bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Language and literacy development in Chinese children
Authors: McBride-Chang Catherine , Lin Dan , Fong Yui-Chi , Shu Hua
Published: February 2013

Studies of Chinese children's reading have focused both on the development and impairment of literacy skills. This article surveys the basics of Chinese literacy development, considering the environments in which reading and writing are taught across Chinese societies, as these may differ in languages and scripts used. It reviews the macro-level variables in reading and writing and highlights the cognitive and linguistic skills that appear to be important for early Chinese reading acquisition and implicated in Chinese developmental dyslexia, including phonological processing, morphological awareness, and visual-orthographic skills. It further takes on parents and home literacy practices in relation to reading and writing achievement in Chinese children in light of a few relatively new studies on Chinese home environments. Although the focus of this article is literacy development in Chinese children, the vast majority of its coverage is on character and word recognition, rather than on text processing.
Beliefs in Chinese culture
Authors: Leung Kwok
Published: February 2013

The study of beliefs is important because in addition to values, norms, and personality, beliefs are a major antecedent of social behaviours. This article provides an update of the study of beliefs in Chinese culture by integrating research that has emerged later on. The two major objectives of this article are to consolidate what has been known about beliefs in Chinese culture, and to identify fruitful directions for future research on this important topic. Chinese culture is rich in the variety and quantity of traditional beliefs because of its long history, but, as this article states, only a few of these rich belief constellations have been explored by psychologists. The article then reviews a few major traditional beliefs deemed important for future psychological research. However it states that there are still many gaps in the knowledge about beliefs among Chinese and how they function to influence social behaviours.
Chinese well-being
Authors: Lu Luo
Published: February 2013

Although the definition of happiness varies from person to person, people do not just want to feel happy for a short while, they want to feel positive about living a good life, and accomplishing things they believe are valuable and worthwhile. Over the centuries, philosophers and ordinary people have pondered what kind of life is worth living. This article explains the different aspects of Chinese well-being and the contexts of it turning to be a study subject. Great breakthroughs have been achieved in the last few decades as science has begun to unravel the prevailing myth of happiness as a mysterious, ephemeral state of mind, revealing it as an ordinary, albeit positive, state of mind that can be studied and understood. This article adopts the customary terminologies used by most current scholars and researchers and use happiness interchangeably with subjective well-being.
Psychiatric disorders in the Chinese
Authors: Stewart Sunita Mahtani , Lee Peter W. H. , Tao Rongrong
Published: February 2013

This article summarizes the recent advances in Chinese psychiatry. There has been an explosion of increasingly sophisticated studies in Chinese psychiatry in the last fifteen years. This article begins with a discussion of the diagnostic frameworks developed and employed in China with a focus on the conceptual similarities to and differences from both the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and the ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems). It reviews the mental disorders in China with specific discussions on several disorders with culture-specific manifestations, including depression, eating disorders, and suicide. Apart from explaining the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CMCD), a nosological system to capture locally recognized psychiatric disorders, it also discusses the stigma of mental illness and help-seeking in China and presents a review of treatment and outcomes.
Psychotherapy with the Chinese: an update of the work in the last decade
Authors: Liu Wai-Sum , Leung Patrick W.-L.
Published: February 2013

Culture matters in psychotherapy as it infuses itself into different human experiences and into the experience of distress and the coping processes it initiates. It has long been recognized that every therapeutic encounter is embedded in a cultural context and that effective coping, to some extent, serves a sociocultural purpose. In fact, culture-centered intervention is now regarded as a fourth force in psychotherapy, on par with psychodynamic, humanistic, and cognitive behavioural schools of thought and practice. This article starts with a review of indigenous therapies and Western psychotherapy methods in the Chinese cultural context. Both practitioners and researchers are interested in how Western therapy is being applied and can best be applied to the Chinese. It also examines the psychopathological Western theories and looks into how Eastern philosophy has recently been integrated into some variants of Western therapy to form new treatment methods.
A gender perspective on Chinese social relationships and behavior
Authors: Tang Catherine So-Kum , Chua Zhiren , O Jiaqing
Published: February 2013

