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  • - Poetry and the Limits of Mimesis
    af Andrew Mattison
    667,95 kr.

    When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mindpictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

  • - Food and Philosophy
    af Raymond D. Boisvert
    633,95 - 1.190,95 kr.

    I Eat, Therefore I Think breaks new ground by introducing philosophy via an activity central to life: eating. Building on the original meaning of philosophy as love of wisdom, it explains how the search for wisdom can best succeed by addressing not just the mind, but the entire human being. Eating, an activity that integrates physiological, social, religious, cultural, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions, offers an opportunity to re-think fundamental questions. The result: surprising and novel ways to approach art, religion, knowledge, ethics, and even democracy. The book outlines a new philosophy for our time. As such, it will be of interest to people curious about the topic of food, to those interested in learning about philosophy, and to those who seek new ideas as guides for living meaningful lives in an intelligible world.

  • - History, Theory, Practice
     
    1.364,95 kr.

    Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice brings together leading researchers from Canada, the United States, and Europe in an interdisciplinary collection of essays to chart the future of critical inquiry in gender and comedy studies.

  • - Progressivism, Prostitution, and Performance in the United States, 1888-1917
    af Barbara Antoniazzi
    674,95 - 1.293,95 kr.

    The Wayward Woman takes a fresh look at the Progressive Era, recasting the turn-of-the-century debate on gender roles and prostitution. Recapitulating and transcending extant studies of female delinquency, prostitution literature, and Progressive womanhood, this work understands ';female waywardness' as the critical intersection between the rise of female emancipation and the panic inspired by the period's obsession with sexual enslavement. Concurrently, it explores the Progressive ambivalence about compassion and control which unfolded alongside a war on prostitution that traversed the realms of law, medicine, literature and politics. Drawing on theories of performativity the author develops ';the wayward woman' as a capacious analytical category that encompasses all women who, countering the residual injunction of domesticity, brought new forms of femininity into the light of the public sphere: the activist, the professional and the divorcee, but also the female breadwinner, the charity girl and the urban woman of coloramong many others. The book investigates the continuum of waywardness that stretches from the high-minded New Woman to the ever-victimized ';white slave' as a cultural battlefield where numerous women stepped across the boundaries of class, race and respectability to claim new public personas. At the same time it reads the preoccupation with white slavery both as a symptom of and an antidote to this wave of change. Through an innovating collection of sources which brings together sociological writings, novels, plays, movies and legal documents, the book rearticulates the tensions of the Progressive Era between gender roles, blackness and whiteness, reformers and reformed, the citizens and the state. The Wayward Woman will be of much interest to students and scholars in the fields of American studies, women studies and performance studies.

  •  
    1.510,95 kr.

    Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrepresented his faith. T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition presents the subject of Eliot's religious beliefs in rich detail, from a number of different perspectives, giving readers the opportunity to see the topic in its complexity and fullness.

  • - Baroque and Neobaroque
    af Mary Ann Frese Witt
    490,95 - 1.192,95 kr.

    Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrou's The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean and Jean Genet's The Blacks; Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion comique with Tony Kushner's The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Bernini's The Impresario with Luigi Pirandello's theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeare's Hamlet with Pirandello's Henry IV and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Moliere's Impromptu de Versailles with ';impromptus' by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eugene Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.

  • - Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment
     
    1.450,95 kr.

    This anthology hosts a collection of essays examining the role of comics as portals for historical and academic content, while keeping the approach on an international market versus the American one.

  • - Queering Patriarchy
    af Helena Gurfinkel
    672,95 - 1.360,95 kr.

    Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy traces the representations of outlaw fathers, or queer patriarchs, and their relationships with their queer sons, in a particular literary tradition: mid-to-late-Victorian and twentieth-century British fiction and memoir. Specifically, I look at such representations in Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne (1858) and The Prime Minister (1875-76) (while also drawing on An Autobiography (1883) and The Duke's Children (1880)); Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (published in 1901), Henry James's ';The Lesson of the Master' (1888), J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself (written in the 1930s and published in 1968), E. M. Forster's ';Little Imber' (1961) (with an occasional detour into The Longest Journey (1907), Howards End (1909), and Maurice (published in 1971)), and Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell (1998). In the coda, I consider the implications of including transgender, transnational female-to-male fathers of color in the ranks of queer patriarchy and discuss two contemporary novels, Jackie Kay's Trumpet (1998, Scotland) and Patricia Powell's The Pagoda (1998, Jamaica and the United States), as well asbrieflyan episode an episode of the television show The L-Word (2008) and the documentary U-People (2007). The term ';queer patriarchy' has two components. The first one is a non-traditional, primarilybut not exclusivelynon-heterosexual, pervasively present, and culturally important, paternal subjectivity. The second one is the bond between such queer paternal figures and their sons, biological and non-biological. This study pays attention primarily to the relationship between psyche, language, and ideology, but it will join a larger conversation about the changing roles of men in general and fathers in particular, which is taking place outside of the field of literary studies.

