Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and...

This book examines the ethical obligations binding a doctor to her patient's confidences and asks Should those ethical obligations be recognized in the courtroom?. Increasingly, English law has shown a responsiveness to the need to accord respect to patient confidentiality. In practice this has involved the prohibition of unauthorized disclosure of medical records in national newspapers and the provision of special protection for data stored on computer. In one area, however, the law has been unwilling to protect patient confidences - the courtroom. A patient cannot stop her doctor from...

This book explores the reality of patient control and choice in health care, and analyses how decisions should be made on behalf of those deemed incapable of making them for themselves. The contributors are distinguished experts from the disciplines of medicine, ethics, theology and law. They look at the complex problem of autonomy and consent in health care and clinical research today and its impact on the vulnerable members of society. The essays move from the exploration of lingering paternalism in health care to the acute dilemmas of treatment of and research on new born babies. In...

The final reader in the Child Development in Social Context series shows how the study of child development is inevitably bound up in more ephemeral cultural ideas about the nature and needs of children and in the educational practices that rise from these ideas. Some readings point to the dangers which can arise from the meeting of science and cultural values, using for illustration studies of the role of psychological theory in reinforcing social attitudes to child care inside and outside the family. Other readings look at children's initiation into that relatively recent cultural...

Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the other': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt popular imagination.
Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire...

Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre.
Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers.
Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF...