In recent years, the well-established field of human anthropology has been put under scrutiny by the new data offered by science and technology. Scientific intervention into human life through organ transplants, euthanasia, genetic engineering, experiments connected to the genetic code and the genome, and varied other biotechnologies have placed ethical beliefs into question and created ethical dilemmas. These scientific inventions influence our views on birth and death, on the construction of the body and its technical reproducibility, and have problematized the concept of the human...

Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. Its three-part history traces the popularization of the 'criminal beast' metaphor in late sixteenth-century England, the troubling of the trope during the long eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century discovery of criminal atavism. With chapters on rogue pamphlets, Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Defoe and Swift, Godwin, Dickens, and Lombroso, the book illustrates how ideologically inscribed...

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking human rights seriously has never been more urgent than it is today. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity, and are intended to make a signficant contribution to this vital and enduring debate.

Ancient declamation defies easy categorization. It stands at the crossroads of several modern disciplines. Only within the past few decades the complexity of declamation and the promise inherent in its study have come to be recognized. The book contains 13 essays from international scholars, engages with the multidisciplinary nature of ancient declamation, focusing on the interactions in declamation between rhetoric, literature, law, and ethics.