“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect.

In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood.

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.

A sense of history and concern for the meaning of history dominated English thought in the nineteenth century; Peter Dale is concerned with this historicizing as it affected Victorian theories about the nature of poetry and art. Examining the critical writings of three of the period's most influential figures—Carlyle, Arnold, and Pater—Dale finds these men preoccupied with the impermanence of moral and intellectual systems and of the artistic values that depended upon them. In adjusting the absolutes of earlier periods to the new historicism the Victorians helped to usher in twentieth-century formalism.

The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History has much to offer to anyone interested in Victorian thought, as well as to modernists concerned with tracing the roots of twentieth-century poetics. It represents an admirable combination of close argument and precision with breadth of view and implication.

Formalism is often used as an all-embracing term covering a range of ontological and methodological approaches in game studies, with little connection to the history or tradition of the approach in other fields. This dilutes the usefulness of the approach, and invites (often unfounded) criticism. Videogame Formalism addresses these issues through an exploration of the historical and theoretical roots of formalist approaches to videogame analysis, situating this approach within games studies, and arguing for its importance and applicability as a methodological toolkit and a theoretical framework for understanding the aesthetic experience of videogames. It presents an overview of how formalist approaches can provide insights into the ways games create aesthetic experiences through the use of poetic gameplay devices, and lays out a comprehensive yet flexible methodological framework for undertaking a formalist analysis of games. This approach is then demonstrated through a series of detailed examples and case studies.