Oxford University Press

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With a broad scope across the millennia, from high literature to popular culture, between page and stage and screen, this Very Short Introduction considers comedy not only as a literary genre, but also as a broader impulse at work in many other historical and contemporary forms of satire, parody, and play....

The White Man's World explores ideas of the white man during the last 100 years of        the British Empire. Working back from Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech of        1968, it discusses the racial assumptions that accompanied the founding of colonial        Australia, South Africa, and Rhodesia - colonies which were popularly known as...

Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary. His Common Sense was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution, while his   Rights of Man sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world. This collection brings together Paine's most powerful political writings in the first fully annotated edition of these works....

Easter Island, an isolated speck in the Pacific Ocean, produced one of the most fascinating and yet least understood of ancient cultures. Who were the inhabitants of this unimaginably remote volcanic island? Where did they come from? What, and equally intriguing, how did they erect the giant stone statues found all over the island? And what became...

Katalin Farkas comes to the defence of a Cartesian view of the mind. She argues that Descartes's influence is more beneficial, and his conception of the mind more deeply rooted in our understanding of ourselves, than most philosophers allow. She sheds light on a range of current issues, including personhood and the internalism/externalism debate....