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The Serpent and the Swan is a history and analysis of animal bride tales from antiquity to the present. The animal bride tale, the author argues, is an enduring expression of humankind's need to remain close to and a part of nature. Boria Sax traces the idea of the animal bride through history by drawing upon legends and literary works from throughout the world. He pays particular attention to Eurasian sources which support his thesis that the animal bride theme originated among the serpent cults of Mesopotamia and southeastern Europe. Through time, the details of the animal bride theme changed as a result of mankind's changing perceptions of the natural world. In general, this study is an account of myths and beliefs that have surrounded animals--and women--during the rise of modern humankind. The Serpent and the Swan identifies and explains images of the animal bride that pervade, enliven, and enrich our culture. The bride becomes Eve taking an apple from the serpent, Medea casting spells, Cinderella riding to the royal ball in a pumpkin coach, and the Little Mermaid rising from the waves. The Author: Boria Sax, who holds a doctorate in German and intellectual history, is the author of The Frog King and The Parliament of Animals, among other books.
Utopia forms a major aspect of human desire, one that is as important as religion. Understanding utopia and the ways in which it can collapse into dystopia is crucial in many disciplines. Fantastic literature (including science fiction and fantasy) is the only form of literature that takes utopia/dystopia seriously. Therefore, analysis of these works provides a basis for serious experimentation in social science. In this volume, critics analyze contemporary literary thought experiments such as 1984 and We. They show how utopian experiments can easily slide into dystopia. Exploring these fictional sociocultural, political experiments gives us new ways to think about our lives and culture. While literature, history, and political science professors may find this book useful, it can also serve as a call to arms to anyone dedicated to maintaining freedom and humane living in the world today.
Why some problems persist while others are resolved. This classic book, available in paperback for the very first time, explores why some people can successfully change their lives and others cannot. Here famed psychologist Paul Watzlawick presents what is still often perceived as a radical idea: that the solutions to our problems are inherently embedded in the problems themselves. Tackling the age-old questions surrounding persistence and change, the book asks why problems arise and are perpetuated in some instances but easily resolved in others. Incorporating ideas about human communication, marital and family therapy, the therapeutic effects of paradoxes and of action-oriented techniques of problem resolution, Change draws much from the field of psychotherapy.
The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway—the idea, if not the place—and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.
This volume focuses on strengthening the foundations of the social sciences with hypotheses that challenge commonly held rational choice theories drawn from economics. In contrast to the rational choice theories of Becker, Hayek, Popper, and others, Moessinger argues that the stability of social structures ultimately results from a linkage of non-rational individual conduct (interpersonal imbalances, confusion of minds, etc.) with social order and hence, that a larger role for psychology is essential for the study of the social sciences. This work is an attempt at cross-fertilization of disciplines. Both of these fields are now limited, fragmented, and scattered. In the social sciences we often have to be content with a few pieces (hypotheses, theories) of a provisional construction, pieces that will be quickly modified or replaced. In this precarious situation for the social sciences, what we can do better, what we must try to do better, is to differentiate and generalize our hypotheses and integrate them into the best-established network of knowledge in order to ensure that they continue to develop. In other words, we have to articulate and systematize the social sciences, in particular to reunite sociology and psychology. Social order emerges from non-rational individual behavior (which social order, in turn, upholds). To express it positively, social order and individual non-rationality together make up a whole. The author holds that metaphors such as "machine" or "organism" are no longer adequate. Social order can no longer be conceived in terms of a dualistic framework. Social order is not some magical equilibrium that is justified by the satisfactions it produces--to all, to the most capable, or only to those in power, depending upon the justification. Nor can social order be considered either the product of either an invisible hand or of an omnipresent secretary who balances everyone's account. This work is an effort to move beyond the polarities and dualities that limit the theory and research of social science as a whole. Pierre Moessinger is professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg. He has published in English-language journals in several fields and is the editor of New Ideas in Psychology.