James Smith

The late James Smith was a polymath scholar and critic, known to a large circle of readers for one or two critical articles of great weight and acuteness. As a busy professor in the University of Fribourg, he published very little more, but was working all his life on two uncompleted books, one on Shakespeare, one on the tradition of English literature. At his death, a good deal was in draft. Originally published in 1974, this volume, edited by Professor E. M. Wilson, presents a coherent body of essays on Shakespeare's comedies, and adds at the end five of the essays for which Smith was already well known. This is more than a literary memorial to a highly self-critical scholar who published little. It is a body of studies which was welcomed and prized by those familiar with Smith's name. New readers meanwhile will find in this principal critical work the expression of a vigorous and sensitive critical mind.

In this work dispersive and Strichartz estimates for solutions to general strictly hyperbolic partial differential equations with constant coefficients with lower order terms are considered. The global time decay estimates of Lp-Lq norms of propagators are analysed in detail and it is described how the time decay rates depend on the geometry of the problem. For these purposes, the frequency space is separated in several zones each giving a certain decay rate. Geometric conditions on characteristics responsible for the particular decay are presented. Published by Mathematical Society of Japan and distributed by World Scientific Publishing Co. for all markets

In this volume, renowned philosopher Merold Westphal introduces current philosophical thinking related to interpreting the Bible. Recognizing that no theology is completely free of philosophical "contamination," he engages and mines contemporary hermeneutical theory in service of the church. After providing a historical overview of contemporary theories of interpretation, Westphal addresses postmodern hermeneutical theory, arguing that the relativity embraced there is not the same as the relativism in which "anything goes." Rather, Westphal encourages us to embrace the proliferation of interpretations based on different perspectives as a way to get at the richness of the biblical text.