Features Elizabeth Gaskell's work. This work brings together her journalism, her shorter fiction, which was published in various collections during her lifetime, her early personal writing, including a diary written between 1835 and 1838 when she was a young mother, her five full-length novels and "The Life of Charlotte Bronte".

"In this work, traditionally translated as On Christian Doctrine, Augustine combines the pedagogical methods he learned from Greek and Roman writings with the content of the Christian faith to help preachers present biblical teachings in an effective manner. This new translation is lively and accessible." Library Journal

This book is a significant and original contribution to the ongoing conversation on modernity. It uses the creative and critical works of Nigerian playwright and novelist Femi Euba to demonstrate the place and function of African cultures in modernity and makes the case for the vibrancy of such cultures in the shaping and constitution of the modern world. In addition to a critique of Euba’s fifty-year artistic career, this book offers an account of Euba’s formative relationship with the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Wole Soyinka, during the promising days of the Nigerian theatre in the immediate post-independence period, and the effect of this relationship on Euba’s artistic choices and reflections. Euba contributes to our understanding of Africa’s negotiation of modernity in significant ways, especially in his sensitive reading of Esu, the Yoruba god of fate and chance, as an artistic consciousness whose historical and ideological mobility during New World slavery, during Africa’s colonial period, and in the manifestations in the black diaspora today emblematizes the process we call modernity. By using ritual, myth, and satire as avenues to the debate on modernity, Euba lays emphasis on the transformative possibilities at the crossroads of history. His works engage the psychological interconnections between old gods and new worlds and the dialogic relationship between tradition and modernity. Delineating the philosophical and literary debates that reject an easy division between a stereotypically traditional Africa and a modern West, the author shows how Euba’s plays and novel engage the entwined and intimate relationships between the modern and the traditional in contemporary Africa, and thereby she asserts the global resonance of Euba’s African, and specifically Yoruba, conception of the world. By meticulously collecting, cataloguing, and critiquing Euba’s works, Osagie models a new way of practicing African literary studies and invites us to glimpse narrative genius on the continent that she firmly believes African scholars should both promote and celebrate.

Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a dramatic increase in its town population, as a hitherto largely rural economy transformed itself into an urban one. Though the political and social issues arising from these events are well-known, little is known about how the British legal process coped with the everyday strains that emerged from the unprecedented scale of these changes. This book explores the river pollution dilemma faced by the British courts during the second half of the nineteenth century when the legal process had to confront the new incompatible realities arising from the increasing amounts of untreatable waste flowing into the rivers. This dilemma struck at the heart of both Victorian urban and rural society, as the necessary sanitary reformation of the swelling cities and expanding industry increasingly poisoned the rivers, threatening the countryside and agricultural rents and livelihoods. Focusing on ten legal disputes, the book investigates the dilemma that faced the courts; namely how to protect the traditional and valued rights of landholders whose rivers and lands were being polluted by industrial waste and untreated sewage, whilst not hindering the progress of sanitary reform and economic progress in the towns. The case studies considered involve major industrialising centres, such as Birmingham, Leeds, Northampton, Wolverhampton and Barnsley, but also include smaller towns such as Tunbridge Wells, Leamington Spa and Harrogate. The fundamental issues raised remain as important today as they did in Victorian times. The need for the courts to balance a variety of conflicting needs and rights within the limits of contemporary technological capabilities often played out in surprising ways, with outcomes not always in line with theoretical expectations. As such the historical context of the disputes provide fascinating insights into nineteenth-century legal process, and the environmental and social attitudes of the times.