The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England is a wide-ranging investigation of Tudor/Stuart drama, Reformation preaching, and the relations between the two. The cross-fertilization between the two kinds of performance engendered among audiences a ready receptivity to the rhetorical use of paradox. The two modes similarly capitalized on characteristic Renaissance syntheses of magic, drama, and religion to develop strategies for negotiating state control. In chapters that set comedies and tragedies by Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, and others side by side with sermons by Hooker, Andrewes, Donne, and popular preachers whose works have not been reprinted since the early seventeenth century, Bryan Crockett argues that stage and pulpit performances elicited similar responses to the political and theological divisions marked by the incessant polemics of the age.

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.

The Cane Creek shale of the Pennsylvanian Paradox Formation has produced more than 7.8 million barrels of oil and about 7.9 billion cubic feet of gas from 18 fields in the Paradox Basin of southeastern Utah. The Cane Creek is divided into three intervals—A, B, and C; the B interval is the primary oil producer. Finely crystalline dolomites and sandstones in the B interval have been the main targets of successful horizontal drilling programs. Hydrocarbon shows were recognized using nondestructive epifluorescence (EF) microscope techniques on samples from wells in the northern part of the basin. A new, qualitative visual EF rating system was developed and applied to these samples. A variety of EF ratings from each well were plotted and mapped. This 44-page Special Study provides (1) a summary of the new EF methods used in the study; (2) detailed petrographic and EF descriptions of Cane Creek samples for 31 wells (in three appendices); (3) 16 maps showing potential oil-prone areas for the entire Cane Creek and the A, B, and C intervals; and (4) a statistical analysis of the EF data. The study will help petroleum companies determine exploration strategies and land acquisition areas. It will also be a reference for government land management agencies, county planners, and local landowners in decision making processes and resource assessments.

In On Paradox literary and legal scholar Elizabeth S. Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. She shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox.

This book addresses how the erosion of traditional forms of political association and legal regulation has given rise to a pluralism of "imperfect communities" constantly exposed to the risk of dissolution. These are niches and micro-worlds that are connected through precarious and ambivalent ties. Such a far-reaching transformation affects at one and the same time both our psychic and social identity. The book argues that this phenomenon is linked to the proliferation of new forms of psychic "disorder" – depression, personality disorder, dissociation – typical of hypermodern societies. However, while these can easily turn into genuine disorders, they can also open onto richer forms of identity, more complex than those of the past. Based on this analysis, the book’s main claim is that this dynamic epitomizes a general anthropological paradox – one that has always marked the human animal: humans are bound by their own biological constitution to fend off disorder by drawing the boundaries of artificial niches, and yet they are inclined to expose themselves to unlimited contingency so that they can find a truly suitable environment. Pursuing a novel understanding of the apparent collapse of traditional juridico-political settings, this book makes the case that the emergence of dissociations at several levels – individual, social, political, legal – does not stem from a lack of political imagination. Rather, it is a situation with which humans are inevitably confronted: a perennial tension between the limited and the unlimited, between the desire to take refuge and the desire to cross borders.