Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age

Worldmaking Spenser reexamines the role of Spenser\u27s work in English history and highlights the richness and complexity of his understanding of place. The volume centers on the idea that complex and allusive literary works such as The Faerie Queene must be read in the context of the cultural, literary, political, economic, and ideological forces at play in the highly allegorical poem. The authors define Spenser as the maker of poetic worlds, of the Elizabethan world, and of the modern world. The essays look at Spenser from three distinct vantage points. The contributors explore his literary origins in classical, medieval, and Renaissance continental writings and his influences on sixteenth-century culture. Spenser also had a great impact on later literary figures, including Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer, two of the seventeenth century\u27s most important writers. The authors address the full range of Spenser\u27s work, both long and short poetry as well as prose. The essays unequivocally demonstrate that Spenser occupies a substantial place in a seminal era in English history and European culture. Patrick Cheney, professor of English and comparative literature at Penn State University, is the author of Spenser\u27s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career. Lauren Silberman, professor of English at Baruch College-CUNY, is the author of Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene. Any Spenserian will find much to enjoy. —Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance An inspirational exploration of new and updated directions for these most canonical of early modern offerings. —Comparative Literature Studies No other anthology of criticism on Spenser currently on the shelves can match this for breadth of topics covered, freshness of insight, number and depth of historical and cultural contexts explored, and variety of scholarly methods pursued. —Donald V. Stump The provocative essays in this volume present new readings of Spenser\u27s Faerie Queene while offering reinterpretations of some of the critical approaches to it. —John T. Shawcross Goes some way in helping us understand the vast variety of approaches to the poet that are available to the modern reader and critic. —Notes and Queries A formidable volume of essays. —Reformation Makes a strong case for seeing in Spenser (and Spenser studies) a productive staging-ground for a variety of concerns central to early modern studies today: colonialism, gender, literary history, and self-fashioning, to name but a few. —Renaissance Quarterly These contributions are usefully varied in their subject matter and methodology. —SEL These essays . . . provide an excellent overview not only of Spenser studies but of approaches and topics current in early modern studies; they also suggest areas and directions for further work. —Spenser Review Evinces a sense of mobility and ease, in its transformations of apparent impasses to which readings of the last decade and a half had brought us. —Theresa M. Krier Showcases some of the best kinds of Spenserian criticism, while serving to defend Spenser studies in an expanding curriculum. —Year’s Work in English Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1104/thumbnail.jp

Improving Advanced Care Planning Discussion and Documentation

Our goal is to improve ACP discussion and documentation in patients above the age of 65 in our Jefferson Hospital Ambulatory Practice (JHAP) resident clinic. By instituting procedural changes within the EMR and the clinic, as well as improving provider education, we hope that residents can carry out a comprehensive and streamlined discussion regarding advanced care planning. We will institute these changes over the next 3 months, and we predict that there will be an increase in ACP discussion and uploading of appropriate documentation to 50% and 25%, respectively

Chronic HCV Infection Affects the NK Cell Phenotype in the Blood More than in the Liver

Although epidemiological and functional studies have implicated NK cells in protection and early clearance of HCV, the mechanism by which they may contribute to viral control is poorly understood, particularly at the site of infection, the liver. We hypothesized that a unique immunophenotypic/functional NK cell signature exists in the liver that may provide insights into the contribution of NK cells to viral control. Intrahepatic and blood NK cells were profiled from chronically infected HCV-positive and HCV-negative individuals. Baseline expression of activating and inhibitory receptors was assessed, as well as functional responses following stimulation through classic NK cell pathways. Independent of HCV infection, the liver was enriched for the immunoregulatory CD56bright NK cell population, which produced less IFNγ and CD107a but comparable levels of MIP1β, and was immunophenotypically distinct from their blood counterparts. This profile was mostly unaltered in chronic HCV infection, though different expression levels of NKp46 and NKG2D were associated with different grades of fibrosis. In contrast to the liver, chronic HCV infection associated with an enrichment of CD161lowperforinhigh NK cells in the blood correlated with increased AST and 2B4 expression. However, the association of relatively discrete changes in the NK cell phenotype in the liver with the fibrosis stage nevertheless suggests an important role for the NK response. Overall these data suggest that tissue localization has a more pervasive effect on NK cells than the presence of chronic viral infection, during which these cells might be mostly attuned to limiting immunopathology. It will be important to characterize NK cells during early HCV infection, when they should have a critical role in limiting infection

The 24/7 approach to promoting optimal welfare for captive wild animals

We have an ethical responsibility to provide captive animals with environments that allow them to experience good welfare. Husbandry activities are often scheduled for the convenience of care staff working within the constraints of the facility, rather than considering the biological and psychological requirements of the animals themselves. The animal welfare 24/7 across the lifespan concept provides a holistic framework to map features of the animal’s life cycle, taking into account their natural history, in relation to variations in the captive environment, across day and night, weekdays, weekends, and seasons. In order for animals to have the opportunity to thrive, we argue the need to consider their lifetime experience, integrated into the environments we provide, and with their perspective in mind. Here, we propose a welfare assessment tool based upon 14 criteria, to allow care staff to determine if their animals’ welfare needs are met. We conclude that animal habitat management will be enhanced with the use of integrated technologies that provide the animals with more opportunities to engineer their own environments, providing them with complexity, choice and control

Between Commerce and Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, and Commercial Incivility

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as a robust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. This essay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflections on commerce, empire and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned the colonial system of monopoly, war and conquest, his strictures against empire did not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonial slavery represented a manifestly uncivil institution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also a decisively commercial institution pivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical ‘commercial incivility’ of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the link between slavery and commerce, and confined his criticism of slavery to its ancient, feudal and Asiatic incarnations. I contend that Hume’s disavowal of the commercial barbarism of the Atlantic economy is part of a broader ideological effort to separate the idea of commerce from its imperial origins and posit it as the liberal antithesis of empire. The implications of analysis, I conclude, go beyond the eighteenth-century debates over commerce and empire, and more generally pertain to the contradictory entwinement of liberalism and capitalism