Empire of Tea

Empire of Tea

Author: Markman Ellis

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1780234643

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Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike. One of the first truly global commodities and now the world’s most popular drink, tea has also, today, come to epitomize British culture and identity. This impressively detailed book offers a rich cultural history of tea, from its ancient origins in China to its spread around the world. The authors recount tea’s arrival in London and follow its increasing salability and import via the East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, inaugurating the first regular exchange—both commercial and cultural—between China and Britain. They look at European scientists’ struggles to understand tea’s history and medicinal properties, and they recount the ways its delicate flavor and exotic preparation have enchanted poets and artists. Exploring everything from its everyday use in social settings to the political and economic controversies it has stirred—such as the Boston Tea Party and the First Opium War—they offer a multilayered look at what was ultimately an imperial industry, a collusion—and often clash—between the world’s greatest powers over control of a simple beverage that has become an enduring pastime.


Fairytales—A World between the Imaginary

Fairytales—A World between the Imaginary

Author: Carmela Scala

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-02-05

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1443874957

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This book investigates Basile’s contribution to the establishment of fairytales as a literary genre; the focus is on his masterpiece Lo cunto de li Cunti. The volume examines Basile’s work’s debt to tradition and its influence on posterity, while also studying the author’s unique use of metaphors in the rich Neapolitan dialect. As this study reveals, metaphors in Lo cunto de li cunti are not used simply as a mean of embellishment; rather they are employed as a way to inform the reader of the rich folkloric tradition of Naples during the baroque times, as well as of Basile’s discontent with the socio-political situation of his times. The use of metaphors is so pervasive that one could argue that the book is itself a metaphor through which Basile conveys his ideals and his utopia of a liberated Naples and a more just society; as well as the importance of the Neapolitan dialect and its linguistic registers. Furthermore, the book also proposes a new interpretation of the female characters of the tales and it instigates a discussion on gender roles in both modern and past societies.


Emergent Evolution

Emergent Evolution

Author: David Blitz

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9401580421

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Emergent evolution combines three separate but related claims, whose background, origin, and development I trace in this work: firstly, that evolution is a universal process of change, one which is productive of qualitative novelties; secondly, that qualitative novelty is the emergence in a system of a property not possessed by any of its parts; and thirdly, that reality can be analyzed into levels, each consisting of systems characterized by significant emergent properties. In part one I consider the background to emergence in the 19th century discussion of the philosophy of evolution among its leading exponents in England - Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace, and G. J. Romanes. Unlike the scientific aspect of the debate which aimed to determine the factors and causal mechanism of biological evolution, this aspect of the debate centered on more general problems which form what I call the "philosophical framework for evolutionary theory." This considers the status of continuity and discontinuity in evolution, the role of qualitative and quantitative factors in change, the relation between the organic and the inorganic, the relation between the natural and the supernatural, the mind-body problem, and the scope of evolution, including its extension to ethics and morals.