The introduction examines the CCP’s hope to break with a Soviet-style anti-religious policy. It examines policies towards the five religions that it recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism (Islam is not discussed), as well as towards the folk religion of the vast majority of Chinese which the Party did not recognize as a religion and dismissed as feudal superstition. The CCP’s initial aim was to create a united front with patriotic religion leaders. However, this came under attack from those who increasingly saw religion as an obstacle to socialist advance. Through propaganda, campaigns and scientific education, the regime aimed to eradicate popular belief in supernatural agency. At the same time, it sought to bolster its legitimacy through what is called ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. the use of supernatural imagery and Confucian values to communicate its messages. This led to tensions within the ruling ideology. The introduction uses the steady move towards repression of religion to reflect on the unhappy relationship of Marxism to religion in general.

The Introduction situates the book’s contribution in relation to the historiographies of madness, medicine, emotion, selfhood, and personhood. While mania and melancholy have enjoyed perennial scholarly interest, the same cannot be said of early modern frenzy. The Introduction offers some thoughts as to why frenzy has been neglected, and reflects on some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which accompany its study. It explains the book’s scope (and limits), and offers short summaries of its six chapters. Sketching out the book’s central claim – that frenzy had devastating effects on personhood, and that these effects drove its early modern observers to unpick the tangle of mind, soul, and brain – it engages with recent claims about the emergence of a distinctively modern ‘cerebral self’. It sets out to test the claim that the possession of certain ‘psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness’ was not constitutive of ‘personhood’ until the end of the seventeenth century.

Scott’s struggles to maintain authorial control against the incursions of Merrilies’s witchlike powers compels him to consciously assume the more distanced role of an antiquarian collecting stories of female enthusiasm in subsequent novels, offering up prognoses of mental instability for the witches in The Antiquary, The Pirate and Ivanhoe. This chapter also introduces an entirely new and different witch figure: Rebecca, a lovely young Jewish healer whose potential marriage to Ivanhoe is challenged by racial prejudice and misogynistic suspicions that brand her as a witch. Although Rebecca is rescued from her trial as a witch, she does not receive the happy ending she deserves. Scott writes her out of the narrative in the end when she and her father decide to leave England. Yet Ivanhoe’s choice of a bride – the mild and dutiful Rowena – pales by comparison to Rebecca, inviting readers to envision an alternative ending: the union of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and the socially transformative potential of this marriage between a Christian and a Jew, the story’s hero, and a purported witch.

The Introduction situates Romanticism Bewitched within current historicist scholarship on gender and witchcraft, feminist political theory and recent scholarship on misogyny and women’s anger. In addition, it traces the trajectory of witchcraft belief from the seventeenth century down to the Romantic era, exploring the eighteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the gendered politics of representations of Lady Macbeth. During the Romantic period, Siddons’s powers of enchantment in that role, and the effect it had on her audience, is an example of how the figure of the Romantic witch opened a space to imagine and explore the constructive and destructive uses of female magic. While some Romantic witches confirmed the worst fears regarding female magic and its pernicious influence, other Romantic witches invited more positive reactions, ranging from sympathy to the deep admiration bordering on awe that Siddons inspired.

Funerals were the most ritually complex of the rites of passage, with ritual aimed at securing a new relationship with the deceased through their transformation into a benevolent ancestor. The chapter looks at ideas of the soul and goes on to discuss the ritual elements in the traditional funeral. The latter continued in the countryside, but funerals were shortened and simplified and there was some mitigation of generational and gender hierarchies. The chapter examines the ‘new democratic funeral’, advocated by the CCP, which advanced rather rapidly in urban areas. This centred on a memorial meeting and was shorn of elements such as the soul tablet and mourning robes. From July 1965, there was a drive to accelerate funerary reform and promote cremation, which took off with the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, graves became a site of symbolic politics with conflict over who should be buried where. The chapter qualifies the view that cremation became almost universal, pointing to popular resistance and to resistance even within the CCP. It suggests that funerary rites had more continuity with the ‘old society’ in the Mao era than in the post-Mao era.

This chapter is intended as a compendium of notation and terminology for the algebra and topology used in the subsequent chapters. Our general approach shall be to try to prove all assertions that are specifically about our topic, but to cite standard references for other supporting material. In particular, we invoke the G-Signature Theorem in the proofs of two key results (Theorems 3.9 and 4.4), and we use 4-dimensional topological surgery to provide homeomorphisms (in the later chapters). As these results and techniques may not be familiar to all 3-manifold topologists, we give condensed accounts in Sections 1.8 and 1.9.

Lexis is central to language acquisition, as knowing a sufficient number of words is crucial for effective communication. For instance, 98 per cent word familiarity is necessary to comprehend written texts. Fewer words may suffice for speech comprehension, though variation among learners is significant. This chapter examines how vocabulary influences foreign language acquisition, reviewing key findings and recent developments in the field. First, achieving proficiency requires mastering at least 2,000-word families in English. Second, this threshold varies by task and learning environment. Third, corpus studies show that there are some words that cover a large proportion of all words occurring in spoken and written texts and that they tend to cluster together in various categories of formulaic language, which may make up to a half of discourse. Fourth, deliberate and incidental learning are complementary, though explicit instruction accelerates vocabulary acquisition in instructional settings. Finally, this chapter considers how educators can integrate classroom teaching with extramural learning. Evidence is continuing to emerge that extramural activities such as watching TV, listening to songs, gaming and engaging in social media may be promising avenues for learning words . However, it is unclear exactly how much vocabulary is acquired in extramural settings, and there is a need for future research to focus more on the systematic investigation of extramural learning environments, across a range of languages and for different age-groups.