  • - Well-Being in Literary Studies
     
    797,95 kr.

    This book is a collection of critical essays that examine a radical shift in focus and orientation. In the challenge to the hermeneutics of suspicion, the adoption of alternative reading strategies, and the investigation of well-being, this collection is an analogue of a new discourse that has immensely enriched literary studies in the last decade.

  • - Making Lives and Making Meaning
     
    798,95 kr.

    This book showcases ways in which the theory of Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) has been applied in a variety of settings. The title reflects the three sections of the book in which CMM is used with individuals and groups toward making meaning together in constructive and generative ways to make better social worlds through communication.

  • - A Bloody Journey
    af Barbara Pezzotti
    693,95 - 1.357,95 kr.

    By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities, but rather she has considered the different forms of (social) landscape in which Italian crime novels are set. Through the analysis of the way in which cities, the urban sprawl, and islands are represented in the serial novels of 11 of the most important contemporary crime writers in Italy of the 1990s, Pezzotti articulates the different ways in which individual authors appropriate the structures and tropes of the genre to reflect the social transformations and dysfunctions of contemporary Italy. In so doing, this volume also makes a case for the genre as an instrument of social critique and analysis of a still elusive Italian national identity, thus bringing further evidence in support of the thesis that in Italy detective fiction has come to play the role of the new social novel.

  • af Joseph P. Jordan
    665,95 - 1.123,95 kr.

    As its startling and aggressive title suggests, Dickens Novels as Verse is no standard work of literary criticism. It is, in fact, altogether new and original. Jordan likens the experience of some of the great Dickens novels, particularly the later ones (namely, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend) to the experience of lyric verse. The point is not that Dickens novels could ever be mistaken for lyric poems, but that the experience of some of the best of Dickens's novels, despite their undoubted sprawl, is like the experience of lyric poemsis so because the novels are made up of the same things that make great verse great: intricate, largely unnoticeable tissues of alliteration-like patterning that net across the work and give narratively insignificant coherence to it. Dickens Novels as Verse meticulously describes these book-length patterns in clear, lucid prose. Its three chapters, each focused on a single Dickens novel, are full of close analyses that can be immediately used by teachers, students, and all other readers of Dickens to grasp why Dickens always seems to be a greater writer than the quality of his ideas might lead us to expect.

  • - A Nation Divided
    af Marco Baliani
    688,95 kr.

    Body of State offers a translation of Marco Baliani's acclaimed dramatic monologue, Corpo di stato, concerning the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the terrorist Red Brigades. Corpo di stato was commissioned by Italian state television in 1998 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the ';Moro Affair.' Baliani's monologue, refracted through the prism of the intervening twenty years, consists of a merciless self-examination, alternately anguished and affectionate, in an effort to confront his generations complicity in the dissolution of Italian politics in the wake of the national trauma of Moros murder. Through over a hundred performances since its 1998 debut, the piece has evolved in response to the forceful reactions of Italian audiences. The first draft of this English translation offered the supertitles for performances in Balianis 2009 U.S. tour, and was subsequently expanded to reflect the most recent version of the text.This unique volume features a translation of the dramatic monologue, embedding it in a context that richly documents the events. The volume includes a preface by translator and performance studies scholar Ron Jenkins, a critical introduction, Baliani's thoughts about the 1998 production for Italian television, an interview with Baliani and his artistic collaborator, Maria Maglietta, and the afterword they wrote in light of the 2009 tour. In addition, Body of State provides precious documentation in the form of reviews, contributed by scholars, students, and spectators, of Baliani's 2009 North American tour.A celebrated author and performer, Marco Baliani is well known as one of the originators of the ';theater of narration.' Starting in 1978, his first performances grew directly from his engagement in radical politics. In 1989 he adapted Heinrich von Kleist's novella, Kohlhaas (1989), into a riveting monologue which he performed on a bare stage, sitting on a chair for ninety minutes. Kohlhaas marked his passage to a ';pure' theater of narration and is today a classic of the genre. Since Kohlhaas, Baliani has shown interest in social, political, and literary themes. Recurring in his work are the psychological and ethical tensions that arise when the search for justice clashes with power or social injustice.