In recent decades, Chinese societies have undergone rapid social, economic, and political changes. Those changes have significant impacts on the way Chinese conduct their daily lives as well as the way they view themselves and the world around them. This article reviews the empirical literature on contemporary Chinese social relationships and behaviour as accessed through the gender lens. It initially presents basic approaches that explain social behaviour of men and women then examines traditional and contemporary economic and social influences on Chinese social relationships. Besides, it reviews Chinese attitudes toward men and women in traditional and non-traditional social roles within the family and in society. It later explores whether Chinese men and women behave similarly as they assume similar social roles or show divergent behavioural tendencies in light of modernization. Furthermore, this article focuses on the implications of prevailing gender attitudes and changing social roles on Chinese social relationships.
Chinese consumer behavior: the effects of content, process, and language
Authors: Wyer Jr. Robert S. , Hong Jiewen
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on the psychology of Chinese consumer behaviour. It reviews the ‘content’ of Chinese culture and its implications for consumer behaviour, focusing on the norms, beliefs, and values that Chinese cultural representatives are likely to hold and the conditions in which they are likely to be applied. Although some of the discussion in this article necessarily duplicates material presented in more detail elsewhere, it provides a framework for conceptualizing much of the current research on consumer behaviour. It further examines a factor that influences both the content and processing of information that consumers are likely to encounter, namely, the language in which information is received and communicated. Although the work reviewed here was largely conducted on Chinese individuals, the study also draws upon data obtained from other East Asian societies that are likely to be similar in terms of the characteristics being considered.
Sport psychology research and its application in China
Authors: Si Gang-Yan , Lee Hing-chu , Lonsdale Chris
Published: February 2013

From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the focus of research in sport psychology was primarily on talent identification. The movement behind talent identification was based on the belief that sporting abilities and potentials are innate, but the environment in which individuals are raised can also shape their future sporting success. However, from the beginning, the purpose of sport psychology in China was to enhance performance in high-level competitive sport, a direction that was determined by both political and social considerations. This article reviews the development of sport psychology in China over the last thirty years, using Chinese sources primarily from mainland China and to a lesser extent Hong Kong. In order to reflect this development, it presents, in chronological order, the developments in the four important areas of talent identification, sport cognition, mental training models, and on-field psychological support.
Inter-cultural interactions: the Chinese context
Authors: Thomas David C. , Liao Yuan
Published: February 2013

Much of the written work on Chinese psychology identifies and describes culture-specific aspects of psychology as it relates to the Chinese people. This identification of cultural specifics (emics) is important, but it is only a first step towards understanding the interactions of Chinese people across cultures. This article discusses a number of intermediate mechanisms or conduits through which Chinese culture influences inter-cultural interactions. These mechanisms involve how Chinese people think about, evaluate, and respond to people who are culturally different. The article describes a behavioural sequence between culturally different actors that involves a number of conduits that are influenced by specific aspects of Chinese culture, such as the salience of situational cues, culturally based scripts and expectations, selective perceptions, out-group identification and attitudes toward out-groups, and the motivational influence of the self-concept. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the review and discussion for research on Chinese psychology.
On the distinctiveness of Chinese psychology; or: Are we all Chinese?
Authors: Smith Peter B.
Published: February 2013

The basic framework for research in many areas of psychology has derived principally from the extensive range of studies conducted over the past hundred years on and by that small proportion of the world's population that resides in North America. This article briefly identifies some of the key areas in which it has thus far been argued that there is something different or distinctive about the psychology of ethnic Chinese. It focuses on examining the extent to which studies conducted in other parts of the world have also identified some of the supposedly distinctive Chinese attributes. It also provides the criteria that are needed for assessing the distinctiveness of Chinese psychology. Sampling of the beliefs and values endorsed within the four primarily Chinese societies in the world in relation to non-Chinese societies indicates substantial psychological variability within the domain of Chinese ethnicity.
The Cartography of Syntactic Structures
Authors: Cinque Guglielmo , Rizzi Luigi
Published: February 2013

Syntactic structures are complex objects, whose subtle properties have been highlighted and elucidated by half a century of formal syntactic studies, building on a much older tradition. Their cartography is an attempt to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations. Broadly constructed in this way, it is not an approach or a hypothesis, but a research topic asking the question: what are the right structural maps for natural language syntax? This chapter discusses the following: inventory of functional categories, comparative syntax and typology, cartography and minimalism; and hierarchies, syntax, and semantics.
Cognitive Grammar
Authors: Langacker Ronald W.
Published: February 2013

The central goal of Cognitive Grammar (CG) is to describe the structure of particular languages and develop a general framework allowing the optical description of any language. CG is a particular cognitive linguistic theory. Even within cognitive linguistics, it stands out as radical due to certain basic claims, notably that grammar is wholly symbolic and that basic grammatical notions (such as noun, verb, and subject) have unified conceptual characterizations. Nevertheless, it is largely compatible with a wide spectrum of cognitive and functional approaches, being general and flexible enough to incorporate their findings and insights.
Sign-Based Construction Grammar
Authors: Michaelis Laura A.
Published: February 2013

