This book introduces and provides commentary on a selection of published and unpublished works by Victoria Welby and exponents of the Signific Movement in the Netherlands. Beyond offering an important contribution to the reconstruction of a neglected phase in the history of ideas, it evidences the theoretical topicality of significs, in particular the focus on the relation of signs to value, meaning, and understanding, on verbal and nonverbal behavior, and on language and communication.

This book explores the belief in ancient Judaism that God embedded hidden signs and visual clues in the natural world that could be read by human beings and interpreted according to complex systems.

This volume provides a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration of approaches to the critical study of advertising. Current and impending practices of advertising have in many ways exceeded the grasp of traditional modes of critique, due at least in part to their being formulated in very different historical conditions. To begin to address this lag, this edited collection explores through critical discussion and application a variety of critical approaches to advertising. Authors address a variety of concrete examples in their chapters, drawing on existing research while presenting new findings where relevant. In order to maintain the relevance of this collection past this particular historical moment, however, chapters do not simply report on empirical work, but develop a theoretical argument.

This text shows that critical discourse analysis is able to provide the analytic context, skills and tools by which we can study how language constructs, constitutes and shapes the social world.

This book enhances our understanding of the exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English dream vision poem Pearl. Situating the study in the contexts of medieval literary criticism and contemporary genre theory, Beal argues that the poet intended Pearl to be read at four levels of meaning and in four corresponding genres: literally, an elegy; spiritually, an allegory; morally, a consolation; and anagogically, a revelation. The book addresses cruxes and scholarly debates about the poem’s genre and meaning, including key questions that have been unresolved in Pearl studies for over a century: * What is the nature of the relationship between the Dreamer and the Maiden? * What is the significance of allusions to Ovidian love stories and the use of liturgical time in the poem? * How does avian symbolism, like that of the central symbol of the pearl, develop, transform, and add meaning throughout the dream vision? * What is the nature of God portrayed in the poem, and how does the portrayal of the Maiden’s intimate relationship to God, her spiritual marriage to the Lamb, connect to the poet’s purpose in writing? Noting that the poem is open to many interpretations, Beal also considers folktale genre patterns in Pearl, including those drawn from parable, fable, and fairy-tale. The conclusion considers Pearl in the light of modern psychological theories of grieving and trauma. This book makes a compelling case for re-reading Pearl and recognizing the poem’s signifying power. Given the ongoing possibility of new interpretations, it will appeal to those who specialize in Pearl as well as scholars of Middle English, Medieval Literature, Genre Theory, and Literature and Religion.

Through a socio-semiotic analysis of promotional materials used by both producers of quality products and their support organizations, this book investigates the use of imagery, especially images of place, in three contrasting regions of Ireland. It highlights the role of place (particularly rural) imagery in the promotion of handcrafts and rural tourism services, and suggests some of the meanings which may be contacted through the use of such imagery. Much of the research to date in this field has concentrated on the use of imagery to promote particular places, rather than products and, in an Irish context, on the promotion of Ireland as a tourism destination. This book focuses on the regional and local level to examine the creation and use of more micro-place specific images - both real and mythical - by small and medium sized businesses and explores the extent to which the two industries borrow from, and feed into, firstly each other, and secondly, macro place myths and iconographies.