This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional “cultures” of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a “third culture.” By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the total economy of existence? What influence, on the other hand, have writers and philosophers had on the doing of science and on scientific paradigms of the world? Thirdly, where does humankind fit into the total picture with its uniquely moral nature? In other words, rather than privileging one discipline over another, this study seeks to uncover a common ground for science, ethics, and literary creativity. Throughout this inquiry certain nodal points emerge to bond the argument cogently together and create new meaning. These anchor points are the notion of movement inherent in all forms of existence, the changing concepts of evil in the altered spaces of reality, and the creative impulse critical to the literary work of art as well as to the expanding universe. This ambitious undertaking is unified through its use of phenomena typical of chaos and complexity theory as so many leitmotifs. While they first emerged to explain natural phenomena at the quantum and cosmic levels, chaos and complexity are equally apt for explaining moral and aesthetic events. Hence, the title “Remapping Reality” extends to the reconfigurations of the three main spheres of human interaction: the physical, the ethical, and the aesthetic or creative.

Practicing Progress focuses on the German Enlightenment in its dual manifestation as a cultural era and as a mode of discourse. The volume’s unifying theme is the promise and limitations of the Enlightenment, as seen from the twenty-first century. Contributors deal with figures from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in theology, poetry and drama, economic theory, and music. Included are such powerful critics of the politics of progress as Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht. The volume is of particular interest to scholars concerned with the complexity of literary phenomena. A variety of interpretive approaches yield fresh insights into the still ongoing project of Enlightenment.

What happens when stories meet mobile media? In this cutting-edge collection, contributors explore digital storytelling in ways that look beyond the desktop to consider how stories can be told through mobile, locative, and pervasive technologies. This book offers dynamic insights about the new nature of narrative in the age of mobile media, studying digital stories that are site-specific, context-aware, and involve the reader in fascinating ways. Addressing important topics for scholars, students, and designers alike, this collection investigates the crucial questions for this emerging area of storytelling and electronic literature. Topics covered include the histories of site-specific narratives, issues in design and practice, space and mapping, mobile games, narrative interfaces, and the interplay between memory, history, and community.

This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world.

Hemispatial neglect is the failure to report, respond to, or orient to novel or meaningful stimuli presented in the contralesional visual field. It constitutes one of the most invalidating neurological disorders that can occur after stroke. It is therefore important to treat neglect as adequate as possible and much of the research dedicated to neglect therefore focuses on rehabilitation. In this special topic, you will find 29 articles on the rehabilitation of neglect. This Research Topic has opened new perspectives, and has given us an indication of where the field is going. Although some of the current rehabilitation techniques have proven to be beneficial, there is limited agreement on the most valuable technique or the mechanisms underlying the ameliorating effects.

Demyelinating diseases are characterized by an extensive loss of oligodendrocytes and myelin sheaths from axolemma, which commonly result in disability in young adults. To date, there is no effective treatment against these neurological disorders. In the adult brain, there are neural stem cells (NSCs) that reside within a niche denominated ventricular-subventricular zone (V-SVZ) in the lateral wall of the cerebral ventricles. NSCs give rise to neurons and oligodendrocytes that help preserve cellular homeostasis. Growing evidence indicates that V-SVZ progenitor cells may represent an endogenous source of oligodendrocytes that can be useful to treat demyelinating diseases. This e-Book “The ventricular-subventricular zone as a source of oligodendrocytes in the adult brain” collected the most recent evidence regarding the mechanisms that modulate the proliferation, migration, quiescence, cell-fate choices and survival of oligodendrocyte precursors generated in the V-SVZ. Herein, we compiled information about the role of Sonic hedgehog, NMDA receptors, ErbB proteins, hemopressin, erythropoietin, osmolarity and microglia in the oligodendrocyte production. Some chapters also describe the role of oligodendrocyte precursors in the preservation of cellular homeostasis, aging and white matter repair. All these information is presented as novel research findings, short communications, and review articles, which were written by experts in the field of oligodendrocyte generation, myelin production and white matter re-myelination.

Central to the idea of a perfect society is the idea that communities must be strong and bound together with shared ideologies. However, while this may be true, rarely are the individuals that comprise a community given primacy of place as central to a strong communal theory. This volume moves away from the dominant, current macro-level theorising on the subject of identity and its relationship to and with globalising trends, focusing instead on the individual’s relationship with utopia so as to offer new interpretive approaches for engaging with and examining utopian individuality. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing together work from around the world, The Individual and Utopia enquires after the nature of the utopian as citizen, demonstrating the inherent value of making the individual central to utopian theorizing and highlighting the methodologies necessary for examining the utopian individual. The various approaches employed reveal what it is to be an individual yoked by the idea of citizenship and challenge the ways that we have traditionally been taught to think of the individual as citizen. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social theory, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, architecture, and feminist thought, whose work intersects with political thought, utopian theorizing, or the study of humanity or human nature.