Oxford University Press strana 8 z 246

This best-selling and market-leading dictionary contains over 11,000 clear and concise entries, covering all aspects of medical science. Written by a team of medical experts, the entries are accessible and jargon-free, and complemented by over 140 illustrations and diagrams. The 7th edition has been fully revised and updated to cover changes in this fast-moving field. Entries on techniques and equipment, drugs, general medical practice, health service organization, and treatment have all been reviewed, and updated where necessary. The dictionary has also been expanded in many areas, notably medical ethics, clinical governance, emergency medicine, pathology, and diagnosis. Selling over 650,000 copies in previous editions, this is an indispensable reference guide for students, as well as those working in the medical and allied professions. It is also an invaluable home reference guide for the general reader.

This best-selling dictionary is a comprehensive source of clear, jargon-free legal information. It focuses primarily on English law and provides a one-stop source of information for any of the many countries that base their legal system on English law. Over 4,300 entries define and explain the major terms, concepts, processes, and organization of the legal system. Now greatly improved and expanded for the 6th edition, the dictionary boasts a wealth of new features including recommended weblinks, feature entries on key topics, and greatly expanded coverage of European and International law, as well as key jurisprudence (legal theory) terms. It also includes a brand-new Writing and citation section that specifically addresses problems and established conventions for writing legal essays and reports. Described by leading university lecturers as ' ... the best law dictionary at present ...' and ' ... excellent for non law students as well as law undergraduates ... ', this classic dictionary is a handy and invaluable source of legal reference for professionals, students, and anyone else needing succinct clarification of legal terms.

This wide-ranging dictionary contains a wealth of information on all aspects of history, from prehistory right up to the present day. Over 4,000 clear, concise entries include biographies of key figures in world history, seperate entries for every country in the world (summarising key historical events), and subject entries on religious and political movements, international organizations, and key battles and places. This new edition of the dictionary has been thoroughly updated to cover recent changes in world affairs. It includes new biographies for recent key figures (e.g. Vladimir Putin, Benedict XVI ), updated biographies for other major figures (e.g. Tony Blair), and the addition of recent major events and their after-effects (including the Orange Revolution and the 2004 tsunami). The book also contains twenty-five detailed maps linked to key historical events and topics. These include the African slave trade, the Black Death, and the Normandy campaign. Encyclopedic in scope, this ambitious dictionary provides an excellent overview of world history both for students and the general reader.

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers - a new, modern-spelling text, based on the 1623 Folio text - on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, language and allusions - detailed introduction considers composition, sources, and critical and theatrical history - includes full text of Plautus' Menaechmi and extracts from Gesta Grayorum and the Geneva Bible - illustrated with production photographs and related art - full index to introduction and commentary - durable sewn binding for lasting use 'not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.'

The Oxford Shakespeare" offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers. The features include: a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings; extensive introduction gives full attention to the play's bold treatment of racial themes, gender, and social relations; detailed performance history designed to meet the needs of theatre professionals; on-page commentary and notes explain language, word-play, and staging; appendices on music in the play and a full translation of the Italian novella from which the story derives; illustrated with production photographs and related art; full index to introduction and commentary; and durable sewn binding for lasting use. "Not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.""

'Therefore this terror and darkness of the mind Not by the sun's rays, nor the bright shafts of day, Must be dispersed, as is most necessary, But by the face of nature and her laws.' Lucretius' poem On the Nature of the Universe combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour Lucretius demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world and everything in it is governed not by the gods, but by the mechanical laws of nature. By believing this, men can live in peace of mind and happiness. Lucretius bases his argument on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His poem explores sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology through acute observation of the beauties of the natural world and with moving sympathy for man's place in it. Sir Ronald Melville's accessible and accurate verse translation is complemented by an introduction and notes situating Lucretius' scientific theories within the thought of 1st century BCE Rome and discussing the Epicurean philosophy that was his inspiration and why the issues Lucretius' poem raisies about the scientific and poetical views of the world continue to be important.

Despite the power of Shakespeare's poems, and their foundational place within his oeuvre, modern readers have seldom been encouraged to engage with his non-dramatic works as a whole. This new edition explains how this state of affairs has arisen, and why it needs to be changed. It contains the complete Sonnets and poems with a full commentary. An extensive and lively introduction explores Shakespeare's poetic development, and shows how the poems relate to each other and to his dramatic works. Each work is freshly interpreted, making full use of the latest research. The volume also explores what the poems may have meant to their earliest readers, and, for this reason, it includes poems attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, as well as those printed under his name in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.