To practise Construction Grammar is to accept a proposition that is anathema to most linguists, whether they be ‘formalists’ or ‘functionalists’: many, if not most, of the grammatical facts which people appear to know cannot be resolved into general principles, but must instead be stipulated. This stipulation takes the form of a grammatical construction. Grammatical constructions are recipes for word combinations that speakers use to achieve specific communicative goals, e.g., issuing an order, requesting information, attributing a property to an entity. This chapter describes the formalized version of Construction Grammar: Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG), beginning with a discussion of SBCG formalism. It then discusses four rationales that constructionists have offered for a construction-based view of syntax. These are: (i) constructions license arguments and syntactic sisterhood relations; (ii) there is a continuum of idiomaticity; (iii) core and periphery are interleaved during production; and (iv) constructions have formal and interpretive conditions that cannot be captured by mapping procedures. The chapter concludes by discussing the role of construction-based syntax in the search for syntactic universals.
A Frames Approach to Semantic Analysis
Authors: Fillmore Charles J. , Baker Collin
Published: February 2013

This chapter contrasts a broad use of the term frame in cognitive science with its related use in a type of linguistic analysis, describing the principles and data structure of a particular research project (FrameNet) as a model for representing frame-based analyses of lexical meanings. It introduces an extension of the project to include the semantic contributions of grammatical constructions and concludes by surveying the implications of a frames perspective on some familiar issues in linguistic semantics.
Framework-Free Grammatical Theory
Authors: Haspelmath Martin
Published: February 2013

This chapter argues that framework-free grammatical description/analysis and explanation is superior to framework-bound analysis because all languages have different categories, and languages should be described in their own terms. Frameworks represent aprioristic assumptions that are likely to lead to a distorted description of language. The chapter argues against restrictive theoretical frameworks of the generative type, against frameworks of functional approaches such as Functional Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar, and against Basic Linguistic Theory.
Health and Medicine in the Enlightenment
Authors: Spray E. C.
Published: February 2013

This article discusses the transformation of medicine at the very end of the century and thus represents a shift both in the training of medical practitioners and in accounts of the body. The eighteenth century has been described as a time of increasing medicalization of Western societies. Though this is usually portrayed as a growth in the power of medical practitioners over ordinary life, in practice lay people may also understand it as an increasing embrace of the medical. The eighteenth century continues to be viewed as a critical period in the history of medicine, as the century when bodies became the subject of large-scale political intervention, from centralized responses to plague epidemics or mass inoculation programmes early in the century to the growing use of mortality tables at its end. To portray these knowledge projects in all their complexity, historians still need to embrace the full implications of treating eighteenth-century medical knowledge as a political enterprise.
Medicine in Islam and Islamic Medicine
Authors: Ebrahimnejad Hormoz
Published: February 2013

The aim of this article is to examine the key developments that led to the formation of Islamic medicine. It addresses theoretical, practical, and institutional features and the ways in which these features were formed and developed in relation to both pre-Islamic and Islamic resources. The dilemma created by a pre-Islamic and Islamic dichotomy is also discussed. The issue discussed here is the turning of medical theories into dogma by Islamic medicine and thus freezing the spirit of inquiry and observation. This article points to the adoption of Greek medicine within the framework of the formation of Islam. Further explanations for such developments need to be found in the intellectual and social history of the Islamic East and the Latin West.
Public Health and Medicine in Latin America
Authors: Birn Anne-Emanuelle
Published: February 2013

The countries of Latin America are enormously diverse demographically, geographically, politically, economically, and culturally, yet they share certain features, providing coherence to thinking about the history of health and medicine in regional terms. This article throws light on more recent scholarship that shows considerable regional innovation and the worldwide reverberation of a range of ‘homegrown’ medical ideas and practices, public health policies, and health care organizational models. It addresses these developments, diversities, and congruities through five historical eras and thematic perspectives. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of historiographical approaches in the contemporary context, exploring the major challenges facing historians writing about Latin American health and medicine today, particularly the links between history and contemporary national and global health policy issues.
History of Medicine in Australia and New Zealand
Authors: Bryder Linda
Published: February 2013

This article considers trends in the writing of medical history in Australia and New Zealand since the 1980s. It traces the growing maturity of the discipline in this geographical region. It pinpoints a particular contribution to the wider discipline, the history of the health of indigenous peoples and their interaction with the state as well as the current political resonances of such historiography. It also shows how the history of health and medicine contributes to a broader understanding of those societies and their sense of nationalism or identity. Finally it addresses transnationalism in health histories and the ways in which medicine in these societies reflected or deviated from developments in the international medical community. This article demonstrates how international histories of medicine, as well as local social and political histories, have been enriched by this expanding historiography.
Childhood and Adolescence
Authors: Levene Alysa
Published: February 2013

