Edited by Giulia Gaimari and Catherine Keen

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’.

Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career.

Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

London: UCL Press, 2019. 192p.

By Bruce Jackson

"Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me" is considered one of the great, classic collections of African-American literature and folklore. Originally published  in 1974, it quickly gained the reputation as a classic collection of black folk poetry. This book will delight students of African-American culture and folklore, and anyone who enjoys the double entendres and hidden meanings found in the oral tradition, from its African roots to contemporary rap.

London; New York: Routledge, 2017. 246p. First published 1974 by Harvard University Press.

By David John Brennan

In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet. Despite their success, such Frankensteinian pursuits proved rife with consequence for the men. Doubts and questions plagued them: What does it mean to be a poet if your work is not your own? Who is best fit to lay claim to a parcel of poetic property that was collaboratively crafted and bequeathed to a fictitious Poet? How does one kill a Poet born of one’s own hand? Blending critical examination with jocular playlets-in-verse featuring the authors of the two books in baffled conversation.

Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2016. 160p.

By Kingsley Amis

From the cover: Throughout his notable career as a novelist, poet and literary critic, Kingsley Amis was often concerned — the less understanding some might say obsessed--with the use and abuse of the English language. Do we know what the words we employ really mean? Do we have the right to use them fi we don't? Should an "exciting" new program be allowed to "hit” your television screen? When is it acceptable to split an infinitive? And just when is one allowed to begin a sentence with "and"? The enemies of fine prose may dismiss such issues as tiresome and pedantic, but Kingsley Amis, like all great novelists, depended upon these very questions to separate the truth from the lie, both in literature and in life. A Parthian shot from one of the most important figures in postwar British fiction, this volume represents Amis's last word on the state of the language. More frolicsome than Fowler's Modern Usage, lighter than the Oxford English Dictionary, and replete with the strong opinions that have made Amis so popular- and so controversial….”

NY. St. Martin’s Press. 1997. 272p.

Prepared by the Editorial Staff of the University of Chicago Press.

For over seventy-live years the University of Chicago Press Manual of Style has been the standard reference tool for authors, editors, copywriters, and proofreaders. Updated many times since 1906, it now goes into its thirteenth edition—the first revision since 1969, and the first to introduce a change in title. Bowing to what has become nearly universal usage, we now call the Manual what everybody else calls it. The Chicago Manual of Style—or, for short, The Chicago Manual.

Two pervasive features characterize the present edition: it reflects the impact of the new technology on the entire editing and publishing process, and it spells out, in greater detail and with many more examples, the procedures with which it deals. It is, in short, much more a “how-to” book for authors and editors than was its predecessor. In chapter 2, on manuscript preparation and copyediting, for example, new sections have been added on how to mark a manuscript and how to mark type specifications on a script. Chapter 12 (“Tables”), completely rewritten, begins with advice on how to make a table from raw data. Chapters 15 through 17, on documentation, have been reorganized and greatly expanded, offering many more alternative methods of citation and a wealth of examples. In chapter 18 (“Indexes”), clear step-by-step
procedures for the mechanics of index making are set forth. The terminology and methodology of technological advances (in word processing, computerized electronic typesetting, and the like) are reflected most prominently in chapter 20, “Composition, Printing, and Binding” (new to this edition), and in the Glossary. Other notable features of the present edition are chapter 4 (“Rights and Permissions”), rewritten in light of the new copyright law, and chapter 9 (“Foreign Languages”), which includes a new table of diacritics, a pinyin (Chinese) conversion chart, and data on several more languages.

Throughout, The Chicago Manual aims to give clear and straightforward guidelines for preparing and editing copy—with the emphasis on the sensible, the practical, and the economical. As did its predecessors, the thirteenth edition of the Manual states the style preferences of the University of Chicago Press and reflects the current practices and requirements of the great majority of American publishers.

Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1982. 718p.