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Aims to fill a significant gap in the general understanding of the law of obligations, by focusing on the place of insurance within it. Argues that the majority of academic obligations lawyers have little knowledge of insurance law in its own right, and that the amount of discussion directed to insurance is disproportionately tiny in relation to the impact of insurance and insurance law on the law of obligations and more broadly. Seeks to address this lack of coverage by exploring the multiple influences of insurance in the law of obligations, and the nature and impact of insurance law as an inherent and significant aspect of private law. Combines conceptual and doctrinal analysis in order to inform and engage, while also making a distinctive contribution to broader discussion about the nature of private law, including the role of judicial and public purpose; and the place of formalism and of contextualism. Argues for wider recognition of the multiple impacts of insurance, and suggests that such recognition will have a number of important implications for obligations lawyers. In particular, suggests that recognition of the presence of insurance necessarily marks a departure from the two-party framework sometimes described as definitive of private law. Provides a structured exploration and interpretation of the contemporary role of insurance in the law of obligations, and of its implications, equipping its readers for further enquiry and debate.

This book defends an anti-platonist philosophy of mathematics derived from game formalism. Classic formalists claimed implausibly that mathematical utterances are truth-valueless moves in a game. This study aims to develop a more satisfactory successor to game formalism utilizing a widely accepted, broadly neo-Fregean framework, in which the proposition expressed by an utterance is a function of both sense and background circumstance. This framework allows for sentences whose truth-conditions are not representational, which are made true or false by conditions residing in the circumstances of utterances but not transparently in the sense. Applications to projectivism and fiction pave the way for the claim that mathematical utterances are made true or false by the existence of concrete proofs or refutations, though these truth-making conditions form no part of their sense or informational content. The position is compared with rivals, an account of the applicability of mathematics developed, and a new account of the nature of idealization proffered in which it is argued that the finitistic limitations Gödel placed on proofs are without rational justification. Finally a non-classical logical system is provided in which excluded middle fails, yet enough logical power remains to recapture the results of standard mathematics.

In Chimeras of Form, Aarthi Vadde vividly illustrates how modernist and contemporary writers reimagine the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization. She explains how Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist literary forms to develop ideas of international belonging sensitive to the afterlife of empire. In doing so, she shows how this wide-ranging group of authors challenged traditional expectations of aesthetic form, shaping how their readers understand the cohesion and interrelation of political communities. Drawing on her close readings of individual texts and on literary, postcolonial, and cosmopolitical theory, Vadde examines how modernist formal experiments take part in debates about transnational interdependence and social obligation. She reads Joyce's use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the "plotless" works of Claude McKay upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of the contemporary writers Zadie Smith and Shailja Patel shows how present-day issues relating to migration, displacement, and economic inequality link modernist and postcolonial traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an aspiration, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

This volume draws together an array of distinguished scholars of ancient and modern literatures to consider the ways in which historicism in literary studies can and should be construed and pursued today. In particular, the contributors to the volume seek to challenge and complement the historicism that stresses proximate socio-political contexts as well as the more recent and salutary concern with understanding literary production and reception on a global scale with the perspective of the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. Thus, the approach advanced in these essays would complement the world-geographical with the world-historical perspective on the literary process, and where a more traditional historicism would see unified or, at best, “polyphonic” responses to concrete historical dilemmas, the contributors to this volume uncover deep-historical stratifications and non-synchronicities, in which certain formal solutions may display “elective affinities” with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous problems. In their quest for a revitalized and more expansive historicism in literary study, the contributors to the volume build on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg (among others). The volume also seeks to place this critical tradition in dialogue with such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Curtius, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Fredric Jameson, who all have approached literature in a globally-comparativist and evolutionary-historical spirit.

Singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, tells an essential yet understudied part of that story. Lift Every Voice and Sing, penned by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his brother Rosamond in 1900, was embraced as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of Black Americans almost immediately. This book shares the story of that song, as it traveled from South to North, from churches to schools, and from civil rights to Black power, and beyond. Because it is an anthem, the story of this song is also a social and cultural history. Readers will learn of the institutions and organizations, as well as the lessons and the emotions shared by those who sang together. Drawing on a wide array of materials including: letters, newspaper articles, essays, poems, novels, school curricula, speeches and the programs of hundreds of organizations, readers have a window into the robust social, cultural and political world that African Americans organized in the face of an unequal society, and how that world produced people who were capable of transforming the nation and world.