Since World War II and especially since the election of Pope John XXIII in 1958, the papacy--the oldest of all Western institutions--has attracted steadily growing interest from non-Christians as well as Christians. Written for people of every religious allegiance and none, J.N.D. Kelly's biographical dictionary presents a wealth of information about the papacy and the astonishing succession of churchmen who have loomed large on the world scene for almost two thousand years. It contains concise accounts not only of all the officially recognized popes from St. Peter to John Paul II, but also of all their irregularly elected rivals, the so-called antipopes. It also includes an appendix which records the once generally accepted, but long since discarded, legend that at some date in the ninth, tenth, or eleventh century a female pope called Joan existed. The Dictionary provides an entry for each pope and antipope which covers--except where (as in the early centuries) information is unavailable--his family and social background and pre-papal career, as well as his activities in office. Each entry has a separate select bibliography, usually including references to the primary source for the pope's life and his official acts. Arranged chronologically, the volume places each pope in the proper historical context and offers, in effect, a continuous history of the papacy. Based on careful research, but eminently readable, this reference work reveals an extraordinarily diverse group of men who have designated themselves as St. Peter's successors, and records their varying involvement in great power politics, personal or family aggrandizement, patronage of the arts, theological controversy, or spiritual leadership. It presents a graphic and moving picture of the fluctuating fortunes of the Christian Church centered in Rome, sometimes submerged by secular forces, but at other times, staging a spectacular revival and confronting the world (as today) with a daunting challenge.

`I evidently saw that unless the great God of his infinite grace and bounty, had voluntarily chosen me to be a vessel of mercy, though I should desire, and long, and labour until my heart did break, no good could come of it . . . How can you tell you are Elected?' (GA, 47) In seventeenth-century England, the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, with its belief in the predetermined salvation of the few and damnation of the many, led many Christians to an anguished search for evidence of God's favour. John Bunyan's Grace Abounding records this spiritual crisis and its gruelling fluctuations between hope and despair in all its psychological intensity. It is a classic of spiritual autobiography - a genre which flourished in seventeenth-century England, as anxiety over one's spiritual state encouraged rigorous self-scrutiny and the sharing of spiritual experiences. This edition sets Grace Abounding alongside four of the most interesting and varied contemporary spiritual autobiographies, making its cultural milieu more meaningful to the modern reader.

No one can write a man's life except himself.' In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of autobiography: defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs of putting into words: the personal quality of one's own existence.

Zola wrote that 'my title speaks not merely of a war, but also of the crumbling of a regime and the end of a world'. The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Débâcle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-71. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as its attention to historical detail. The novel seeks to explain why the Second Empire ended in a crushing military defeat and revolutionary violence. It focuses on ordinary soldiers, showing their bravery and suffering in the midst of circumstances they cannot control. Zola's descriptions are some of the most powerful he ever wrote. He skilfully integrates his narrative of events and the fictional lives of his characters to provide the finest account of this tragic chapter in the history of France. Often compared to War and Peace, La Débâcle has been described as a 'seminal' work for all modern depictions of war.

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.' Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. This selection, freshly edited form the first printing of each text, enables readers to follow her unfolding career as she experimented with a broad range of writing, from tales for children to decadent fin-de siecle sketches. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, 'The Storm'.

Jacobean Tragedy explores the tensions between the disruptive energies of sex and seventeenth century social, cultural and political values with an exceptional frankness, and the plays collected in this volume demonstrate the genre at its most sinister and explicit. The Insatiate Countess (1610), by William Barksted and Lewis Machin from a draft by John Marston, is a study in obsessive nymphomania and the reprisals taken by the male establishment. The Maid's Tragedy (1611) by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, reveals dark sexual secrets at the heart of the royal court, and emphasizes the political instability which ensues their discovery. Thomas Middleton's The Maiden's Tragedy (1611) provides an overtly Christian dimension to the conflict between lust and chastity, and John Fletcher's The Tragedy of Valentinian (1614) is a chilling portrayal of rape as the exercise of absolute power. Each play raises difficult questions about conventional moral and social attitudes to sexuality which remain relevant today.

Macabre and melodramtic, set in haunted castles or fantastic landscapes, Gothic tales became fashionable in the late eighteenth century with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Crammed with catastrophe, terror, and ghostly interventions, the novel was an immediate success, and influenced numerous followers. These include William Beckford's Vathek (1786), which alternates grotesque comedy with scenes of exotic magnificence in the story of the ruthless Caliph Vathek's journey to damation. The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest, set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid. Frankenstein (1818, 1831) is Mary Shelley's disturbing and perennially popular tale of young student who learns the secret of giving life to a creature made from human relics, with horrific consequences. This collection illustrates the range and the attraction of the Gothic novel. Extreme and sensational, each of the four printed here is also a powerful psychological story of isolation and monomania.

'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarme and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.

Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned' As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, his The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the growth of the United States as a world power. Exploring America as both a success and a failure, contradiction was the very impetus that compelled Adams to write the Education, in which he was also able to voice his deep scepticism about mankind's power to control the direction of history. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing the future, Adams's vision expresses what Henry James declared the `complex fate' to be an American, and remains one of the most compelling works of American autobiography today.