In this book, the editors focus on architecture and communication from various different perspectives – taking into account that the term “architecture” is used for buildings as well as in the context of computer software. Data and software also impact on our cities; raw data, however, do not convey any information – in order to generate information and communication they have to be organized and must make sense to the reader. The contributions avoid clear separation of the various communication spheres of their disciplines. Instead, they use the wide range of approaches to explore meanings – an ambitious aim that leaves the destination wide open; the reader is invited to share in this adventure.

Review: "More than 100 scholars contributed to this carefully researched, well-organized, informative, and multi-disciplinary source on death studies. Volume 1, "The Presence of Death," examines the cultural, historical, and societal frameworks of death, such as the universal fear of death, spirituality and varioius religions, the legal definition of death, suicide, and capital punishment. Volume 2, "The Response to Death," covers such topics as rites and ceremonies, grief and bereavement, and legal matters after death."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004.

The appearance of ghosts in art and popular culture has transformed throughout history. From the undead corpse of the medieval tradition to the transparent forms of photographic film, to the infrared and thermal images that now populate reality television, the paranormal has literally changed shape over the centuries. In Poetics of the Paranormal Kevin Chabot articulates the idea of spectrality, demonstrating how the paranormal is far from a stable, metaphysical category: it is a dynamic and historically contingent discourse, the contours of which shift over time. Specific media, Chabot argues, present the ghost in distinct ways that emphasize the ghostly qualities of the medium and, conversely, the technological qualities of the ghost. Through detailed analyses of nineteenth-century spirit photography, horror films, ghost-hunting reality television, and the viral internet phenomenon Slender Man, Chabot shows how the paranormal both shapes and is shaped by media. Exploring key historical shifts in contemporary media while providing a rich and novel theoretical framework, Poetics of the Paranormal addresses with renewed rigour the relationships between media, perception, temporality, and the elusive concept of the evidential.

Having been established as a field in its own right for the last decade, intercultural pragmatics is increasingly being recognized as an important area of research among scholars working in pragmatics. The present volume is a collection of selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication – admittedly the biggest venue for researchers in the area, and comprises contributions that report on recent research that deals with or can directly inform work in intercultural pragmatics. Given the breadth of research areas that are represented herein, ranging from lingua franca and business communication to the study of cultural perceptions, translation and pragmatic development, this volume is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of intercultural pragmatics, but also to all those with a more general interest in the sociocultural turn in the study of pragmatics.

Published with academic researchers and graduate students in mind, this volume of the 'Shakespeare Survey' presents a number of contributions on the theme of the play 'Macbeth'.

Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond explores ghost movies, one of the most popular film genres in East and Southeast Asia, by focusing on movie narratives, the cultural contexts of their origins and audience reception. In the middle of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, ghost movies became major box office hits. The emergence of the phenomenally popular “J-Horror” genre inspired similar ghost movie productions in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Ghost movies are embedded and reflected in national as well as transnational cultures and politics, in narrative traditions, in the social worlds of the audience, and in the perceptual experience of each individual. They reflect upon the identity crises and traumas of the living as well as of the dead, and they unfold affection and attraction in the border zone between amusement and thrill, secular and religious worldviews. This makes the genre interesting not only for sociologists, anthropologists, media and film scholars, but also for scholars of religion.

"Donald Thomas is the all-time best at Sherlockian pastiche." —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine "Have you ever seen a ghost, Mr. Holmes?“ asks Victoria Temple, and Sherlock Holmes, at the height of his powers in 1898, must face a new challenge, one that plunges the great detective into the realm of the supernatural. Miss Temple has been found guilty—but also insane—at her trial for murdering a child under her care. She is locked away in the Broadmoor lunatic asylum and, worse still, she believes fully in her own guilt. But were the hauntings at the Elizabethan manor house of Bly a vision of the walking dead, perhaps, rather than delusions of her tormented mind? Or could it be that a criminal conspiracy is to blame for the psychic phenomena? In the company of Dr. Watson, the indefatigable Holmes will track down the perpetrators through the occult underworld of Victorian London.

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.

The Visible Ghost tells a tale of a scientist who has an accident inside his laboratory and dies. To his astonishment, and that of everyone else around him, he becomes a ghost who is visible for all to see with their eyes . . . all the time. He does not have the ability to become invisible. Another fascinating detail about him in his ghost form is that his appearance is 100 percent solid, like any living being around him. If someone were to stand next to him, they could have a conversation with him and not in any way ever suspect that he is, in fact, a ghost, because of how solid in form he appears to be. Being a scientist, this ghost is extremely intrigued, even in death, about being a ghost. He decides to investigate and document everything possible about being a ghost for others to understand before he disappears . . . which can be at any moment. At the very least, he has proven to the world that ghosts do, in fact, exist.