The origins, nature, function and effects of imagination have engrossed writers, theologians, philosophers and practitioners of the arts across the ages; its influence on painting and music continues to be debated. It has been simultaneously feared as a dangerous, uncontrollable force and revered as the supreme visionary power. Cocking's Imagination is an exploration of the history of imagination from antiquity to the Renaissance. The book opens with a treatment of imagination in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Developments in the Middle Ages are traced, with particular attention to the...

Challenging our understanding of ideas about psychology in Shakespeare's time, Shakespeare's Imagined Persons proposes we should view his characters as imagined persons. A new reading of B.F. Skinner's radical behaviourism brings out how - contrary to the impression he created - Skinner ascribes an important role in human behaviour to cognitive activity. Using this analysis, Peter Murray demonstrates the consistency of radical behaviourism with the psychology of character formation and acting in writers from Plato to Shakespeare - an approach little explored in the current debates about...

Bringing together a range of critics working on the hispanic and francophone as well as anglophone post-colonial regions, this book aims to dislocate some of the commonly accepted cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries that have previously informed post-colonial studies. Collected essays include: cross-cultural comparisons from areas as diverse as Africa, Ireland and Latin America; analysis of specific texts as sites of border conflict; and revisions of post-colonial theoretical frameworks. A timely questioning of the categories of a critical field at the point when it is becoming...