More than sixty-five years after the composer’s death and almost thirty years since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is high time not only to take a fresh, balanced look at the output of Sergei Prokofiev, but also to probe some of the important but less studied aspects of his music. Many of his works are twentieth-century classics, but some are less familiar; others still, because of the times in which he lived, are controversial, or misunderstood, or simply unexplored. Commissioned from both established experts and younger researchers in the field, Rethinking Prokofiev is a new compendium of essays that examine the background and context of Prokofiev’s music: his relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions; to the Silver Age and Symbolist composers and poets; to the culture of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. It investigates his reception in the West and his return to Russia, and analyzes the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. His early, experimental piano and vocal works are explored, as well as his piano concertos, his operas, the film scores, the early ballets, and the late symphonies. The main focus of the book is the nature of the music itself. Prokofiev’s work is utterly distinctive, yet it defies easy analysis. By uncovering the contents of his sketchbooks, however, and through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures, these chapters reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius, his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.

Bakhtin as a philosopher and a student of the novel is intent upon the novel’s role in the history of consciousness. His project fails if he is wrong about the dialogic nature of consciousness or the cultural centrality of the novel as the only discourse that can model human consciousness and its intersubjective character. Inventing the Novel is an argument in four stages: the Introduction surveys Bakhtin’s life and his theoretical work in the 1920s, which grounded his work on the novel, as investigated in following chapters. Chapter 1 sketches Bakhtin’s view of literary history as an agonistic dialogue of genres, concluding with his claim that the novel originates as a new way of evaluating time. Chapter 2 explores Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes: how do forms of time and space in ancient fiction delimit the possible representation of the human? Chapter 3 assesses Bakhtin’s poetics of genre in his account of Menippean satire as crucial in the history of the novel. Chapter 4 uses Petronius to address the prosaics of the novel, exploring Bakhtin’s account of how novelists of “the second stylistic line” orchestrate the babble of voices expressive of an era into “a microcosm of heteroglossia,” focusing it through the consciousness of characters “on the boundary” between I and thou. Insofar as this analysis succeeds, it evinces the truth of Bakhtin’s claim that the role of Petronius’s Satyrica in the history of the novel is “immense.”

Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a “science” of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wave-like stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll’s children’s books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.

In the late 19th century, neurophysiology introduced techniques for detecting somatic signs of psychological processes. Scientific modes of recording, representing, and interpreting body movement as “expressive” soon found use in multiple cultural domains. Based on archival materials, this study charts the avenues by which physiological psychology reached the arts and evaluates institutional practices and political trends that promoted interdisciplinary engagements in the first quarter of the 20th century. In mapping the emergence of a paradigm it calls “psychomotor aesthetics,” this book uncovers little-known sources of Russian Futurism, Formalist poetics, avant-garde film theories of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and early Soviet programs for evaluating filmgoers’ reactions. Drawing attention to the intellectual exchange between Russian authors and their European and American counterparts, the book documents diverse cultural applications of laboratory methods for studying the psyche. Both a history and a critical project, the book attends to the ways in which artists and theorists dealt with the universalist fallacies inherited from biologically oriented psychology—at times, endorsing the positivist, deterministic outlook, and at times, resisting, reinterpreting, and defamiliarizing these scientific notions. In exposing the vastness of cross-disciplinary exchange at the juncture of neurophysiology and the arts at the turn of the 20th century, Psychomotor Aesthetics calls attention to the tremendous cultural resonance of theories foregrounding the somatic substrate of emotional and cognitive experience—theories, which anticipate the promises and limitations of today’s neuroaesthetics and neuromarketing.

German constitutionalism has gained a central place in the global comparative debate, but what underpins it remains imperfectly understood. Its distinctive conception of the rule of law and the widespread support for its powerful Constitutional Court are typically explained in two ways: as a story of change in a reaction to National-Socialism or as the continuation of an older nineteenth-century line of constitutional thought. But while both narratives account for some important features, their explanatory value is ultimately overrated. This book adopts a broader comparative perspective to understand the rise of the German Constitutional Court. It interprets the particular features of German constitutional jurisprudence and the Court’s strength as a reconciliation of two different legal paradigms: first, a hierarchical legal culture as described by Mirjan Damaška as opposed to a more coordinate understanding of legal authority such as prevails in the United States; and second, the turn towards a transformative model of constitutionalism, as it is today most often associated with countries such as South Africa and India. Using post-war legal history, sociological and empirical research, as well as case-law, the book demonstrates how German constitutionalism has harmonized the frequently conflicting demands of these two legal paradigms—resulting in a distinctive type of constitutional reasoning, at once pragmatic, open, formalist, and technical, which this book labels Value Formalism. Value Formalism, however, also comes with serious drawbacks, such as a lack of institutional self-reflection in the Court’s jurisprudence and a closure of constitutional discourse towards laymen.