This chapter investigates how Percy Shelley’s poetry of speech draws on a Darwinian materialist understanding of the body and can be read alongside John Thelwall’s theory of rhythmus in its figuring of speech as unstoppable action. Focussing on Shelley’s later works, including A Defence of Poetry, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, and The Mask of Anarchy, this chapter draws out the ways that materialist and embodied models of speech production underpin Shelley’s figuring of poetry as a force of change, and allow him to blur the boundaries between art and science, aesthetics and politics, the internal and the external. It examines how such understandings of the communicative power of voice as a physical and material force that can be felt as action or movement challenge the notion that Shelley’s later poems are indicative of the failure of both poetry as a means of communication and utterance as a means of effecting change.

The psychiatric interview is an important tool in the field of psychiatry, allowing the clinician to connect with the patient and to gather information that will help determine a treatment plan. The skills for this crucial assessment are not necessarily “learned on the job,” but rather should be taught with dedicated time and attention to ensure that interviewers become both confident and effective. Continuous self-reflection is essential for improvement, and is important for both inexperienced trainees and experienced mental health clinicians alike.

This chapter provides for principles, guidance, and illustrations about the way multimodality is conceptualized and operationalized within Conversation Analysis. It discusses the foundations of CA multimodal studies and shows how multimodal analysis can be conducted, on the basis of several empirical exemplary cases. The introduction of this chapter focuses on the conceptualization and definition of multimodality, and their methodological consequences. The subsequent sections guide readers through empirical analyses of various phenomena that have progressively expanded multimodal analysis, beginning with apparently simple co-speech gestures, and showing how they actually involve the entire body, continuing with the temporality of multiactivity, the spatiality of mobile activities, and the materiality of multisensoriality. These phenomena constitute exemplary areas of study in which the body features in a crucial way, and in which the interplay of linguistic and embodied resources provide for the accountability and intersubjectivity of the ongoing action in interaction.

This is the first of two chapters concerned with the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision. In this chapter, I trace the history of circumcision as a trope for Jewish difference in European Christian thought and consider its symbolic role in debates about the legal equality of Jews. Christian thinkers spent much time pondering Jewish circumcision and what it told them about the supposedly ‘carnal’, particularistic, and anachronistic nature of Jews. Apart from constituting a trope for what differentiated Jews from Christians, the bodily sign eventually also became enmeshed in discussions about the possibility of Jewish emancipation where it offered a site to debate the fitness of Jews to become citizens. However, regardless of how much Christians disdained circumcision, they mostly respected the Jewish right to circumcise and due to a curious twist of history, some Christian societies eventually even embraced circumcision themselves. More recently, circumcision has emerged as a human rights issue and I explore the role of Christian ambivalence in contemporary calls for a ban on the practice in the name of children’s rights and gender equality.

This chapter provides an overview of the innovative protesting techniques of the Kazakh Spring and the Oyan, Qazaqstan movement. The interplay between the repressive law-enforcement agencies and the creative protesting techniques and narratives protestors had to find is at the heart of this chapter. I argue that the evolution of the protestors’ movements led to slow but consistent adaptation on the part of the police and secret police, and all those involved in the physical and emotional harassment of the protestors. Through interviews, I focus on how the body of the protestor and the public square become the two prime spaces for aggressive coercion and resistance. This pushes protestors to stage bodiless performances with anonymous posters and anonymous online activism, on the one hand. And on the other hand, it pushes law-enforcement officers to find aggravated techniques of torture. They came up with the kettling strategy, whereby protestors are trapped for hours in the heat or severe cold without access to basic amenities, water, food, or shelter. Other techniques of torture included kidnapping, intimidation, and even sexual violence.

This chapter finds in the Bible a diversity of views about sexuality, gender, marriage, divorce, celibacy, virginity, and the human body. It next traces in early Christianity an aversion towards same-sex relationships, abortion, and contraception, and a growing gynophobia combined with a growing devotion to the Virgin Mary. It discusses the association between sexuality and original sin, and between misogyny and the invention of the witch, together with the negation of sexual pleasure, the confinement of sexual relations to procreation within marriage, and the struggles of monks with their erotic desires. A painful incompatibility between the sexual practices of colonized peoples and missionary expectations and behaviour is noted. Through to the present time, different models of marriage and attitudes towards same-sex relationships are found within Christianity. The early diversity of views about sexuality is shown to be unresolved, re-appearing in the culture wars of the present century. While attitudes to cohabitation, divorce and masturbation are generally more liberal than in the past, global Christianity still retains a strong antipathy towards loving same-sex relationships, abortion, and even the ordination of women.

This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

This chapter introduces the micro-sociological lenses to the study of peace talks. The chapter discusses how bodily and facial interaction shapes peace diplomacy and its potential for generating social bonds between participants. The chapter maps six different spaces in peace diplomacy: formal negotiations, informal space, formalized informal space, shuttle diplomacy space, press conferences, and virtual space; and how these make the character and dynamics of interaction possible in peace talks. The chapter shows that under the right spatial and interactional circumstances, peace talks can generate social bonds between the involved parties. However, the leaders of the respective parties often do not take part in peace talks and thus they are not the ones generating social bonds. The chapter further discusses the importance of interpersonal trust versus trust in the process, as well as how the social bonding being generated at the peace table is transferred to the society at large.

This is the first of three chapters showing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation techniques in genre-defining novels of the Romantic period. I give an account of anti-caricature rhetoric in the critical reception of Jane Austen’s novels, from contemporaneous reviews and responses to the twentieth century. I describe Austen’s particular moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-indulgence, first examining instances of the word ’caricature’ in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, then close-reading depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, as instances of literary realism’s ’explained caricatures’.