility in legal filings and communications. After discussing the problems with this legal design and the resultant implications for the goals of administrative process, the chapter concludes with proposals for reform.

Consumer protection law is notoriously imbalanced with respect to the superior ability of sellers to process information as compared to their customers. Yet despite the resulting comprehension asymmetries, the design of consumer contract law and disclosure requirements regularly fail to encourage sellers to communicate meaningfully with the target audience. This chapter explores how consumer protection law tacitly encourages incomprehensibility and proposes reforms which would provide increased incentives for meaningful communication between buyers and sellers.

The interplay of the personal and the social is discussed with regard to McEwan’s output as a whole, but with particular reference to some of its more marginal texts, such as Amsterdam. Much of McEwan’s writing has rightly been seen as focused on public issues. For example, Amsterdam is a social satire; the oratorio text Or Shall We Die? aims to influence public debate about nuclear weapons. However, McEwan is also a chronicler of the personal and physical. For example, The Ploughman’s Lunch is about personal corruption as well as national mendacity. Indeed, throughout McEwan’s work, the personal and the public interweave. Interpersonal relations are also central to McEwan’s work. A typology of such relations is suggested based on closeness and disjunction, concealment and intrusion. Examples are drawn from a wide range of McEwan’s work. The motif of transvestism is given prominence.