Download or read book Friends and Foes Volume I written by Barbara Gabriella Renzi and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The product of an international, multi-disciplinary conference at Queen’s University Belfast, the two-volume Friends and Foes series offers an illuminating investigation of the relationship between friendship and conflict by established and emerging scholars. In this first volume, which collects together philosophical and cultural essays on the topic, the authors raise and tackle some of the most pertinent issues central to the understanding, and making, of friendship. What constitutes friendship? What challenges, duties and pleasures does friendship entail? The ambiguity of friendship is a recurring theme in the book, and Mark Vernon’s essay on the philosophical history of thinking about friendship’s ambiguity provides the perfect point of entry for discussion of the compelling literary and theatrical representations which follow, in the work of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Gregory Burke, and Edgar Allan Poe.