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Toward a Generous Orthodoxy provides a refined exposition of Hans Frei's christologically motivated engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Erich Auerbach, his use of ordinary language philosophy and nonfoundational philosophical insights, while illuminating and expanding his orientational indebtedness to Karl Barth's theology. By placing Frei's work into critical conversation with developments in pragmatist thought and cultural theory since his death, the rereading of Frei offered here aims to correct and resolve many of the complaints and misunderstandings that vex his theological legacy. The result is a clarification of the unity and coherence of Frei's work over the course of his career; a reframing of the complex relationship of his work to that of his Yale colleague George Lindbeck and successive "postliberal" theological trends; demonstration that Frei's uses of Barth, Wittgenstein, Auerbach, and Geertz do not relegate his theological approach to critical quietism, methodological separatism, epistemic fideism, or a so-called "theological ghetto"; explication and development of Frei's account of the "plain sense" of Scripture that evades charges of narrative foundationalism and essentialism on one hand and, on the other, avoids criticisms that any account so emphasizing culture, language, and practice will reduce scriptural meaning to the ways the text is used in Christian practice and community. What emerges from Toward a Generous Orthodoxy is a sharpened account of the christologically anchored, interdisciplinary, and conversational character of Frei's theology, which he came to describe as a "generous orthodoxy," modeling a way for academic theological voices to take seriously both their vocation to the Christian church and their roles as interlocutors in the academic discourse.

The first book-length study of the Scottish Legendary (late 14^th c.), the only extant collection of saints’ lives in the vernacular from medieval Scotland, scrutinises the dynamics of hagiographic narration, its implicit assumptions about literariness, and the functions of telling the lives of the saints. The fifty saints’ legends are remarkable for their narrative art: the enjoyment of reading the legends is heightened, while didactic and edifying content is toned down. Focusing on the role of the narrator, the depiction of the saintly characters, their interiority, as well as temporal and spatial parameters, it is demonstrated that the Scottish poet has adapted the traditional material to the needs of an audience versed in reading romance and other secular genres. The implications of the Scottish poet’s narrative strategies are analysed also with respect to the Scottishness of the legendary and its overall place in the hagiographic landscape of late medieval Britain.

This volume draws upon art historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies to delineate the structures and details of late Burmese wall paintings and elucidate the religious, political, and social concepts driving the creation of this art form. The combination of architecture, paintings, sculpture, and literary traditions created a complete space in which devotees could interact with the Buddha through his biography. Through the standardization of a repertoire of specific forms, codes, and themes, the murals were themselves activating agents, spurring devotees to merit-making, worship, and other ritual practices, partially by establishing normative religious behavior and partly through visual incentives. Much of this was accomplished through the manipulation of space, and the volume contributes to the analysis of visual narratives by examining how the relationships between word and image, layouts, story and scene selection, and narrative themes both demonstrate and confirm social structures and changes, economic activities, and religious practices of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century Burma. The visual material of the wall painting sites worked together with the sculpture and the architecture to create unified spaces in which devotees could interact with the Buddha. This analysis takes the narrative field beyond the concept that pictures are to be “read” and shows the multifarious and holistic ways in which they can be viewed. To enter temples of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries was to enter a coherent space created by a visually articulated Burmese Buddhist world to which the devotee belonged by performing ritual activities within it.

The recognition scene is a feature of narrative that has shown extraordinary resilience in literary history and transformative power in works of literature. The evidence lies in its robust survival and reinventions from antiquity to the present time. It thrives in most traditions of storytelling, and across all narrative media, from primitive oral folklore to the most sophisticated contemporary novels and films. In quality it ranges from the artistically sublime to rude cliche. The recognition scene has several key features: in its commonest form, it gives resolving shape to the plot of a story, very often providing ‘the sense of an ending’, and stands for narrative knowledge and enlightenment. It can carry – within a relatively circumscribed moment – the signature of an entire narrative. It is the part of a story that is emblematic of the whole and can thus act as the very token and sterling stamp of fiction, even though it exists in tales that are both imagined and real. In its most classic form, the recognition scene is clearly both a theme and a structuring device – what we learn from and through it – can bring closure to a narrative.

