Oxford University Press

What kind of injury is an insult? Is its infliction determined by the insulter or the insulted? What does it reveal of the character of each and of the character of society and its conventions? What is its role in social and legal life (from play to jokes to ritual to war and from blasphemy to defamation to hate speech)? Jerome Neu's book...

Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, Masur captures the reactions, as the war was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott....

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Randolph Clarke examines free will in the context of determinism on the one hand, and the notion that this choice may in fact be random and arbitrary on the other. In the first half of the book, he provides a careful, 'conceptual' assessment of the various libertarian theories that do not appeal to agent causation, and contends that they fail to...

Romantic Indians considers the views that Britons, colonists, and North American Indians took of each other during a period in which these people were in a closer and more fateful relationship than ever before or since. It is, therefore, also a book about exploration, empire, and the forms of writing that exploration and empire gave rise to-in...