Oxford University Press

Since its beginnings, opera has depended on recognition as a central aspect of both plot and theme. Though a standard feature of opera, recognition-a moment of new awareness that brings about a crucial reversal in the action-has been largely neglected in opera studies. In Recognition in Mozart's Operas, musicologist Jessica Waldoff draws on a broad...

In this fascinating book, John Haiman argues that 'cheap talk', in which we don't mean what we say (for instance, by the use of sarcasm and irony) is central to the way we now talk. He traces this radical change in our use of language to the emergence of a post-modern 'divided self' who is hyper-conscious that what he or she is saying has been said...

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Despite recent upheavals, Japan remains one of the dominant economic powers at the end of the twentieth century. Yet the Japanese economy is one of the most misunderstood phenomena in the modern world. Aimed at graduate courses on Japan, this book will be indispensable both for students and instructors alike. Lucid explanations and comprehensive...

Brian Davies offers a full-scale introduction to Aquinas's philosophy, collecting in one volume the best recent essays on Aquinas by some of the world's foremost scholars of medieval philosophy. Taken together they illuminate the entire spectrum of Aquinas's thought: philosophy of nature, logic, metaphysics, natural theology, philosophy of mind,...

Savages within the Empire explores how Britons perceived and represented American Indians during a time when the empire and its constituent peoples began to capture the nation's sustained attention for the first time. Troy Bickham considers an array of contexts,including newspapers, imperial policy, museum exhibits, the Enlightenment, missionary...