Introduction

Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Anker ◽  
Bernadette Meyler

While law and literature represents one of the most enduring sites of interdisciplinary inquiry, the field has recently expanded in a wide range of exciting new directions. Since its inception, law and literature has inspired taxonomies of the field, and the Introduction evaluates the limits and merits of those existing categorical schemes. It assesses frequent critiques of law and literature, while developing a framework for conceptualizing the many methodological and other innovations transforming the field. In particular, it emphasizes five new directions, considering the influence of history and political theory, efforts to globalize the field, the broadening of focus beyond legal texts along with changes in legal hermeneutics, attempts to transcend suspicion and critique, and new work on the imagination.

After the heyday of the law and literature movement in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether it would retain vitality and influence. Yet in recent years, scholarship in law and literature continues to flourish, broadening into a number of new directions. This collection of essays by twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field, at the same time as it takes stock of many of the new directions shaping the interdiscipline. In so doing, New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the innovative methodological approaches that helped to enlarge the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of insights from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and the expansion of study beyond the text to performance and the image. Other essays instead grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, or competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law’s construction of racialized bodies. Together, the essays in this volume offer a diverse, evolving portrait of the wide variety of work in law and literature, and in the process they likewise chart new lines of inquiry that beginning scholars might pursue.


Author(s):  
Pamela Barmash

The introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law advocates for the study of both the law of the Hebrew Bible in its historical and literary context as well as the history of its interpretation in emerging Jewish and Christian communities. It explains that biblical law encompasses both civil/criminal law and ritual law and justifies their inclusion in a single volume. The introduction offers a survey of the organization of the Oxford Handbook of Biblical, showing how the volume offers a reappraisal of comprehensive issues in the study of biblical law in the light of the re-evaluation of the social, religious, and political context and ideology of the legal texts of the Hebrew Bible and the employment of methodologies from the fields of law and literature, gender studies, anthropology, and political theory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinlu Feng ◽  
Zifei Yin ◽  
Daniel Zhang ◽  
Arun Srivastava ◽  
Chen Ling

The success of gene and cell therapy in clinic during the past two decades as well as our expanding ability to manipulate these biomaterials are leading to new therapeutic options for a wide range of inherited and acquired diseases. Combining conventional therapies with this emerging field is a promising strategy to treat those previously-thought untreatable diseases. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has evolved for thousands of years in China and still plays an important role in human health. As part of the active ingredients of TCM, proteins and peptides have attracted long-term enthusiasm of researchers. More recently, they have been utilized in gene and cell therapy, resulting in promising novel strategies to treat both cancer and non-cancer diseases. This manuscript presents a critical review on this field, accompanied with perspectives on the challenges and new directions for future research in this emerging frontier.


This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Bryce J. Dietrich

Abstract Although previous scholars have used image data to answer important political science questions, less attention has been paid to video-based measures. In this study, I use motion detection to understand the extent to which members of Congress (MCs) literally cross the aisle, but motion detection can be used to study a wide range of political phenomena, like protests, political speeches, campaign events, or oral arguments. I find not only are Democrats and Republicans less willing to literally cross the aisle, but this behavior is also predictive of future party voting, even when previous party voting is included as a control. However, this is one of the many ways motion detection can be used by social scientists. In this way, the present study is not the end, but the beginning of an important new line of research in which video data is more actively used in social science research.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Maxim Pyzh ◽  
Kevin Keiler ◽  
Simeon I. Mistakidis ◽  
Peter Schmelcher

We address the interplay of few lattice trapped bosons interacting with an impurity atom in a box potential. For the ground state, a classification is performed based on the fidelity allowing to quantify the susceptibility of the composite system to structural changes due to the intercomponent coupling. We analyze the overall response at the many-body level and contrast it to the single-particle level. By inspecting different entropy measures we capture the degree of entanglement and intraspecies correlations for a wide range of intra- and intercomponent interactions and lattice depths. We also spatially resolve the imprint of the entanglement on the one- and two-body density distributions showcasing that it accelerates the phase separation process or acts against spatial localization for repulsive and attractive intercomponent interactions, respectively. The many-body effects on the tunneling dynamics of the individual components, resulting from their counterflow, are also discussed. The tunneling period of the impurity is very sensitive to the value of the impurity-medium coupling due to its effective dressing by the few-body medium. Our work provides implications for engineering localized structures in correlated impurity settings using species selective optical potentials.


Ramus ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gagarin

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hudson

At a time when linguistic theory is becoming increasingly fragmented and decreasingly dominated by a single orthodoxy, it has been an encouraging exercise to compile a list of statements about language which are likely to be accepted by virtually all linguists, irrespective of what they think about all the many issues on which linguists disagree. The following list contains no fewer than 83 claims which have been accepted by a wide range of British linguists, and there is no reason to believe that the sample of linguists who have helped me in compiling the list is particularly biased. It seems reasonable to claim that other linguists are LIKELY to accept these statements, although I certainly cannot claim that every linguist accepts every one of them. So far as I know, no attempt has ever been made before to find out what linguists at large actually believe, although any writer of an introductory text-book hopes that he is expounding a widely held set of views. Considered as a piece of research, this investigation seems to me to have produced at least one interesting result: linguistics really is making some progress, in a cumulative way, and we are not just lurching from one 'paradigm' to another, as some of us sometimes suspect in our gloomier moments. Moreover, it raises the interesting question what other statements could be added to the list given here, which certainly is not meant to be exhaustive. I hope that other linguists with more imagination than me can bring the list into the hundreds, as should surely be possible.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 20160151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Logan ◽  
Michael P. Murphy

Our understanding of the role of mitochondria in biomedical sciences has expanded considerably over the past decade. In addition to their well-known metabolic roles, mitochondrial are also central to signalling for various processes through the generation of signals such as ROS and metabolites that affect cellular homeostasis, as well as other processes such as cell death and inflammation. Thus, mitochondrial function and dysfunction are central to the health and fate of the cell. Consequently, there is considerable interest in better understanding and assessing the many roles of mitochondria. Furthermore, there is also a growing realization that mitochondrial are a promising drug target in a wide range of pathologies. The application of interdisciplinary approaches at the interface between chemistry and biology are opening up new opportunities to understand mitochondrial function and in assessing the role of the organelle in biology. This work and the experience thus gained are leading to the development of new classes of therapies. Here, we overview the progress that has been made to date on exploring the chemical biology of the organelle and then focus on future challenges and opportunities that face this rapidly developing field.


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