Semiotics is long on theoretical, often obscure discourses, but short on applications that demonstrate with clarity the applicability of its methods. This book confronts a challenging object, the circus, and endeavors to describe its performances in ways that explain how circus acts produce meaning and cause a deep emotional involvement for their audiences. The approach is not top-down, such as would be a method that would dogmatically apply a particular theory to fully explain the phenomena in terms of this theory alone. Epistemologically, this book is an example of the bottom-up strategy, which consists of considering first the objects and heuristically calling upon methodological resources in a broad theoretical array to come to grips with the problems that are encountered. Any circus act is a complex event that has cognitive and emotional dimensions. It is also a part of a history and an institution, and cannot be abstracted from its cultural and sociological contexts. Thus the range of relevant theoretical and methodological approaches must include structural semiotics, biosemiotics, pragmatics, socio-semiotics, cultural anthropology, the cognitive sciences, the psychology and sociology of emotions, to name only the most important. But the ultimate focus of this book is to enable the readers to better understand the meaning of circus performances and to appreciate the skills and creativity of this traditional popular art, which constantly renews itself from generation to generation.

Learn all about opposites with illustratedÊelephant duo, Eddie and Ellie. These curious elephants explore the world around them together, but somehow always end up liking opposite things!Ê Illustrated with vibrant photographs of different circus acts combined with playful illustrations of Eddie and Ellie, this book is sure to be a popular choice!

In this children's story, Billy Whiskers, the big white bearded Billy Goat who lives at Clover leaf Farm, has an adventure at the circus when it comes to town. There, he encounters many strange animals and people that he has never seen before. He is also the subject of a kidnapping attempt, but manages to get away with the help of the monkeys who have become his friends. Afterwards he said it was the best time of his life and loved to talk about it. The author, Frances Trego Montgomery said that she got the ideas for her books by inviting groups of children to her house "between dinner and their bedtime."

'Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairy tale horror, and visions of the alienated wreckage of a future world. In Nights at the Circus she has invented a new, raunchy, raucous, Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, taking us back into a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety' The Times.