Childhood and youth have undergone a period of much more intensive scrutiny within the social history of medicine in the past few decades. This article discusses the significance of health and well-being of the younger generation as it reflects a variety of wider societal concerns about national efficiency, confidence in medical practice, a healthy and well-balanced population, and the quality of social relations. It discusses more insightful discoveries about the nature of child patients and disease by studying how they are treated compared with others experiencing similar impairment. It also deals with the second theme to emerge in recent medical histories of childhood and youth focusing on the boundaries of normal life experiences. The history of child health is moving from the margins of welfare and employment into its own field, and it is hoped that future work will continue to build up a more convincing set of theoretical reference points.
The Political Economy of Health Care in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Gorsky Martin
Published: February 2013

The main aim of this article is to account for the coming of health systems within welfare states and to examine how these systems respond to demographic, financial, and technological changes in the contemporary period. The question of why the state entered this arena in the recent past is therefore of over-arching importance, and this article summarizes common theoretical approaches advanced to explain this process. It outlines the nineteenth-century foundations of social insurance and public provision of medical facilities on which state engagement was built. It traces the growth and development of health systems in the case-study countries, dividing events into three broad periods: the early twentieth century, in which they were largely put in place; the post-war ‘golden-age’ of the welfare state; and attempts since the 1970s to reform health systems in response to burgeoning costs and ideological critique. The conclusion reflects on how the different models adopted have impacted on population health.
Medicine and Species: One Medicine, One History?
Authors: Kirk Robert G. W. , Worboys Michael
Published: February 2013

This article surveys the present position of the animal within the history of human medicine, linking this to work in the history of veterinary medicine, and also speculates on the value of making ‘species’ a central and unifying theme of a new history of medicine. It mentions that re-conceiving medicine as a set of knowledge-practices grounded in interspecies interactions promises to reinvigorate the subject. It draws on a diverse theoretical literature ranging from ‘animal studies’ to ‘post-human’ literature in order to suggest how such an approach could allow us to re-imagine what medicine has been and still may be. This is a timely project as the medical and veterinary professions, after long debating the notion of ‘one medicine’ as ‘a common pool of knowledge in microbiology, immunology, physiology, pathology and epidemiology’, are now calling to develop the field.
Medical Film and Television: An Alternative Path to the Cultures of Biomedicine
Authors: Boon Timothy
Published: February 2013

This article is concerned with the triangular territory between biomedicine, relevant moving image media production, and lay people — sometimes cinematic subjects, sometimes patients, and sometimes audiences. The examples quoted — mainly British — arise from the period stretching from the late nineteenth century up to the 1960s. The significant costs and effort involved in producing medical films and programmes make their existence in certain times and places particularly interesting evidence for the terrain of biomedicine in the past. The three modes of medical film and television are discussed and they stand for different aspects of biomedicine. This article provides an understanding of how biomedicine came to be made and used and gives access to the politics and social attitudes of participants in interesting ways. The coverage of each mode of film-making is concentrated in the decade of its emergence.
A Guide to Modelling credit term Structures
Authors: Lipton Alexander , Rennie Andrew
Published: February 2013

This article examines the conventional bond pricing methodology and shows that it does not adequately reflect the nature of the credit risk faced by investors. In particular, it demonstrates that the strippable discounted cash flows valuation assumption, which is normally taken for granted by most analysts, leads to biased estimates of relative value for credit bonds. The article introduces a consistent survival-based valuation methodology that is free of biases, albeit at a price of abandoning the strippable discounted cash flows valuation assumption, and also develops a robust estimation methodology for survival probability term structures using the exponential splines approximation. This methodology is implemented and tested in a wide variety of market conditions, and across a large set of sectors and issuers, from the highest credit quality to highly distressed ones. It concludes that the adoption of the survival-based methodologies advocated in this article by market participants will lead to an increase in the efficiency of the credit markets, just as the adoption of better pre-payment models led to efficiency in the mortgage-based securities markets twenty years ago.
Statistical data mining procedures in generalized cox regressions
Authors: Wei Zhen
Published: February 2013

This article, which introduces the basic ideas of Cox's original proportional model for the hazard rates and extends the model within a general framework of statistical data mining procedures, is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces various statistical data mining procedures for (generalised) Cox regression with time-independent covariates (for cross-sectional type data). Section 3 deals with time-dependent covariates. Section 4 presents an example of using statistical factors to explain the default arrival intensities and to generate trading signals. The idea is quite general and can be extended to make other forms of factor models for credit derivatives. Concluding remarks are given in Section 5.
An Exposition Of CDS Market Models
Authors: Schloegl Lutz
Published: February 2013