  • - A Documentary History with Commentaries
     
    1.450,95 kr.

    This documentary history is intended for the specialist and non-specialist alike. The introductions to the book's sections, together with introductions to each document, provide a general history of the war. The contents cover the pre-war, war, and post-war periods in Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Spain, the Philippines, and the United States. Included are documents on the main battles and diplomatic history of the war, along with internal situations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Spain, the Philippines, and the United States.

  • - An Early Modern Autobiography
    af Sonia Perez-Villanueva
    1.445,95 kr.

    The Life of Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun: An Early Modern Autobiography examines Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alferez as a form of autobiography through a comparative study with early-modern secular life narratives: the picaresque novels La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades (anonymous), La pcara Justina by Francisco Lopez de beda, the chronicle Relacion que dio Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaescido en las Indias en la armada donde yva por governador Pnfilo de Narvez desde el ao de veynte y siete hasta el ao de treinta y seis que bolvio a Sevilla con tres de su compaa by Cabeza de Vaca and the soldier's narrative Vida, nacimiento, padres, y crianza del Capitn Alonso de Contreras natural de Madrid Cavallero del orden de San Juan Comendador de una de sus encomiendas en Castilla, escrita por el mismo by Alonso de Contreras. Two questions are addressed: How is Vida y sucesos similar to or different from picaresque novels, chronicles of the New World, and soldiers' narratives? How are the similarities and differences between Vida y sucesos and these forms of writing related to theoretical parameters for an autobiography? In order to conduct this comparative analysis, four theoretical parameters are established for assessing autobiographical texts. These parameters (coincidence of narrator and protagonist, historical referentiality, whether the subjective narration has a plausible basis in the experience and belief structure of the narrator and the intention of the narrator to tell an autobiographical truth) are based upon the critical approach of hybridity and intersubjectivity, but also draw upon related theoretical work. This book argues that Vida y sucesos should be considered as a form of autobiography, with the understanding that autobiography is an intersubjective and hybrid form or a forma fronteriza.

  • - Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist
    af William Baker & Jeanette Roberts Shumaker
    1.145,95 kr.

    This is the first book-length study of the work of contemporary writer Bernard Kops. Born on November 28, 1926 to Dutch-Jewish immigrants, Bernard Kops became famous after the production of his play The Hamlet of Stepney Green: A Sad Comedy with Some Songs in 1958. This play, like much of his work, focuses on the conflicts between young and old. Identified as an ';angry young man,' Kops, like his contemporaries John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, and Harold Pinter, belonged to the so-called new wave of British drama that emerged in the mid-1950s.Kops went on to create important documentaries about the Blitz and living in London during the early 1940s. He has written two autobiographies, over ten novels, many journalistic pieces, and more than forty plays for TV, stage, and radio. A prolific poet, Kops has authored a long pamphlet poem and eight poetry collections. Now in his mid-80s, the prolific and versatile Kops still produces, his creativity undimmed by age.

  • - Justice Will Be Made
    af Patricia Arneson
    660,95 - 1.283,95 kr.

    Communicative Engagement and Social Liberation: Justice Will Be Made recognizes limitations in contemporary understandings that separate history and rhetoric. Drawing together ontological and epistemic perspectives to allow for a fuller appreciation of communication in shaping lived-experience, facets of the two academic subjects are united in acts of communicative engagement.Communicative engagement draws from Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's writings on the human condition; extends the communicative praxis of philosopher Calvin O. Schrag by reuniting theoria-poesis-praxis; expands Ramsey Eric Ramsey's writings to provide ground for vitalizing social liberation; and includes the work of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault as well as philosophers of communication including Lenore Langsdorf, Michael J. Hyde, Corey Anton, and others who guide a recollection of the significance of poesis in human communication. Myrtilla Miner, Mary White Ovington, and Jessie Daniel Ames dedicated their lives to being out-of-place and speaking out-of-turn to alter the way humanity was understood by members of society at large. The lived-experiences of these historical figures assists readers in recognizing how creativity (poesis) can potentially enable liberation from restrictive social circumstances.

  • - Back to the Future
     
    1.621,95 kr.

    Toward a Cultural Archive of la Movida revisits the cultural and social milieu in which laMovida, an explosion of artistic production in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Spain, was articulated discursively, aesthetically, socially, and politically. Of interest to both researchers and academics interested in Spanish culture and the processes of political and cultural transition from dictatorship and democracy through the cultural phenomenon known as la Movida, this book offers an expanded critical approach to the study of contemporary Spanish cultural studies.

