Classical literature is full of humans, gods, and animals in impressive motion. The specific features of this motion are expressive; it is closely intertwined with decisions, emotions, and character. However, although the importance of space has recently been realized with the advent of the 'spatial turn' in the humanities, motion has yet to receive such attention, for all its prominence in literature and its interest to ancient philosophy. This volume begins with an exploration of motion in particular works of visual art, and continues by examining the characteristics of literary depiction. Seven works are then used as case-studies: Homer's Iliad, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tacitus' Annals, Sophocles' Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, Parmenides' On Nature, and Seneca's Natural Questions. The two narrative poems diverge rewardingly, as do the philosophical poetry and prose. Important in the philosophical poem and the prose history are metaphorical motion and the absence of motion; the dramas scrutinize motion verbally and visually. Each study first pursues the general roles of motion in the particular work and provides detail on its language of motion. It then engages in close analysis of particular passages, to show how much emerges when motion is scrutinized. Among the aspects which emerge as important are speed, scale, and shape of movement; motion and fixity; the movement of one person and a group; motion willed and imposed; motion in images and in unrealized possibilities. The conclusion looks at these aspects across the works, and at differences of genre and period. This new and stimulating approach opens up extensive areas for interpretation; it can also be productively applied to the literature of successive eras.

Classical literature is full of humans, gods, and animals in impressive motion, though motion has yet to receive significant attention in scholarship and criticism. The case-studies in this volume explore how motion is treated in Greek and Latin visual art and literature, offering a new and stimulating approach to these well-known works.

This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.

Explains the physics of gravity and gravitational pull, offering information on the contributions made in this area by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.

Books in Motion addresses the hybrid, interstitial field of film adaptation. The introductory essay integrates a retrospective survey of the development of adaptation studies with a forceful argument about their centrality to any history of culture--any discussion, that is, of the transformation and transmission of texts and meanings in and across cultures. The thirteen especially composed essays that follow, organised into four sections headed 'Paradoxes of Fidelity', 'Authors, Auteurs, Adaptation', 'Contexts, Intertexts, Adaptation' and 'Beyond Adaptation', variously illustrate that claim by problematising the notion of fidelity, highlighting the role played by adaptation in relation to changing concepts of authorship and auteurism, exploring the extent to which the intelligibility of film adaptations is dependent on contextual and intertextual factors, and making a claim for the need to transcend any narrowly-defined concept of adaptation in the study of adaptation. Discussion ranges from adaptations of established classics like A Tale of Two Cities, Frankenstein, Henry V, Le temps retrouvé, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, 'The Dead' or Wuthering Heights, to contemporary (popular) texts/films like Bridget Jones's Diary, Fools, The Governess, High Fidelity, The Hours, The Orchid Thief/Adaptation, the work of Doris Dörrie, the first Harry Potter novel/film, or the adaptations made by Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Walt Disney. This book will appeal to both a specialised readership and to those accessing the dynamic field of adaptation studies for the first time.

During the first half of the 20th century, Japan was the dominant military & political force in East Asia. This study explores the transculturations of Japanese literature amongst the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese & Manchurians whose lives had come within the sphere of the Japanese Empire.

On dance and culture