This article gives an introduction to the mechanics and techniques used to develop market models for credit, focusing on the single credit case. The concept of a background filtration was introduced by Jeanblanc and Rutkowski (2000), and has been used by multiple authors since, e.g., Jamshidian (2004) and Brigo and Morini (2005). The theory is worked out in relative detail in Section 2, which also formalises the concept of a background price process. Section 3 shows how this theory can be used to derive Black-type pricing formulas for default swaptions. A full market model is developed in Section 4. It turns out that, in the case where both credit spreads and interest rates are stochastic and dependent, the situation is not as clean as for interest rate market models. This is because default protection payoffs inherently contain a measure mismatch due to the timing of default and the payout. In the case where credit and interest rates are independent, the situation simplifies considerably. Under these simplifications, Section 5 describes in detail the induction steps needed to construct a market model from scratch. Section 6 describes an alternative method of constructing credit default swaps (CDS) market models. Instead of using forward default intensities as model primitives, it directly describes the dynamics of certain survival probability ratios. Finally, the pricing of constant maturity CDS contracts is examined in Section 7.
Markov Chain Models of Portfolio Credit Risk
Authors: Bielelcki Tomasz R. , Crépey Stéphane , Herbertsson Alexander
Published: February 2013

This article reviews a selection of methods and results for various applications of the theory of continuous time Markov chains to valuation of credit derivatives. Section 2 begins with a review of some basic notions and results from the theory of continuous-time Markov chains. Sections 3 to 5 are devoted to the study of a few specific Markovian models of portfolio credit risk.
An EVT Primer for Credit Risk
Authors: Chavez‐Demoulin Valérie , Embrechts Paul
Published: February 2013

This article aims to provide the basics any risk manager should know on the modelling of external events, and this from a past–present–future research perspective. Such events are often also referred to as low-probability events or rare events. The article is organised as follows. Section 2 starts with an overview of the credit risk-specific issues within Quantitative Risk Management and shows where relevant Extreme Value Theory-related questions are being asked. Section 3 presents the one-dimensional theory of extremes, whereas Section 4 is concerned with the multivariate case. Section 5 discusses particular applications and gives an outlook on current research in the field, while Section 6 concludes.
Home Price Derivatives and Modelling
Authors: Levin Alexander
Published: February 2013

This article discusses the nature of the housing prices and their dynamics. More specifically, it presents a qualitative and quantitative overview of the formation of the housing price bubble in the United States and its subsequent collapse. The article argues that home prices are stochastic in nature and proposes their modelling in two complementary ways: (a) based on pure empirical considerations; and (b) based on general risk-neutral arguments using the fact that several purely financial home price indices are traded at various exchanges.
The Scribe of The Flood Story and his Circle
Authors: Koppen Frans van
Published: February 2013

This article looks at the social context of Mesopotamian poetry as it relates to the question of where and how one famous example may have been received, the story of Atram-hasis. It explains that this work was by apprentice scribe Ipiq-Aya and that the Atram-hasis and the other literary texts signed by, or attributed to, Ipiq-Aya were written by a boy or young man who was taught to be a scribe. It argues that compositions studied by Ipiq-Aya and his contemporaries reveal a very different choice of texts than we are familiar with at Nippur and Ur.
Royal Decision-Making: Kings, Magnates, and Scholars
Authors: Radner Karen
Published: February 2013

This article investigates the role of two distinct groups of advisors to the Assyrian king and their impact on royal decision-making: the highest state officials or magnates and scholarly experts in the royal entourage. The magnates comprised a set of about 100–120 men who formed the backbone of the Assyrian Empire, instrumental in its creation and indispensable to its maintenance. The scholars served to monitor and interpret divine messages and to perform the rituals necessary to keep the precious relationship with the divine powers in balance.
Exchangeability, Representation Theorems, and Subjectivity
Authors: Poirier Dale J.
Published: February 2013

This article is concerned with the foundation of statistical inference in the representation theorems. It shows how different assumptions about the joint distribution of the observable data lead to different parametric models defined by prior and likelihood function. Parametric models arise as an implication of the assumptions about observables. The article presents many extensions and offers description of the subjectivist attitude that underlies much of Bayesian econometrics. This subjectivist interpretation is close to probability. This article discusses exchangeability as the foundation for Bayesian econometrics. It serves as the basis for further extensions to incorporate heterogeneity and dependency across observations. It also discusses representation theorems involving random variables more complicated than Bernoulli random variables. They are not true properties of reality but are useful for making inferences regarding future observables.
Bayesian Macroeconometrics
Authors: del Negro Marco
Published: February 2013