  • - Forgotten Master of Markets
    af Paul Ryscavage
    1.453,95 kr.

    Norman Bruce Ream was born in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1844, the son of a farmer. He exhibited a commercial sense, but the Civil War interrupted his ambitions. Wounded twice, he returned home a hero.After some unsuccessful business ventures out west, he went to Chicago in 1871 and became a commission merchant in the Union Stockyards. A few years later, he moved uptown and traded grains and provisions in the pits of the Board of Trade. Money poured in. Indeed, by 1886 he was a millionaire (also married and the father of several children). He started investing in real estate, urban transit companies, railroad stockand began consolidating and financing enterprises.At century's end, he was traveling to New York City, impressing financiers like J. Pierpont Morgan. Indeed, he helped Morgan put together the U.S. Steel Corporation and the International Harvester Company, served on many boards, and even advised Morgan during the panic of 1907. But life grew turbulent. Public sentiment soured towards Wall Street and the wealthy. This, along with the presumed indiscretions of some of his children, kept his name in the press. He died in 1915, and gradually, his life was forgotten.

  • - Founder of North Carolina Central University
    af Lenwood G. Davis
    1.283,95 kr.

    James Edward Shepard was an African-American leader between 1900 and 1947. He was, however, more than a race leader. Shepard was a minister, politician, pharmacist, entrepreneur, world traveler, civil servant, businessman, one of the founders of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (the worlds largest African-American Life Insurance Company), president of the International Denominational Sunday School Convention, one of the founders of Mechanics and Farmers Bank of Durham, President of the North Carolina Teachers Association, and a visionary.Dr. Shepard was active in several social and fraternal organizations. He was Grand Mast of The Prince Hall Free and Accepted Masons of North Carolina, Grand Patron of the Eastern Star of North Carolina, and Secretary of Finances for the Knights of Pythia. He was on the Board of Trustees of Lincoln Hospital of Durham, the Oxford (NC) Colored Orphanage, member of the Executive Committee of the North Carolina Agricultural Society, and Field Superintendent of Work Among Negros for the International Sunday School Association. He was also an educator, historian, and scholar. He was founder and president of North Carolina Central University, the first State-supported Liberal Arts College for African Americans in the United States.

  • - Historical Studies of Philosophy and Science in Adversity
     
    1.516,95 kr.

    The history of Western philosophy and science is marked by numerous moments when a major development has emerged from conditions that are manifestly adverse to intellectual activity. This book surveys a wide range of cases, and considers how these achievements were possible and how adversity helped shape the ideas that emerged.

  • af Erica L. Johnson
    805,95 kr.

    Caribbean Ghostwriting addresses a question central to the fields of postcolonial, feminist, and African diasporic studies:how are we to know the colonial past when the lives of colonized and enslaved people were largely written out of history? Caribbean authors Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Dionne Brand address the silences and gaps of historiography by fleshing out overlooked historical figures in literary form. These authors do not simply reconstruct lost lives, but rather they foreground the tension between the real, material traces of peoples lives and the fact of their erasure. In novels that are at once historical, biographical, and artistic, they portray real but sparsely documented and therefore haunting histories through a strategy identifiable as ghostwriting. Erica L. Johnson defines ghostwriting as an important genre of Caribbean literature through which authors literally ghostwrite stories for lost historical figures even while they poetically preserve the unspeakable nature of the archival lacunae their novels engage.

  • - Diversity in College Fraternities and Sororities
     
    1.506,95 kr.

    This volume draws from a variety of disciplines in an attempt to provide a holistic analysis of diversity within collegiate fraternal life. It also brings a wide range of scholarly approaches to the inquiry of diversity within college fraternities and sororities. It explores not only from whence these groups have come but where they are currently situated and what issues arise as they progress.

  • - Victorian Aesthetisim and the Woman Writer
    af Patricia Rigg
    1.021,95 kr.

    This book treats the literary work of Julia Augusta Webster within the context of Webster's participation in nineteenth century British aestheticism. It makes use of extensive archival materials to provide context for a study of Webster's literary work, beginning with her first volume of poetry Blanche Lisle and concluding with her posthumously published Mother and Daughter sonnets. In tracing the trajectory of Websters development as an aestheticist poet, Patricia Rigg extends Webster scholarship into areas of the writer's work not previously explored.

  • af Lisa Beckstrand
    880,95 kr.

