Bøker av John Regan

An in-depth digital investigation of the 18th-century British corpus, this book identifies shared communities of meaning in the printed British 18th century by highlighting and analysing patterns in the distribution of lexis in historical corpora. There are forces of attraction between words: some are more likely to keep company than others, and how words attract and repel one another is worthy of note. Charting these forces, this book presents how distant reading 18th-century corpora can tell us something new, methodologically defensible and, crucially, interesting, about the most common constructions of word meanings and epistemes in the printed British 18th century. Through the case studies in this book, computation brings to light some remarkable facts about collectively-produced forms of meaning, without which the most common meanings of words, and the ways of knowing that they constituted, would remain matters of conjecture rather than evidence. Providing the first investigation of collective meaning and knowledge in the British 18th century, this interdisciplinary study builds on the existing stores of close reading, praxis, and history of ideas, presenting a view constructed at scale, rather than at the level of individual texts.

Return of the Children is a beautiful story which follows the travels of forty million children who journey from Heaven to Earth on a mission of peace. Sent by God, they bring His gifts of love, mercy, forgiveness and healing to their mothers and fathers who had aborted them. Magnificent and emotional reunions bring joy and happiness to millions of families as a great wave of God's love sweeps across America.

'Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790' explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography between 1760 and 1790. These were the decades of Hugh Blair's 'Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal' (1763) and 'Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres' (1783), Thomas Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry' (1765), Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' (1767) and Lord Monboddo's 'Of the Origin and Progress of Language' (1774). In these texts and many more, verse is examined for what it can tell the historian about the progress of enlightened man to civil society. By historicizing poetry, these theorists used it as a lens through which we might observe our development from savagery to 'polish', with oral verse often cited as proof of the backwardness or immaturity of man from which he has awoken.'Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790' deepens our understanding of the relationship between poetry and ideas of progress with sustained attention to aesthetic, historical, antiquarian and prosodic texts from these decades. In five case studies, this volume demonstrates how verse was employed to deliver deeply ambivalent reports on human progress. In this pre-'Romantic', pre-'Utilitarian' age, those reading verse with an eye to what it could convey about the journey towards the Enlightenment Republic of letters were in fact telling stories as subtle and ambiguous as the rhythms of the verse being read. Rather than focusing on a limited set of particular poets, 'Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790' pays close attention to the theories of versification which were circulating in the later anglophone eighteenth century. With numerous examples from poems and writing on poetics, this book shows how the poetic line becomes a site at which one may make assertions about human development even as one may observe and appreciate the expressive effects of metred language.The central contention of 'Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790' is that the historians and theorists of the time did not merely instrumentalize verse in the construction of historical narratives of progress, but that attention to the particular characteristics of verse (rhythm and metre, line endings, stress contours, rhyme, etc.) had a kind of agency - it crucially reshaped - historical knowledge in the time. 'Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790' is a sustained assertion that poetry makes appeals to what was known as one's 'taste', exerting aesthetic forces, and by so doing mediating one's understanding of human development. It claims that this mediation has a special shape and force that has never undergone sufficient exploration.