This article presents the challenges that arise since macroeconomists often work in data-rich environments. It emphasizes multivariate models that can capture the co-movements of macroeconomic time series analysis. It discusses vector autoregressive (VAR) models distinguishing between reduced-form and structural VARs. Reduced-form VARs summarize the autocovariance properties of the data and provide a useful forecasting tool. The article shows how Bayesian methods have been empirically successful in responding to these challenges. It also encounters dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that potentially differ in their economic implications. With posterior model probabilities, inference and decisions can be based on model averages. This article discusses inference with linearized as well as nonlinear DSGE models and reviews various approaches for evaluating the empirical fit of DSGE models. It concludes with a discussion of model uncertainty and decision-making with multiple models.
Thomas Middleton's Shelf Life
Authors: Yates Julian
Published: February 2013

The The Owle's Almanacke may be described as a mock-almanac, a parody, and so to assimilate her to the world of almanac production in early modern England. But to proclaim The Owle a mock-almanac begs an even greater set of questions about what remains still essentially an understudied phenomenon in early modern England and Europe: the circuits of information and book use that formed between variously skilled groups of readers or book users and the readers or book users we name writers. This article begins by contextualizing The Owle within the larger traditions of almanac parody, which for Middleton became a career-long obsession. It then examines the zoographic play of The Owle as it thematizes the processes of reading and finding yourself read – caught up, that is, in a series of machine-like responses that you had assumed were singular, personal, yours, and which now offer a different order of pleasure than that of use. The article traces The Owle's relationship to the Faust story, finding in Middleton's mock-almanac a comical, prosaic instance of the more urgent, desperate questions of ‘shelf life’ provoked by the blood writing of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1604/1616). It concludes by asking how Middleton's mock-almanac might lead us to rethink the model of reading most usually deployed to make sense of early modern modes of ‘book use’.
Middleton And Dance
Authors: Ravelhofer Barbara
Published: February 2013

This article, which examines Middleton's techniques of tempo, timing, and spacing in light of Renaissance dance, begins with some general observations about dancing in Middleton's time and then moves on to choreographic technique in his work. As Middleton sometimes wrote his plays together with other writers, it will be important to consider dance in drama in light of such collaborations.
‘My Cloak's A Stranger; He Was Made But Yesterday’
Authors: Lowe Eleanor
Published: February 2013

Middleton explores the concept of layering using literal and linguistic means by presenting a diverse range of sartorially informed dramatic moments. This article examines a selection of examples from Your Five Gallants, The Roaring Girl, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. For example, in The Roaring Girl, Moll Frith is measured for breeches by a lecherous tailor, Master Allwit is seen being trussed in preparation for ‘his’ child's christening party in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Tailby strips off whilst gambling and is subsequently reclothed by doting female ‘clients’. The three examples chosen from Middleton's body of work emphasize the links between clothing, the economy, and the daily and life rituals of early modern Londoners.
‘Old Dad Dead?’
Authors: Lehmann Courtney
Published: February 2013

This article considers whether film adaptations of Middleton's plays are really that much different from their Shakespearian counterparts. Is there something genuinely new occurring in these adaptations? The answer is an unqualified ‘yes’. It is shown that while Middleton adaptations tend to reinforce the reductive equation of the Jacobean period with ‘decadence’, brought about by ‘material comfort, political stability and undue deference to the monarch’, the adaptations examined do not misread the present. These films venture into critiques of the neo-noir universe of late capitalism where Shakespeare films fear to tread. Generating provocative, if not highly disturbing, variations on the noir themes of the obscene father and the femme fatale, film adaptations of Middleton linger on the cusp – or, indeed, in the middle – of an uncertain heritage, caught somewhere between the historical reflex of misogyny and a more radical critique of the collective, totemic paternalism of our own ‘contemporary Jacobean’ culture.
‘Nimble In Damnation, Quick In Tune’
Authors: Lanier Douglas M.
Published: February 2013

Shakespearian tragedy is a popular choice for opera due to its affinity between the expressive virtuosity and melodramatic nature of opera as a form and the orientation of Shakespeare's dramaturgy towards relishing the passions of his characters – passions rhetorically intensified with hyperbole, ecphonesis, copia, and the like. This raises the question of why composers of musical theatre have by and large not taken up the works of other early modern English playwrights, for Shakespeare is certainly not alone in crafting scenarios that afford myriad opportunities for emotional display, nor in using rhetorical resources to embellish those moments. This article considers two such examples: Middleton's Vice and The Revenger's Tragedy. The heightened pathos, eventful plot, Italian setting, and themes of love, betrayal, and vengeance in The Revenger's Tragedy seem especially well suited to operatic adaptation. Vice is billed as ‘a jazz opera’, and that formulation captures its hybrid musical style.
Middleton And Usury
Authors: Hawkes David
Published: February 2013

