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Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks of 9/11 and the current problems plaguing the Middle East and Afghanistan, there has been a real desire both to find and map a set of commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is often done, however, not for the sake of scholarship, but interfaith dialogue. Recently, however, the term “Abrahamic religions” has been used with exceeding frequency in the academy. We now regularly encounter academic books, conferences, and even positions (including endowed chairs) devoted to the so-called “Abrahamic religions.” Often lost in contemporary discussions of “Abrahamic religions” is a set of crucial questions: whence does the term “Abrahamic religions” derive? Who created it and for what purposes? What sort of intellectual work is it perceived to perform? In order to answer these and related questions, the book examines the creation and dissemination of this category. Part genealogical and part analytical, this study seeks to raise and answer questions about the appropriateness and usefulness of employing “Abrahamic religions” as a vehicle for understanding and classifying data. In so doing, this book can be taken as a case study that examines the construction of categories within the academic study of religion, showing how the categories we employ can become more an impediment than an expedient to understanding.

Abstract objects such as properties, propositions, numbers, degrees, and expression types are at the centre of many philosophical debates. Philosophers and linguists alike generally hold the view that natural language allows rather generously for reference to abstracts objects of the various sorts. The project of this book is to investigate in a fully systematic way whether and how natural language permits reference to abstract objects. For that purpose, the book will introduce a great range of new linguistic generalizations and make systematic use of recent semantic and syntactic theories. It will arrive at an ontology that differs rather radically from the one that philosophers, but also linguists, generally take natural language to involve. Reference to abstract objects is much more marginal than is generally thought. Instead of making reference to abstract objects, natural language, with its more central terms and constructions, makes reference to (concrete) particulars, especially tropes, as well as pluralities of particulars. Reference to abstract objects is generally reserved for syntactically complex and less central terms of the sort the property of being wise or the number eight.

In the development literature, some countries are cited more often than others as examples of development success. These countries are understood to have policies and institutions in place that could be transferred, at least in part, to less successful countries both within their own regions, and elsewhere in the world. As such, they may constitute ‘role models of development’. This scholarly volume contains historical accounts of a select set of successful countries in the developing world; successful by virtue of their growth and development path—albeit at times in an uneven, non-linear, and patchy manner. Each unique case describes the fundamental ‘causes’ of success: initial conditions and resources; local, regional, and international factors shaping the national state of affairs; and contributions to the development process by internal and external actors and institutions. Each country has a story to tell from which useful lessons can be drawn. While other similar works have presented cases of successful development strategies, they tend to be region-specific or constitute a relatively small number of cases. This book takes a more wide-ranging perspective involving a large number of country studies, spanning world regions and development levels.

The Iliad is a poem whose events revolve around the “anger” of Achilles, and his personal fierceness and pursuit of glory remain, despite different and more complex nuances, the prevailing features of his characterization. This book proposes to investigate how different literary authors and visual artists at different periods responded to Achilles' “erotic life”, an aspect about which the Iliadwas almost completely silent. Achilles' loves expose a crack in the usually self-assured attitude of the hero, demonstrating the limits of epic heroism and the epic vision of the world. As such, these moments of erotic “weakness” became perfect manifestos for reuse in other genres, such as tragedy and the various forms of love poetry, in which themes of love and passion were more customary than in heroic epic.

Acids and bases are ubiquitous in chemistry. Our understanding of them, however, is dominated by their behaviour in water. Transfer to non-aqueous solvents leads to profound changes in acid-base strengths and to the rates and equilibria of many processes: for example, synthetic reactions involving acids, bases, and nucleophiles; isolation of pharmaceutical actives through salt formation; formation of zwitter-ions in amino acids; and chromatographic separation of substrates. This book seeks to enhance our understanding of acids and bases by reviewing and analysing their behaviour in non-aqueous solvents. The behaviour is related where possible to that in water, but correlations and contrasts between solvents are also presented. Fundamental background material is provided in the initial chapters: quantitative aspects of acid–base equilibria, including definitions and relationships between solution pH and species distribution; the influence of molecular structure on acid strengths; and acidity in aqueous solution. Solvent properties are reviewed, along with the magnitude of the interaction energies of solvent molecules with (especially) ions; the ability of solvents to participate in hydrogen bonding and to accept or donate electron pairs is seen to be crucial. Experimental methods for determining dissociation constants are described in detail. In the remaining chapters, dissociation constants of a wide range of acids in three distinct classes of solvent are discussed: protic solvents, such as alcohols, which are strong hydrogen-bond donors; basic, polar aprotic solvents, such as dimethylformamide; and low-basicity and low-polarity solvents, such as acetonitrile and tetrahydrofuran. Dissociation constants of individual acids vary over more than twenty orders of magnitude among the solvents, and there is a strong differentiation between the response of neutral and charged acids to solvent change. Ion-pairing and hydrogen-bonding equilibria, such as between phenol and phenoxide ions, play an increasingly important role as the solvent polarity decreases, and their influence on acid–base equilibria and salt formation is described.

From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women, and streetwalkers, the so-called ‘fallen woman’ was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays, and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women’s illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women’s rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics, eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain. Acts of Desire challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term ‘the fallen woman’. Encompassing a vast range of published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, social and political texts, and contemporary reviews, it reveals the surprising continuities, covert meanings, and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and ‘high art’ performances, this study also reveals the vital connections and exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting, and the novel, and shows theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women’s sexuality.

Volume II of the Advances in Culture and Psychology showcases contributions from internationally renowned culture scholars who span the discipline of culture and psychology and represent diversity in the theory and study of culture within psychology. The volume includes cutting edge contributions on culture and neuroscience, culture and intelligence, culture and human development, culture and personality, culture and language, and culture change.

Volume III of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series showcases a number of cutting edge research programs in culture and psychology. The volume includes chapters on The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts (Mutsumi Imai and Takahiko Masuda); Development—The Cultural Solution to Universal Developmental Tasks (Heidi Keller and Joscha Kärtner); From Chinese to Cross-cultural Personality Inventory: A Combined Emic-Etic Approach to the Study of Personality in Culture (Fanny Cheung, Shu Fai Cheung and Weiqiao Fan); Cultural Unity and Diversity in Compensatory Control Processes (Aaron Kay and Daniel Sullivan); Creating Cultures between Arctics and Deserts (Evert Van de Vliert); and Macro Cultural Psychology: Its Development, Concerns, Politics, and Future Direction (Carl Ratner).

This monograph is a cultural history of the performance, reception and influence of the ancient Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. First produced in the late 5^th century BCE in Athens, this play was one of the most influential of all the canonical classical dramas in antiquity until the fourth century CE and in the period between the Renaissance and the early 20^th century. It dramatises the escape of the Greek siblings Iphigenia and Orestes, with Orestes' friend Pylades, from the barbarian community of the Taurians on the north coast of the Black Sea, bringing with them an ancient statue of Artemis. The book explores the extent and diversity of the play's cultural impact diachronically. Its first half documents and analyses the reasons for the popularity of the play in antiquity, appearing in Greek and Roman poetry, fiction, philosophy, vase-painting, murals, sarcophagus art, and on coins. The second half discusses the influence of the play since the Renaissance, with particular attention to Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, Frazer's The Golden Bough, Gilbert Murray's Edwardian translation and more recent feminist and postcolonial adaptations.

This book uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages. The book argues that the dissimilar surface characteristics of these languages (primarily English and Romance, but also Gungbe, Hungarian, Hebrew, Dutch, and others) can be explained by universal constraints, and that the same structures apply across the languages. The book focuses on main clause transformations—movement operations that can only take place in main clauses.