Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

Stylistics and children’s literature

This article constitutes an introduction to the five articles that appear in this special issue. This framing process starts by highlighting the sparse, yet important, work that has been conducted over the past 20 years on children’s literature in the field of stylistics. The focus in the article then turns to a more general discussion on the language of children’s literature. Here, in this chronological overview of language usage in books written for children, an outline is sketched from the writers and philosophers of the enlightenment up to contemporary debates on literacy, cognition and theory of mind. In the section that follows, the five studies that appear in this special issue are briefly synopsized. What becomes apparent is the wide range of methodological approaches that have been taken by the scholars in question to analyze the texts that are under investigation, in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The article ends with a plea for more stylistic work to be conducted in the areas of both children’s literature and young adult fiction. This is especially pertinent because stylisticians possess the key linguistic and analytic skills and tools to help, in interdisciplinary settings, to address current social, emotional and cognitive challenges pertaining to child development through literacy and through reading in particular.

Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History

This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.

Embodying Ubuntu, through the Physical Journal as an antidote to the effects of the Anthropocene.

This Article will explore, how embodying an interpretation of the South African concept of  Ubuntu, through apraxisviamyconceptofthePhysicalJournal,canbecomeanantidote to the alienating effects of the Anthropocene. The current effects of the Anthropocene, areunderpinned by the ideology of liberal capitalism; which has been accelerating itseconomic indifference to the Eco-scene since the enlightenment. This much heraldedperiod in the 18th century, saw people with my Yoruba cultural heritage, as commodities to be bought andsold.Thus,Iwould havebeenseen,atthetimeof theenlightenment,asaresourcetobe exploited along with the environment and livestock. As a consumable resource, Iwould not have been considered as having any rights to the lofty claims proposed by the  enlightenment philosophers of equality and more specifically: life, liberty, and property.

Carl von Linné: The Development of the Idea of Binomial Nomenclature

Due to binomial classification system defined by Carl von Linné, it has been shown that living things that were thought to be independent from each other are actually in a relationship. This "binomial classification" idea corresponds to a leap in the history of human thought. Carl von Linné's original idea is a product of the specific conditions of the period, particularly the renaissance and reform movements and geographical discoveries, rather than an idea he produced alone. These movements are part of a chain of ideas that stretches from antiquity to the Medieval and then to the period called the Enlightenment. The aforementioned transformations generally affected the scientist, albeit indirectly, even in geographies far from Sweden, where Carl von Linné spent most of his life. As such, the binomial classification system stands before us as a result of scientific breakthroughs in central Europe. In this study, it will be tried to be explained by taking the opus magnum of Carl von Linne as an example, taking into account the course of scientific developments, which we can attribute to the European civilization, and the philosophical and social texture.