This article discusses usury as a dominant theme in Middleton's plays. Relations of credit and debt mediate every kind of human interaction in his drama, despoiling innocence, violating love, debasing character, and unbalancing the mind. Middleton was particularly well placed to understand the dramatic impact of usury on everyday life. His childhood was marred by a decades-long financial and legal struggle between his mother and stepfather, which temporarily sent his stepfather to debtors' prison and deprived Thomas of most of his inheritance. Fragmentary as it is, the surviving written evidence records several instances of Middleton's financial distress. In 1612 he is listed among the debtors of the deceased Ewen Hebson of Westminster, and he defaulted on loans in 1606 and 1609.
Middleton'S Language Machine
Authors: Guy-Bray Stephen
Published: February 2013

The distinctive qualities of Middleton's poetry are best demonstrated in The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased. This poem was his first publication; it appeared in 1597 when the poet was still an adolescent. This article attempts to give some sense of how this extraordinary poem functions as a language machine, sometimes coinciding with the biblical book that is its source, and sometimes working on its own and producing its own meanings.
Wisdom in Reverse
Authors: Fernie Ewan
Published: February 2013

This article explores Middleton's first known work, the lengthy and elaborate religious poem The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597). It suggests that Wisdom is not just a piece of immature hack work in the shrubbery of Scripture. As Debora Shuger notes in her introduction to the poem in the Collected Works, more than 60 per cent of its lines have no biblical source or equivalent, and elsewhere, Middleton ‘tends to be aggressively contrapuntal rather than faithfully paraphrastic’. Moreover, he writes in perfectly uninhibited ignorance of – or indifference towards – the exegetical tradition. Can Wisdom be our first glimpse of the face of Thomas Middleton? If so, it is a strange face indeed, very different from the curled, barbered, rich-complexioned, and self-possessed gallant of the surviving portrait. For this is a face distorted by pain and a self-hatred that eats so deep as to encompass the entire species. And yet, it is also, simultaneously, a face almost obscenely touched with an inexpressible and perhaps perverted ecstasy.
Giving Revenger's Its Due
Authors: Buccola Regina
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on two productions of Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy staged in the summer of 2008, at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, and the National Theatre, London. Jonathan Moore – an actor, director, and playwright known for his work in opera with production designer David Blight – directed the play for the Royal Exchange Theatre. Celebrated choreographer, designer, and director Melly Still put Revenger's on the Olivier Theatre stage with co-designer Ti Green. The unintentionally paired productions in Manchester and London offered a unique theatrical laboratory for exploring the different perspectives on Vindice as a character, retributive justice, and the place of women in a sex-based patriarchal power structure that Revenger's can be made to convey. Despite the many differences between the two productions' presentations of Vindice and the trio of wronged women at the centre of Revenger's, both made effective use of the early modern practice of actors doubling roles to visually link the women who motivate the play's acts of vengeance.
Middleton's Imagination
Authors: Bruster Douglas
Published: February 2013

This article explores Middleton's imagination, which is attracted to the struggle between body and soul, desire and fear, and which generally follows his convictions rather than creating them. Calvinistic in a way that reflects the complexities of that thinker's positions, Middleton finds sin not only inevitable but erotic: one of the pleasures of his own imagination seems to be imagining the painful consequences, for others, of pleasure seeking. Therefore neither his imagination nor its products are habitually transcendent, or especially seek to be. Middleton's major act of imagination is to conceive of human impulsiveness – whether in imaginative creation or the pursuit of the erotic – as less a liberating and productive faculty than a recursive and debilitating one. Yet in their focus on the pull of the physical, his works reveal a compelling range of experience. Middleton has a different way of conceiving of the imagination; in this difference we gain a valuable entry to the differences and achievements of his imagination itself.
Middleton And The Continent
Authors: Britland Karen
Published: February 2013

There is no evidence that Middleton ever visited the Continent, but it is clear from his writing that he read widely in Italian, French, and Spanish sources, usually, if not always, in the original languages. This article investigates some of his borrowings and the ways in which he and his collaborators represented foreign characters, languages, and political affairs on the English stage. Taking its spirit from A Mad World, My Masters' gloriously duplicitous courtesan, it also considers the ways in which these plays figure the connections between the Continent and the incontinent.
Editor's Introduction
Authors: Stone Dan
Published: February 2013

