The year is 2028. Man's most ancient and feared enemy still walks the earth. For centuries, he has been consolidating his power and marshaling his dark forces for one last play. Walker Cain is the Man of Shadows and has only one agenda: to establish a one-world order through which he can control our destiny and remove our freedoms of personal choice. For him, no other plan can be worth his time and resources. He is the beast and intends for all to carry his mark. Benjamin Jasher has been a historian for as long as humanity has lived to record the advancement of civilizations. As a young man following The Great Flood, the ancient patriarch Noah presented him with a special duty and a challenge: to record the march of history. To ensure his life's work continued, he was permitted to live as long as necessary. But he needed to make special note of the acts and machinations of the most insidious man who ever lived, Cain.

How do we learn what it means to be a man? And how do we learn to question what it means to be a man? This collection comprises a set of original interdisciplinary chapters on the linguistic and cultural representations of queer masculinities in a range of new and older media: television, film, online forums, news reporting, advertising and fiction. This innovative work examines new and emerging forms of gender hybridisation in relation to complex socialisation and immigration contexts including the role of EU institutions in ascertaining asylum seekers’ sexual orientation, and the European laws on gender policy. The book employs numerous analytical approaches including critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, literary criticism and anthropological and social research. The authors show how such texts can disrupt, question or complicate traditional notions of what it means to be a man, queering the idea that men possess fixed identities or desires, instead arguing that masculinity is constantly changing and negotiated through the cultural and political overlapping contexts in which it is regularly produced. These nuanced analyses will bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender, masculinity and queer studies, linguistics, anthropology and semiotics.

This pioneering collection of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama has now been updated to include more early material, plus Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, John Marston’s The Malcontent and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens. Second edition of this pioneering collection of works of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama. Covers the full sweep of dramatic performances, including State progresses and Court masques. Contains material useful for courses on women playwrights or women in Renaissance drama, including Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. Includes plays and pageants not anthologised elsewhere, such as the coronation entries of Elizabeth I and Queen Anne, and Thomas Heywood’s ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness’. For the second edition more early material has been added, such as Noah and The Second Shepherd’s Play. The anthology now also includes Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, John Marston’s The Malcontent and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens.

The Genesis story of Cain’s murder of Abel is often told as a simplistic contrast between the innocence of Abel and the evil of Cain. This book subverts that reading of the Biblical text by utilising Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer, the state of exception and the idea of sovereignty to re-examine this well-known tale of fratricide and bring to the fore its political implications. Drawing from political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this book creates a theoretical framework from which to do two things: firstly, to describe and analyse the history of interpretation of Genesis 4:1-16, and secondly to propose an alternative reading of the Biblical text that incorporates other texts inside and outside of the Biblical canon. This intertextual analysis will highlight the motives of violence, law, divine rule, and the rejected as they emerge in different contexts and will evaluate them in an Agambenian framework. The unique approach of this book makes it vital reading for any academic with interests in Biblical Studies and Theology and their interactions with politics and ethics.