Egodocuments are cherished because of the view they supposedly provide into the innermost feelings of individuals in past and present. Recent research, however, has shown the complexity of genres like autobiographies, diaries and letters. Building on critical and historical research into autobiographical writing, this book describes epistolary practices of the Dutch elite in the period 1770-1850. Analysing how cultural ideals of sincerity, individuality and naturalness influenced the style and contents of letters, the book also addresses the functions of letter writing in family life, like the formation of an adolescent identity and the relationship between parents and children. Correspondence was a vital means by which class and gender identities were performed and the appropriate emotions were shaped.

Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters—Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles—informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving. By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exchange, Wilcox provides a nuanced analysis of neglected and misunderstood aspects of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. Turning to Seneca, she shows that he both inherited and reacted against Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she analyzes how Seneca transformed the rhetoric of his own letters from an instrument of social negotiation into an idiom for ethical philosophy and self-reflection. Though Cicero and Seneca are often viewed as a study in contrasts, Wilcox extensively compares their letters, underscoring Cicero’s significant influence on Seneca as a prose stylist, philosopher, and public figure.

With passion, clarity, and rich examples, Reclaiming Writing is dedicated to reawakening the journeys that writers take as they make sense of, think about, and speak back to their worlds in this era of high-stakes testing and mandated curricula. Classrooms and out-of-school settings are described and analyzed in exciting and groundbreaking narratives that provide insights into the many possibilities for writing that support writers’ searches for voice, identity, and agency. Offering pedagogical strategies and the knowledge base in which they are grounded, the book looks at writing within various areas of the curriculum and across modes of writing from traditional text-based forums to digital formats. Thematically based sections present the pillars of the volume’s critical transactive theory: learning, teaching, curriculum, language, and sociocultural contexts. Each chapter is complemented by an extension that offers application possibilities for teachers in various settings. Reclaiming Writing emphasizes literacy as a vehicle for exploring, interrogating, challenging, finding self, talking back to power, creating a space in the world, reflecting upon the past, and thinking forward to a more joyful and democratic future.

"The binding thread throughout this edited collection of Ambrose Bierce's letters is the argument that Bierce has too often vilified as a cynical misanthrope. Joshi and Schultz believe that Bierce's human side has been ignored by scholars, and they work here to rectify this oversight. The importance of this collection is underscored by the fact that no collection of Bierce's letters has been published since 1922. This selection represents a sampling of nearly one-half million words of Bierce's correspondence, which Joshi and Schultz are the first to gather and transcribe." "The letters reveal many sides of Bierce that he deliberately concealed in his literary work: the caring father who keenly felt the deaths of his two sons and took constant interest in the welfare of his only daughter; the literary giant of San Francisco who gathered around him a substantial cadre of disciples whose work he encouraged and meticulously criticized; the vigorous castigator of chicanery, hypocrisy, and injustice wherever he saw it; and the author of coyly flirtatious letters to a number of female correspondents. For the first time, a well-rounded picture of Bierce the man and writer emerges in his own words. The volume ends chillingly with Bierce's last surviving letter, written from Chihuahua, Mexico, on December 26, 1913, which concludes: "As for me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination." Bierce was never heard from again." "The letters have been scrupulously edited from manuscript sources and exhaustively annotated to elucidate obscure historical, literary, and other references."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Learning disabilities are a heterogeneous group of disorders characterized by failure to acquire, retrieve, or use information competently. They are the most severe and chronic form of learning difficulty in children. They can be present at birth or acquired as a result of illness, exposure to toxins, poor nutrition, medical treatment, sociocultural deprivation, or injury. Learning problems typically consist in failure to acquire reading, writing, or math skills, which are traditionally considered core domains. This book explores the epidemiology, neurobiological bases, and diagnostic tools necessary for a comprehensive assessment of children with learning disabilities. It also presents examples of children with specific learning disabilities and explains possible intervention strategies.

While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger's indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger's thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson's comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson's entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.

`This is a highly readable and accurate translation. The very useful annotations help to orient the modern reader with respect to medieval concepts, reflecting a profound understanding of thirteenth-century institutional history and the social and legal context of medieval Christianity. An extraordinary piece of scholarship.' James Ginther, Department of Theological Studies, St Louis University Robert Grosseteste (c.1170-1253) was an English statesman, philosopher, theologian, and bishop of Lincoln, and also one of the most controversial figures in his country's episcopate. His long life coincided with the central period of institutional, intellectual, and religious consolidation in medieval Europe and his letters provide important insights into the practices and preoccupations of the English clergy and laity in the first half of the thirteenth century. This volume contains the first complete translation of Grosseteste's collected Latin letters and shows that these were most likely chosen and arranged by Grosseteste himself. Shedding light on some of the period's crucial debates on issues of theology, law, pastoral care, and episcopal authority, F.A.C. Mantello and Joseph Goering's richly annotated English translation makes his letters more accessible than ever for scholars and students, and for those interested in medieval history, religion, and culture.

This book is focused on an emerging area, i.e. combination of IoT and semantic technologies, which should enable breaking the silos of local and/or domain-specific IoT deployments. Taking into account the way that IoT ecosystems are realized, several challenges can be identified. Among them of definite importance are (this list is, obviously, not exhaustive): (i) How to provide common representation and/or shared understanding of data that will enable analysis across (systematically growing) ecosystems? (ii) How to build ecosystems based on data flows? (iii) How to track data provenance? (iv) How to ensure/manage trust? (v) How to search for things/data within ecosystems? (vi) How to store data and assure its quality? Semantic technologies are often considered among the possible ways of addressing these (and other, related) questions. More precisely, in academic research and in industrial practice, semantic technologies materialize in the following contexts (this list is, also, not exhaustive, but indicates the breadth of scope of semantic technology usability): (i) representation of artefacts in IoT ecosystems and IoT networks, (ii) providing interoperability between heterogeneous IoT artefacts, (ii) representation of provenance information, enabling provenance tracking, trust establishment, and quality assessment, (iv) semantic search, enabling flexible access to data originating in different places across the ecosystem, (v) flexible storage of heterogeneous data. Finally, Semantic Web, Web of Things, and Linked Open Data are architectural paradigms, with which the aforementioned solutions are to be integrated, to provide production-ready deployments.

This title is part of a two volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2007. Coverage includes shape and texture, image and video processing, face and gesture, tracking, camera networks, learning, motion and tracking, retrieval and search, human pose estimation, matching, face/gesture/action detection and recognition, low level vision and phtometory, motion and tracking, human detection, and segmentation.

The Emergence of a Hero is dedicated to the history of Russian emotional culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the epoch when the court Masonic lodges and literature were competing for the monopoly on the 'symbolic images of feeling' that an educated and Europeanised Russian was supposed to interiorize and reproduce. The case study in the centre of the study is the story of the life and death of Andrei Turgenev (1781-1803), the author of a confessional diary, a gifted poet, and an early Russian Romantic who failed to live up to the principles and models he cherished. Brought up on the patterns of emotions he found in works of Rousseau, Sterne, and the authors of Sturm and Drang, he soon found them too narrow for his individuality, and navigated towards a more mature nineteenth century Romanticism, but was not able to make this transition. Turgenev experimented not so much in his literary work as in his life. The reconstruction of this convoluted and enigmatic case is based on archival research and innovative analysis of individual emotional experience.