There is much to be gleaned from novels concerning the links between wealth and power, inequality and corruption, poverty and illness. A student of social epidemiology will profit as much from close reading of these classics as from consulting textbooks on social stratification.

national settings was higher than they expected, the novels were “culturally generic with the characters’ ethnicity used only for descriptive purposes rather than functioning to depict insights about the culture or cultural practice” (p. 566). Like Cart (2010), Koss and Teale (2009) found that “the majority of international countries and characters portrayed were white and European” (p. 569). T...

Thomas Keneally has long been a writer who gives expression to nationalist sentiment. In 1978 J.J. Healy commented that writers such as Keneally represented ‘a collective, many-motived consciousness’ whose impulse was ‘political, public’. Indeed, many of Keneally’s earlier novels illustrate what we might call ‘national progenitors’. In From The Ruins of Colonialism Chris Healy describes a uniqu...

In his article, "Reading Orientalism and the Crisis of Epistemology in the Novels of Lawrence Durrell," James Gifford argues that Edward Said's Orientalism has had a far reaching impact on the study of literature as well as in Comparative Literature, especially in works which depict the "Eastern Other." However, a question arises in those texts which have completed the philosophical motion from...

A P300 (P3)-evoked response is generated in a variety of mammalian species upon detection of significant environmental events. The P3 component has been proposed to index a neural system involved in attention and memory capacity. We investigated the contribution of anterior and posterior association cortex to somatosensory P3 generation. Somatosensory event-related potentials (ERPs) were record...

Art images and natural scenes have in common that their radially averaged (1D) Fourier spectral power falls according to a power-law with increasing spatial frequency (1/f(2) characteristics), which implies that the power spectra have scale-invariant properties. In the present study, we show that other categories of man-made images, cartoons and graphic novels (comics and mangas), have similar ...

Studying characters plays a vital role in computationally representing and interpreting narratives. Unlike previous work, which has focused on inferring character roles, we focus on the problem of modeling their relationships. Rather than assuming a fixed relationship for a character pair, we hypothesize that relationships are dynamic and temporally evolve with the progress of the narrative, an...

In the 1990s the book market and the production and reception of literature in Russia radically changed, conforming to Western patterns. This transformation is mostly – and even from the side of scholars – estimated as an emancipatory development. But unlike vanguard postmodern literature, which considers and ironically reverses clichés and stereotypes, mass fiction provides unambiguous element...

Electronic communication technologies continue to change the landscape of reference services. For many users, virtual communication is the preferred means of conversing. Synchronous virtual reference, similar to other synchronous means of communication, is an important method for reaching students and for providing teaching and learning opportunities. Grounded Theory (GT) research provides a me...

Although the title of William Faulkner‘s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner‘s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner‘s characters employ their senses is to miss...