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore the generic features of emigration literature: textual mobility, a sense of place and colonial home-making. Authors and artists discussed in this book include, among others, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Susannah Moodie, Catherine Helen Spence, Catharine Parr Traill and Thomas Webster. The book’s careful analysis of the aesthetics of emigration literature demonstrates the close relationships between textual and demographic mobilities, textual materiality and realism, and the spatial imagination.

This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others—contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: “It was no accident, Comrade,” which encapsulates a popular American understanding of Marxism). No Accident, Comrade explains how the association of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War culture, and then uses this opposition as a starting point for a discussion of the period’s literature. I show how writers innovated strategies for dealing with and incorporating chance, which allowed them to theorize the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict. Indeed, by emphasizing the Cold War’s narrative quality—that is, by viewing it as a rhetorical field—this book likewise argues that pressure was put on fictional narratives in general, and that if we attune ourselves to the uses of chance in such material, we can understand how the Cold War encouraged new relationships between aesthetics and politics.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker is one of the most recognizable sequential art characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done looking at the role of supervillains; The Joker: A Critical Study of the Clown Prince of Crime attempts to fill this gap. It is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this character, asking the question, why, particularly today, is the Joker so relevant to audiences? Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. This collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. The Joker: A Critical Study of the Clown Prince of Crime will be useful for those scholars in Game Studies, Comic Studies, Graphic Narrative, Television and Film Studies.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of the American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim’s musicals in two contexts: the exhaustion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical play that flourished after World War II; and the postmodernism that by the 1960s influenced all the U.S. arts. Sondheim’s musicals are central to the transition from the musical play that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical, one that reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge, the fragmentation of identity, and the problematization of representation. Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, bridges the span between the musical play and the postmodern musical and, in his most recent work, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim’s musicals; examines their dialogue, lyrics, musical themes, and structures; and finds in them their critiques of the operations of power, their questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and their explorations of contemporary identity.

A professional storyteller journeys to discover what it means to be a teacher and a teller of tales. Just like Jack, he traces his path from being raised on the stories of Appalachia and explores if they have a place in the classroom. However, he does not climb a beanstalk to understand this journey, but instead challenges what it means to be a teller and educator and even the definition of storytelling. As he reflects on not only his stories but his students, he changes as a storyteller, as an educator, and better understands his students in the process. Drawing from storymaking, storytelling, and dramatic methods, he revisits and finds new stories to tell.

TV antiquity explores representations of ancient Greece and Rome throughout television history. It is the first comprehensive overview of the genre in television. More specifically, the author argues that serial television set in antiquity offers a perspective on the ancient world quite distinct from their cinematic counterparts. The book traces the historic development of fictional representations of antiquity from the staged black-and-white shows of the 1950s and 60s to the most recent digital spectacles. A key argument explored throughout the book is that the structure of serial television (with its focus on intimacy and narrative complexity) is at times better suited to explore the complex mythic and historic plots of antiquity. Therefore, the book consciously focusses on multipart television dramas rather than made-for-TV feature films. This enables the author to explore the specific narrative and aesthetic possibilities of this format. The book features a range of insightful case studies, from the high-profile serials I, Claudius (1976) and Rome (2005-8) to lesser known works like The Caesars (1968) or The Eagle of the Ninth (1976) and popular entertainment shows such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-9) and STARZ Spartacus (2010-3). Each of the case studies also draws out broader issues in the specific decade under consideration. Consequently, the book highlights the creative interplay between television genres and production environments and illustrates how cultural and political events have influenced the representations of antiquity in television.

This book introduces law students to the art of reading judicial opinions. At the same time, it offers an innovative theory of the nature of legal argument, emphasizing the roles of rhetoric, narrative, voice, persuasion, and context. Separate chapters deal with the development of legal doctrine and the way in which facts operate as the context or horizon against which legal claims are understood. The book defends a humanist approach to law, which is a necessary complement to the dominant social science approach.