When I began research on the topic of the CCP and folk religion, I did so expecting that it would be a story of conflict between ordinary people and the regime, especially in the countryside. It was, certainly, largely a story of repression in which the new Communist government suppressed religious institutions, such as temples, monasteries, and spirit halls, and ritual specialists, such as monks, nuns, household Daoists, diviners, geomancers, and many others. But that turned out not be the whole story. There were instances in which ordinary folk defended temples and stood up to local officials who tried to suppress temple fairs; and, occasionally, as with the redemptive religious societies or, in a different way, with blind fortune-tellers, acts of collective resistance in defence of folk religion did take place, albeit never on a mass scale. The relatively low level of resistance was partly due to the fact that ordinary people had a clear-sighted understanding of the historically unprecedented power of the party-state at the local level and were reluctant to test it. But there were other factors involved, including features intrinsic to folk religion that skewed it in a conservative direction, not least because of the strong imprint of Confucianism upon it, which valorizing social harmony, loyalty to the powers-that-be, and to the ancestors. In addition, supernatural politics, discussed in the companion volume, fostered ambivalence in the populace, who resented the arbitrariness of officials, but who saw in the figure of Chairman Mao – understood as the possessor of the Mandate of Heaven or as a bodhisattva – proof that the regime had the interests of the people at heart. But ultimately folk religion survived because it provided meaning and guidance on matters beyond the purview of the party-state. The Communist regime represented a more intense form of domination over the masses than had existed historically, and its ideological apparatuses were remarkable successful in setting the terms of what was thinkable. Yet those who maintained their faith found ways of accommodating to it and, crucially, of offering support to the regime yet reserving the right also to withhold it. Mao’s China was a world in which millions saw nothing contradictory in being supportive of the Revolution yet faithful to the gods.

Now in its second edition, this handbook is a current overview of second language (L2) research, providing state-of-the-art synopses of recent developments in each subarea of the field and bringing together contributions by emerging scholars and experts in second language acquisition (SLA). Since the first edition, broad sociopolitical movements, alternative views of bilingualism, emergence of global markets, vast expansion of electronic resources, the development of social media and the availability of big data have transformed the discipline, and this edition has been thoroughly updated to address these changes. It is divided into six main parts: Part I situates SLA in terms of research and practice; Part II explores individual cognitive, age-related and neurolinguistic similarities and differences; Part III outlines external, sociocultural and interactive factors; Part IV presents profiles of bilinguals who take differing paths of acquisition; Part V describes interlanguage properties; and Part VI comprises clear models of L2 development.

The Introduction combines a contextual introduction to disability in Kinshasa with an outline of the research problem as the tension between exceptionality and normality in a city that has long defined itself as in ‘crisis’. The interlocutors, their city, the times in which they lived, and their livelihood activities were all subject to ambiguous judgements as to whether they stood out as a negative or positive example, or if they were better viewed as simply part of the general experience of life in the wider community. The Introduction thus outlines the focus on mobility-impaired people in the grey area between work and welfare, where ‘crisis’ (mpiaka) opens a discursive space for experimentation, critique, and evaluation. The unpredictability that marks life in Kinshasa, in this respect, leads people to constantly reckon their social and economic value projects in relation to time. The Introduction introduces how crisis confronts people with choices of realising the short-term values of ‘fending for yourself’ or the long-term values of cultivating dependent relationships.

This chapter gives an overview of theories and empirical studies in the field of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). After a scoping review of current ISLA research, the chapter proposes two future directions, by broadly defining ISLA as a discipline that investigates theoretical and practical language-related issues with the ultimate goal of improving second language education. First, ISLA research can be more inclusive in terms of research topics and methodologies. Second, ISLA research can be more equitable by r-conceptualizing the research-practice relationship and incorporating practitioners’ experiences, knowledge and voices. Given the ultimate goal of much of ISLA research as well as the complexity of classroom teaching whereby a variety of cognitive, social and psychological issues dynamically influence student learning, the chapter argues for the necessity for widening the current ISLA scope and striving to create equitable relationships among various stakeholders related to ISLA research and classroom teaching.

Focusing on the 1961 UNESCO Conference of African States on the Development of Education, this chapter shows how and why public schooling became the defining development project of West African independence. At the highpoint of African decolonization, two radically new propositions intersected, each shaping the other: the rise of new economic tools, including human capital theory and manpower planning, and the triumph of anticolonial and antiracist demands that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights indeed be universally applicable.

Complex fluids can be found all around us, from molten plastics to mayonnaise, and understanding their highly nonlinear dynamics is the subject of much research.

This text introduces a common theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the flow behavior of complex fluids. This framework allows for results including a qualitative understanding of the relationship between a fluid’s behavior at the microscale of particles or macromolecules, and its macroscopic, viscoelastic properties. The author uses a microstructural approach to derive constitutive theories that remain simple enough to allow computational predictions of complicated macroscale flows.

Readers develop their intuition to learn how to approach the description of materials not covered in the book, as well as limits such as higher concentrations that require computational methods for microstructural analysis.

This monograph’s unique breadth and depth make it a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in fluid mechanics.

This chapter provides an analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s representation of contemporary female artists and authors like herself and Sarah Siddons as witches or enchantresses in “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” and offers examples of the wide variety of witches in Romantic-period Gothic literature, with sections on mother witches, political witches, marvelous witches, Faustian witches and serpent witches. Romantic-era Gothic writers discussed include well-known authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Samuel Coleridge and Charlotte Dacre as well as lesser-known writers (at least to us now) such as Catherine Smith, Mary Julia Young and George Brewer.