This chapter reconsiders the grotesque in the light of European sensibilities of transgression and abnormality. Querying to what extent the grotesque can challenge and unsettle modern and supposedly rational (European) sensibilities through its insistence on the overflow and unruliness of the body, the chapter starts out by a reading of the film Midsommar (2019). The chapter then proceeds to unearth the grotesque as an aesthetic term from its medieval and classical roots in order to perceive it in the light of a modernity that has attempted to regulate and eradicate premodern worldviews. From here, it examines the grotesque through a theoretical genealogy of Wolfgang Kayser, John Ruskin, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault. It then engages in a reading of texts in light of both their national, regional and planetary contexts, such as Canadian David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome (1983, Dutch Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), and Argentinian Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2017). The chapter concludes by considering the implications of a global, environmental or planetary grotesque.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Contract and consent had important roles in early modern English labor relationships. The scholarship in social and economic history and legal studies has rarely tried to reconcile the legal framework of voluntariness with the practical unfreedom of early modern work. The Introduction proposes that the foundations of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent developed in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in part, from the exploitative labor systems of parish apprenticeship, transatlantic indentured servitude, military impressment, and prisoner of war labor. Charity, colonization, and war were the key factors that drove masters and middlemen to reach for consent as a tool to bind people into labor. The ideology of "natural laborers" justified presuming consent in people of appropriate profiles. Moments of consenting were fraught with power imbalances, and they reinscribed social hierarchies. Contemporary examples of coerced consent show an ongoing acceptance of this pairing. The legal context, chapter summaries, and a consideration of the method of historicizing consent complete the Introduction.

This chapter advocates for Alter-Native Constitutionalism’s prioritisation of vernacular understandings of property and housing within South African law, challenging the colonial legacy of ‘lex nullius’ that undermines Black South Africans’ land claims. It critiques the uncommon law’s failure to recognise the Ntu’s historically-rooted, multigenerational land-based relationships and emphasises the interconnectedness of property and housing. The chapter uses Ntu Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation set out in Chapter 6 to critique the ways in which, in its precedents, the Constitutional Court has interpreted the property and housing clauses to the near-complete exclusion of vernacular law’s layered property rights system. It argues that courts, as part of the state, should enforce these constitutional protections using Alter-Native Constitutionalism to uphold vernacular land rights. Further, arguing that the courts must prioritise equitable housing access over strict property rights, the chapter uses the Salem case’s limited ‘sharing model’ attempts vis-à-vis restitution to show that vernacular law’s ‘access-to-occupation’ could be feasibly extended throughout South African ‘property law’ in a manner that would reduce forced evictions and balance state, ‘owner’ and beneficial occupiers’ interests. The chapter thus illustratively pushes for judicial interpretations that better reflect ordinary people’s socio-economic realities, needs and sociocultural values, as well as constitutional commitments.

This chapter introduces techniques for bounding random processes. We develop Gaussian interpolation to derive powerful comparison inequalities for Gaussian processes, including the Slepian, Sudakov–Fernique, and Gordon inequalities. We use this to get sharp bounds on the operator norm of Gaussian random matrices. We also prove the Sudakov lower bound using covering numbers. We introduce the concept of Gaussian width, which connects probabilistic and geometric perspectives, and apply it to analyze the size of random projections of high-dimensional sets. Exercises cover symmetrization and contraction inequalities for random processes, the Gordon min–max inequality, sharp bounds for Gaussian matrices, the nuclear norm, effective dimension, random projections, and matrix sketching.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Brokers and ship captains sent thousands of people from the British Isles to work in the English American colonies without indentures. These immigrants only entered written contracts after arrival. Here – and in other labor arrangements in England – the concept of “enticement” dominated. Subordinates’ consent to serve was imagined to be the result of campaigns of temptation to which they succumbed. While previous studies of enticement in early modern England have been limited to sexual seduction, at the time enticement also meant servant poaching. Claims of enticement allowed commentators to emphasize the power of personal interactions in servant procurement, instead of drawing attention to the structural conditions that made a segment of society disproportionately vulnerable to abuse by illicit brokers denounced as "spirits."

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

The introduction to Leaping Decolonization reframes the history of North African decolonization. It shifts attention from formal political independence to the deeper intellectual processes through which Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian thinkers sought to overcome the legacies of French colonialism. It situates this intellectual production in relation to Frantz Fanon’s writings on the internalization of the complex of cultural inferiority and historical delay. It finds a continuation of his ideas in the publishing infrastructure of the region—namely its periodicals, published essays, and the communities of producers and readers that composed them. This introduction sets the terms of this study, including the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s, the intellectual generation from these decades, and the status of North Africa as a thought-producing geography on the world stage.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.