It is tempting to tell the story of Europe in the twentieth century in two halves: the first, a sorry, bleak tale of poverty, war, and genocide; and the second, a happy narrative of stability and the triumph of boring normality over dangerous activism and exuberant politics. When one examines the ‘return of memories’ which could not be articulated in the public sphere during the Cold War, one can see that the years since 1989 are intimately connected to World War II and its aftermath. In many ways, we are only now living through the postwar period. The impact of World War II, the largest and bloodiest conflict in world history, did not end in 1945. This book modifies the emphasis usually placed on the Cold War as the main historical framework for understanding the postwar period. It questions the extent to which 1945 was really a ‘zero hour’ and examines various facets of postwar life – from high politics to economics to tourism and consumerism.
East, West, and the Return of ‘Central’: Borders Drawn and Redrawn
Authors: Lee Catherine , Bideleux Robert
Published: February 2013

Western Europe has not only met but also married Eastern Europe, even if there are rumours that it was a marriage of convenience, consummated in ‘EU Europe’. Nevertheless, a significant outcome of the cohabitation has been the resurgence of debates about the status, location, and distinctiveness of ‘Central Europe’; the changing nature of borders and borderlands; and the emergence of ‘new’ East/West divides. Because World War II was predominantly fought on the Eastern Front, almost 95 per cent of Europe's fatalities of war and genocide were in Central and Eastern Europe (including Germany and Austria). These mass killings, combined with the paramount role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of the Third Reich, led to substantial reconfigurations of the borders and ethnic compositions of European states. This article examines the reconfigurations of European territories at the close of World War II, the drastic redrawing of European borders during 1945–1948 and again in the late 1980s and 1990s, the impact on European borders of the European Union and its ‘deepening’ and ‘widening’, and Europe's new East/West divide.
The Spectre of Americanization: Western Europe in the American Century
Authors: Gassert Philipp
Published: February 2013

By 1945, the spectre of Americanisation had been haunting Europe for half a century. With the United States still struggling to establish colonial rule over the Philippine Islands, European observers began framing the ‘American challenge’ as a cultural and most of all economic threat to national independence. Controversies about the impact of ‘America’ often served as a stand-in for a more fundamental reckoning with processes of modernisation. The initial period of sustained Americanisation was the 1920s, when American film, music, and automobiles were conquering Europe for the first time. A second heyday of Americanisation ‘from below’ started with the ‘American occupation of Britain’ and that of continental Europe during and after World War II. This article focuses on Western Europe and Americanisation, highlighting Americanisation from above and Americanisation from below. It looks at two concepts that often come up within debates about Americanisation: Westernisation and anti-Americanism.
Gendering Europe, Europeanizing Gender: The Politics of Difference in a Global Era
Authors: Linke Uli
Published: February 2013

When attempting to understand the cultural politics of gender in Europe after 1945, some readers will undoubtedly anticipate answers to the following question: To what extent have the impact of the Cold War, the rise of feminism, the supposedly sexually liberated 1960s, the emergence of ‘post-feminism’, and the putative ‘crisis of masculinity’ changed attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and impacted on gender-related legislation? This article examines the cultural politics of gender at the juncture of globalisation, securitisation, and Europeanisation, and explores how Europeans have ‘fashioned their distinction’ in attempts to reconstitute themselves as global citizens in a multi-ethnic, post-imperial Europe. By focusing on the commoditisation of white femaleness, the coercive normalisation of Muslim masculinity, the ‘liberation’ of the veiled Muslim woman, and the eroticisation of black men in white consumer fantasy, the article's analysis of exemplary cases demonstrates how gendered imaginaries in Europe are forged by a complex dialogue with race, nation, capitalism, sex, and security.
Making Postwar Communism
Authors: Pittaway Mark
Published: February 2013

The Soviet Union's victory in World War II offered both Moscow and Communists in Europe the opportunity to break out of the isolation that had afflicted them during the interwar years. With the end of the war in Europe in 1945, the Soviet front line traversed Central Europe from Germany's Baltic Coast in the north to the Yugoslav–Italian border in the south. By the mid-1950s, the enhanced influence of communism had been both consolidated and contained. Explaining the paradoxical consolidation and containment of communism's influence across the continent is fundamental to grasping the contours of politics in Europe during the postwar period. The dominant strand in the historiography that approaches such an explanation is informed by the perspective of international history. The pressures of survival during the precarious situation for the Soviet Union that persisted throughout 1942 reinforced the non-participatory, bureaucratic Stalinism which emerged during 1939–1940. The launch of Barbarossa underpinned an escalation in the radicalisation of Nazism.