    Despite critical interest in the role of women in the French Revolution, there is no single, comprehensive study of the works of the two most prolific women writers of the period¿Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland. At a time when politicians were molding public policy concerning life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and constituting criteria for citizenship, increasing numbers of women in Paris were clamoring for rights. New medical and philosophical theories redefining female nature were trotted out to justify women's continued exclusion from full political participation. Such theories focused on the female body as the locus of women's intellectual inadequacies and promulgated the idea that women who acted outside of the confines of their physiological nature were considered desensitized and unfeminine. Deviant Women of the French Revolution and the Rise of Feminism aims to uncover the work of those women who challenged prevailing views of female nature, sought social reforms, and were deemed "deviant" for their writing and/or activism during the French Revolution.

  • - Gender and Editing in the Contemporary Novel
    af Earl G. Ingersoll
    951,95 kr.

    Waiting for the End examines two dozen contemporary novels as demonstrations of the continuing concern with the gender of ending in narrative. Traditional concepts of the role of ending came under question in the later twentieth century, as feminists began to argue that the structure of "rising action" and "climax" was patently masculinist. The effort to theorize alternatives to that structure was echoed by contemporary novelists, male as well as female, who sought to complicate conventional notions of ending. Often those complications of ending(s) have spoken to a growing awareness that ending in narrative is artificial and that plot structure and ending need to make gestures toward the reader's sense that while narrative may end, what narrative attempts to represent will always evade the artifice of fiction.

  • - A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works
    af Sabrina Hassumani
    745,95 kr.

    This is a close textual analysis of Rushdie's five major novels: Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Moor's Last Sigh. Rushdie recognizes that practicing identity politics leads to nativism and nationalism, categories he rejects because they merely invert the colonizer/colonized binary, leaving violent hierarchies intact. His impulse is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so to clear a 'new' postmodern space. This text employs post-structuralist/ postmodern theory not only to address the issues of representation that Rushdie raises in his major political novels, but also to facilitate a discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel.

  • - Studies in Federalism (Leicester, England)
    af Michael Burgess
    778,95 kr.

    This volume is a review of both ideas and practice concerning federalism in Britain and Ireland, the Empire, and Europe, furnishing an unusual perspective on BritainOs changing political and constitutional relations from 1870 to the present day.

  • - Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920-1950
    af Carlos Mondragon
    1.192,95 kr.

    In Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920-1950, Carlos Mondragn, offers an introduction to the ideas of notable Protestant writers in Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite their national and denominational differences, Mondragn argues that Protestant intellectuals developed a coherent set of ideas about freedom of religion and thought, economic justice, militarism, and national identity. This was a period when Protestants comprised a very small proportion of Latin America's total population; their very marginality compelled them to think creatively about their identity and place in Latin American society. Accused of embracing a foreign faith, these Protestants struggled to define national identities that had room for religious diversity and liberty of conscience. Marginalized and persecuted themselves, Latin America's Protestants articulated a liberating message decades before the appearance of Catholic Liberation Theology.

  • - A Styles of Thinking Approach
    af Alessandro Zir
    138,95 kr.

    As it happens with other early-Modern corpora, the descriptive texts from sixteenth-century encounters of the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil are well-known for their strangeness. In them we find references to entities like monsters and demons, bizarre descriptions, and odd classification systems of plants and animals. Modern scholars usually dismiss these elements as mere eccentricities. Instead, this book takes these elements seriously. They are focused on and tackled with a theoretical tool-styles of thinking- developed in the fields of philosophy and history of science. By doing so the book aims to unveil epistemological and ontological issues in which colonial and post-colonial studies are entangled, and which have a relevance that goes beyond debates concerning, for instance, the formation of Brazil's cultural identity. This book contributes to Luso-Brazilian studies, science studies, and the history of the early-modern period. The notion of "e;styles of thinking"e; as presented and used in it benefitted from the many discussions about philosophy and history of science that emerged since the 1980s, with authors such as Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison, who have already done much reassessing critically what is best in the work of previous authors such as Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault.This book considers that the well-known puzzling passages of the corpus of the Portuguese have a fictional and figurative character that acquires full intelligibility in view of literary and mystical traditions typical of the late Renaissance, and influential over the Portuguese. Nature is understood as emerging from an excessive source which permanently overflows it and which is impossible to refer to and depict literally. The book points to the fact that such an idea would connect the Portuguese with other peculiar pre-Modern and post-Modern authors with similar ontological insights: from the neo-Platonists to Boccaccio, Nietzsche, and more recently, Derrida.