A fundamental and rarely debated assumption guiding most scientific research is that researchers, like all human beings, do not enjoy immediate and unencumbered access to objective reality. Their perspectives into and approach to investigating specific aspects of reality are always mediated via theories, concepts, research instruments, and ultimately language. There is hence no Archimedean viewpoint from which we can perceive or construe objective truth. However, recognition of this assumption does not necessarily make judgemental relativism – the view that all scientific and lay accounts are equally valid – the only possible stance on offer. Although our means to understand the world are inherently fallible and conditioned by the knowledge that is available at certain times in history, as researchers we must assume that objective reality, both natural and social, exists independently of the mind of the observer (Bhaskar, 1979). Otherwise, science, the very possibility of scientific progress, and the capacity for scientific discovery to improve the quality of both human and non-human life, would be impossible. Scholars thus remain steadfastly invested in pursuing the improvement of theories, concepts, and methodologies, and they do so through collective, critical, and conceptually grounded adjudication between stronger and weaker, better and worse theories. To this end, they must develop, work with, and critically reflect upon their own and their discipline’s philosophical assumptions about what is (ontology), how it can be known (epistemology), and why we do research (normativity).

This chapter explores different strands of the theory of two-player zero-sum games and equilibrium concepts for general multiplayer games. The conventional viewpoint is that equilibrium is an extension of the concept of value (and its associated optimal strategies) to non-zero-sum games, and the value is just a special case of an equilibrium payoff. However, it is argued that a number of important concepts apply only to one of these concepts.

In this chapter, violinist Yale Strom offers a uniquely personal perspective on klezmer and Romani music, recounting unexpected moments of connection and cultural exchange across Eastern Europe during his fieldwork in the 1980s. He points out that music was one of the strongest expressions of Jewish identity, but also that Romani musicians who played in klezmer bands were accepted by their fellow Jewish musicians. Ultimately, he argues that as culture (food and language as well as music) changes all the time, to preserve it as a rigid historical document is to deny its ongoing cultivation.

The Arthurian legends have been taken up by educators, poets, playwrights and novelists in the British colonies in Australia and the societies that emerged from them, developing an Arthurianism that has contributed to the formation of Australian identity and national consciousness. This chapter examines the changing significance of these legends as an imaginative prism through which Australian experience has been refracted. While in some instances Arthurianism distances the colonial subject from their antipodean surrounds, elsewhere it creates a vision of Camelot transformed by life in Australian environments. Arthurian legend has been valuable for exploring the states of colonial dependence and cultural autonomy, and has provided an indispensable resource for understanding modern femininity in the Australian context. Australian Arthurianism’s capacity for constant renewal is reflective of a culture undergoing significant changes in its self-understanding; indeed, renewal is at the heart of Arthurianism itself, even at a profound distance from its source.

This chapter lays out the overall rationale for the book, elucidates some of its key aspects and situates the book in relation to a scholarly field of feminist jurisprudence in India. It introduces the established convention of diversity in the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence, which this book joins with and expands. The chapter offers an illustration of the field by introducing the body of literature that the book is drawing from and contributing to and foregrounds that there are different voices in the field each of which speaks from a different locus both within and outside Indian legal academia. Simultaneously, the chapter explains the relevance of caste and how it hierarchically organises the field of intellectual labour in India.

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.

Throughout the 1970s, audience research conducted at both the BBC and ITV affiliates consistently overlooked audiences of colour, even as these institutions began to hesitantly acknowledge and consider institutional mis-steps in their approach to Britain’s own ‘race problem’. Several extended audience research reports were conducted on shows about ‘race’ in the period, including Till Death Us Do Part in 1973, which began to produce a coherent picture of persistent racial prejudice among white viewers. Alongside this, audiences of colour were finally brought into audience research but in quite exceptional ways, including a 1975 study for ITV, when 21 West Indian television viewers offered their thoughts on Love Thy Neighbour and the broader television landscape, and in 1979 at the BBC for a potential programme on “multiracial Britain.” The chapter examines the shape of this belated inclusion within these institutions and considers the highly circumscribed ways in which Black and south Asian audiences were allowed to speak about screen content and racism.

Chapter 1 focuses on fictional narrative and gameplay. The novel, understood as a game space, provides an apt literary form to probe the distinction between, and interpenetration of, fiction and reality. My discussion addresses how risk is hypothetically imagined in a future-oriented sense and counterfactually in a retrospective sense, as something that has already happened but can be overwritten or reinvented by fiction. In either case, risk transforms the experience of literature and the world. Through horizontal comparisons of approximately contemporary works, I read together Sino-French and Hong Kongese Sinophone writers: Shan Sa with Dorothy Hiu Hung Tse and Dai Sijie with Dung Kai-cheung. This comparison brings together, for the first time, Sino-French and Hong Kongese Sinophone writers who share Sinitic linguistic and cultural heritage as well as an insider–outsider relation to national Chinese literature.

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.

Beginning with the Paolo and Francesca episode from Dante’s Inferno, this chapter focuses on rewritings of the episode by Hunt in The Story of Rimini and by Byron in Don Juan and ‘Francesca of Rimini’. These rewritings provide insight into the erotics of shared reading and the subsequent uncertainty surrounding Francesca’s claim that, when she and Paolo settled down to read together, they did so ‘without suspicion’. Teasing out the ambiguities in Dante’s text, Hunt and Byron suggest that reading allows desire to be acknowledged in tacit ways that invite or evade self-awareness (or self-suspicion). Their interpretations of Francesca’s speech also offer reflections on their own poetic styles, with Hunt questioning the difference between naturalness and artfulness, and Byron questioning the sincerity of veiled self-disclosure.

The conclusion summarises the interconnected histories of the plebiscite and its foremost scholar and places them in historical perspective. Both were shaped by Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to reorder the world. Over one hundred years on from that attempt, with major political changes having taken place, and liberal internationalism of the kind advocated by Wilson and followers seemingly having lost its appeal to the United States, the history of Sarah Wambaugh and the plebiscite seems relevant once more.

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 this chapter, moving beyond observational studies of natural speech alone, we report the systematic design, method, and results of an experiment in English concerning our hypotheses that acquisition of relativization in a language-specific grammar is developmentally achieved through constraint by a UG template relating Determiner Phrases and Complementizer Phrases. Headless relatives are developmental precursors for headed relatives over the course of development of a specific language grammar. This experiment provides a prototype for the experimental work in the following two chapters, which focus on French and Tulu. Comparisons of production and comprehension in this English study and experimental design both allow this study to address the effects of syntax and semantics and their integration in the developmental course of relativization. Growth curve analyses across these tasks allow us to refine our understanding of the nature and timing of their integration in development.

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.

Debussy’s later mélodies present a fascinating variety, bound together by a deep allegiance to the French language and poetic tradition. From the Wagner-drenched Cinq mélodies de Charles Baudelaire, with their refrains and sonnet forms, to the exacting medieval rondels and ballades of his Trois chansons de France and Trois ballades de François Villon, Debussy measured his text-setting against strict forms. In between these cycles, meanwhile, the composer embraced the contemporary prose poem, both in his settings of Pierre Louÿs and his own texts for Proses lyriques and Nuits blanches. A striking feature of these later cycles is the strong preference for three-song sets, a form that resonates with the resurgence of the triptych in French painting. Debussy’s dedications to friends and skilled amateur singers show that he intended these sophisticated musical-poetic works for a close circle of connoisseurs.