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Whatever societies accept as ‘knowledge’ is embedded in epistemological, institutional, political, and economic power relations. How is knowledge produced under such circumstances? What is the difference between general knowledge and the sciences? Can there be science without universal truth claims? Questions like these are discussed in eleven essays from the perspective of Sociology, Law, Cultural Studies, and the Humanities.
This volume clarifies the meanings and applications of the concept of the transnational and identifies areas in which the concept can be particularly useful. The division of the volume into three parts reflects areas which seem particularly amenable to analysis through a transnational lens. The chapters in Part 1 present case studies in which the concept replaces or complements traditionally dominant concepts in literary studies. These chapters demonstrate, for example, why some dramatic texts and performances can better be described as transnational than as postcolonial, and how the transnational underlies and complements concepts such as world literature. Part 2 assesses the advantages and...
How does immigration transform societies and relations between ethnic and racial groups? This volume brings together scholars working at the cutting-edge of theory and empirical research on integration and assimilation in the US and Europe. It is dedicated to the life and works of Richard Alba, who has done so much to re-invigorate and establish ideas about integration and assimilation. The book aims to open a dialogue on the continuing value of assimilation and integration for studying social change in an era of increasing ethno-racial diversity in Western liberal democracies. Assimilation and integration, and the understandings of societal change that they theorise, depict, and empirically...
Eurasianism has proved to be an unexpectedly diverse and highly self-reflexive concept. By transforming the way we describe the Eurasian landmass, it also resignifies our field of studies and its disciplinary boundaries. In this process, Eurasianism itself is subject to a constant resignification. The present volume builds on this notion while pursuing an innovative approach to Eurasianism. The authors advance the well-established positions that view Eurasianism as a historical intellectual movement or as an ideology of Russian neo-Imperialism, and proceed to unpack an innovative vision of Eurasianism as a process of renegotiating cultural values and identity narratives—in and beyond Russia. This procedural approach provides deeper insight into the operationality of the identity narratives and shifting semantics of Eurasianism in its relation to the Russian World.
Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.
This book examines the oceanic presence in life on Earth, and the ways that we engage with the oceanic worlds for play, pleasure, adventure, and the pursuit of leisure and escape through tourism and travel. The oceanic ‘turn’ across the social sciences and humanities has produced a still proliferating opus of work that seeks to discover and emphasize oceanic presence in life on Earth. This literal and figurative ‘unearthing’ of blue spaces has encouraged scholars to gaze beyond the lands that have supported much of our experience and knowledge towards the gathering up of a more holistic appreciation of blue planetary life. This widening of scholarly attention – from ‘land’ to â...
Special Focus: Law and Literature This special focus issue of Symbolism takes a look at the theoretical equation of law and literature and its inherent symbolic dimension. The authors all approach the subject from the perspective of literary and book studies, foregrounding literature’s potential to act as supplementary to a very wide variety of laws spread over historical, geographical, cultural and spatial grounds. The theoretical ground laid here thus posits both literature and law in the narrow sense. The articles gathered in this special issue analyse Anglophone literatures from the Renaissance to the present day and cover the three major genres, narrative, drama and poetry. The contri...
What is the ocean’s role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Søren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk’s logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and Joseph Conrad as well as their 20th and 21st century-heirs like J. G. Ballard, Jens Bjørneboe, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen. A Poetic History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology, and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian literary engagements with the sea.
This book identifies water as the key element of Virginia Woolf’s modernist poetics. The various forms, movements, and properties of water inspired Woolf’s writing of reality, time, and bodies and offered her an apt medium to reflect on the possibilities as well as on the exhaustion of her art. As a deeply intertextual writer, Woolf recognised how profoundly water has shaped human imagination and the landscape of the literary past. In line with recent ecocritical and ecofeminist assessments of her works, this book also shows Woolf’s attraction to water as part of an indifferent nature that exists prior to and beyond the symbolic. Through close analyses that span the whole of Woolf’s oeuvre, and that centre on the metaphorical and the material voices of water in her works, Modernist Waterscapes offers a fresh perspective on a writing that is as versatile as the element from which it draws. The monograph addresses postgraduate students and scholars working in modernist studies and Woolf studies in particular.