The Comedy’s recantation of an error determines Paradiso’s role. The poem recants Convivio’s rationalism, not for the sake of faith but for philosophy properly understood. Dante initiates that change when, in Convivio IV, he pivots from a metaphysical impasse to investigating the meaning of nobility, a focus on human affairs that persists in the Comedy. Because wisdom must be sought, understanding the ground from which the search begins is crucial to its justification and, once it’s undertaken, to forestall passion-induced distortions. As a guide, Dante looks to Aristotle, the genuine Aristotle, not the derivative versions of his contemporaries.

But Dante’s path to the question of happiness, which animates philosophy, differs from Aristotle’s. To defend the philosophic life, Dante must liberate philosophy from subordination to faith. I here sketch the way in which the Comedy’s form aids him in this effort. In thus prosecuting political philosophy’s central task, the defense of the philosophic life, Paradiso fulfills its role not as the poem’s telos but as the portal to that life “figured” in Purgatorio’s Earthly Paradise.

The Introduction consists of a brief overview of the book and its structure, its driving questions and the critical contexts, and identifies foundational aspects of an Irish poetics of space. The Introduction describes the book’s organization—largely chronological—to show how Ireland’s spatial poetics developed over 500 years in response to specific historical circumstances. Three major issues are introduced, which are tracked across the book to illustrate ongoing thematic continuities and developments: (1) affective and transformative engagement with textual geographies; (2) national and postcolonial place-writing strategies; and (3) canonization and theorization of a spatial literary corpus. In addition, each chapter develops discrete aspects of writing place in conjunction with a critical literature on space (pilgrimage, actual and virtual, through otherworldly landscapes and seascapes; exile and dislocation; verbal mapping or cartography; movement as knowledge-generating, i.e. ‘practicing place’; alterity, place-writing and conquest).

Genre tends to be applied most readily to popular films, products developed according to recognisable formulae, codes and conventions whereas the authors use terms such as 'art cinema', 'arthouse' or 'avant-garde' for films which do not 'fit' a formula. Genre films in post-Franco Spain have been dominated by the comedy. The dominance, popularity and commercial success of the comedy in post-Franco Spain clearly reflects the fact that the genre has enjoyed a long and very distinguished tradition in Spanish filmmaking. Sex and sexuality have long figured prominently as vehicles for humour in Spanish film comedy. After 1975, the film comedy was able to deal with social, political and cultural issues far more openly and aggressively, with greater explicitness, especially in the realm of sexuality and the use of colloquial language. The chapter presents the emergence of the New Spanish Comedy, whose nucleus was undoubtedly the so-called 'comedia madrileña'.

This chapter explores small-scale industries during the colonial period. Rather than seeing these industries as a traditional holdover from earlier times, it regards them as a large, vital and dynamic element in the colonial economy. The chapter explores two particularly important industries in depth. Handloom manufacture undoubtedly declined as a portion of the overall economy during the nineteenth century, but by 1880 it had started to grow, forging new markets, introducing new technologies and undergoing shifts in social organization. The production of medicines expanded by adopting new forms of marketing, particularly newspaper advertising. A range of other small-scale industries also grew during the later colonial period. Associated with these developments were the rise of a diverse set of small-scale entrepreneurs, new products and marketing methods; the introduction of small, ‘everyday’ forms of technology; changes in workshop organization; and the construction of new ‘business communities’. But these industries were also characterized by low wages, social dependence and precarity of employment.

Into the twentieth century, a tradition of domestic fiction communicated that Irish Catholic women must endure hardship, consoled by faith. Mary Anne Sadlier’s fiction propagates this lesson within an Irish diasporic readership. Yet anti-Catholic novels offered contrary narratives of gratuitous cruelty in Catholic life, as in works by Maria Monk and Rebecca Theresa Reed. In anti-Catholic lecture tours organised by Protestant activists, speakers such as former nun Edith O’Gorman alleged a humiliating convent life to which the Church lured girls with promises of peaceful devotion. Catholic responses attempted to silence O’Gorman, discounting her claims with suggestions of emotionalism and inconsistency. Like O’Gorman’s work, accounts of other ‘escaped nuns’ tended to be either instrumentalised or ridiculed by commentators in ways that overlooked the substance of the women’s claims.

Sound and hearing play a crucial role in the conceptualisation and perception of divine entities, cultic places, and ritual processes. Sound phenomena can evoke religious experiences, structure ritual communication and stimulate desired emotional responses, whilst exposure to certain resonance frequencies can affect the human body, thereby influencing one’s perceptions and states of consciousness. This essay analyses the Dodonean soundscape, exploring the potential affect of the various sonic experiences in relation to the process of consultation. In addition to the diverse sensory input from the natural environment, which in the case of Dodona is crucial, as it can be surmised from the traditional accounts of the oracular oak, special consideration is given to the chalkeion of Dodona, a remarkable sonic installation that offered one of the most unusual auditory experiences to the pilgrims. Based on the symbolic and sound properties of the chalkeion, it is possible to suggest that the soundscape at Dodona invited a form of ecstasy or meditation, with the potential to alter the focus of attention and consciousness, thus allowing for new forms of knowledge to become available.

The director Bertrand Blier has, over a thirty-year period, come to be acknowledged as one of the most enduring and challenging talents of French post-new wave cinema. This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to identify strategies for finding one's way through a body of work which has disconcerted spectators, critics and academics alike, and to identify some reference points which the curious spectator can use as a map to navigate through Blier's preferred themes and stylistic techniques. It is the very unconventionality of this work that has had such an appeal to emerging film-makers and actors. The analysis reveals that the key tropes around which Blier's work is structured point to an engagement with a tradition of popular discourse. The concept of artistic subversion is absolutely central to understanding Blier's work.

Before the emergence of British imperial rule, India consisted of regions ruled by different states and frequently representing somewhat different ecologies and economic bases. The historiography of economic change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, therefore, has developed as a set of regional studies. It is a rapidly evolving literature. What are its key concerns? One shared theme is the need to have a credible prehistory of colonial expansion, which should help to better understand the pattern of change that came after. With two case studies, Gujarat and Bengal, and attention to livelihoods, connections and varieties of capitalism, the chapter offers tentative conclusions on what this historiography tells us.