OXFORD HANDBOOKS

An indispensable resource for students and scholars, 'The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms' features a diverse array of essays that treat the Psalms from a variety of perspectives. Classical scholarship and approaches as well as contextual interpretations and practices are well represented. The coverage is uniquely wide ranging.

Thousands of texts, written over a period of three thousand years on papyri and potsherds, in Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, and other languages, have transformed our knowledge of many aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology provides an introduction to the world of these ancient documents and literary texts, ranging from the raw materials of writing to the languages used, from the history of papyrology to its future, and from practical help in reading papyri to frank opinions about the nature of the work of papyrologists. This volume, the first major reference work on papyrology written in English, takes account of the important changes experienced by the discipline within especially the last thirty years. Including new work by twenty-seven international experts and more than one hundred illustrations, The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology will serve as an invaluable guide to the subject. - Publisher.

How do we approach the rich field of nineteenth-century American literature? How might we recalibrate the coordinates of critical vision and open up new areas of investigation? To answer such questions, this volume brings together 23 original essays written by leading scholars in American literary studies. By examining specific novels, poems, essays, diaries and other literary examples, the authors confront head-on the implications, scope, and scale of their analysis. The chapters foreground methodological concerns to assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, disability studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, and other cutting-edge approaches. The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature is thus both critically incisive and sharply practical, inviting attention to how readers read, how critics critique, and how interpreters interpret. It offers forceful strategies for rethinking protest novels, women's writing, urban literature, slave narratives, and popular fiction, just to name a few of the wide array of topics and genres covered. This volume, rather than surveying established ideas in studies of nineteenth-century American literature, registers what is happening now and anticipates what will shape the field's future.

In three sections, 'The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine' celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.

The Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age presents to students, scholars, and interested general readers a broad overview of current understanding of the archaeology of Europe from 1000 bc to the early historic period. During this period, new technologies, agricultural innovation, and demographic growth saw much of the landscape opened up to near modern limits, accompanied in many areas by greater social and economic complexity. Three introductory chapters situate the reader in the times and the environments of Iron Age Europe. Fourteen regional chapters provide overviews of developments in different parts of the continent, from Ireland and Spain in the west to the borders with Asia in the east, and from Scandinavia in the north to the Mediterranean shores in the south, exploiting the large quantities of new evidence yielded by the upsurge in archaeological research and excavation on this period over the last thirty years in many areas. Twenty-six thematic chapters then examine different aspects of Iron Age archaeology in more depth, from lifeways, economy, and complexity to identity, ritual, and expression. Among the many topics explored are agricultural systems, settlements ranging from villages to cities, landscape monuments, iron smelting and forging, production of textiles, politics, demography, gender, migration, funerary practices, social and religious rituals, coinage, literacy, and art and design. This volume is the only publication currently available that explores all aspects of the European Iron Age in all parts of the continent, along with consideration of regions beyond Europe with which European communities maintained commercial and diplomatic relations.

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology is a defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology. The volume first offers a chronological account of key moments in the formation of the tradition; goes on to demonstrate literary ways of reading the Bible, theological ways of reading literature, and literary conceptions of theological texts; and finally explores the great themes that have preoccupied the Jewish and Christian traditions. Framing editorial essays describe the history, the cultural implications, and the methodological issues of this now popular interdisciplinary study, before speculating as to its possible futures in a postmodern, multicultural world. - Publisher.