You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Literary Politics identifies and debates competing definitions of 'English Studies' as an academic subject, celebrates the diversity of contemporary literary studies, and demonstrates the ways in which a range of literary texts can be understood as politically engaged, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Many of the best-known and most popular children's stories of the 20th and early 21st century were written by veterans of World War I and World War II. These include works by such writers as A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others. Although they had experienced war, most of the veterans did not overtly write about it. The seeming paradox of warriors who went through searing combat and then wrote books for children has not been addressed collectively before now. The essays in this book explore what motivated these veterans to write for children, what they wrote, and how their writing was influenced by the wars they lived through. It examines how their combat experience can be traced in their writing, however subtly, whether it was stories about a bear and his piglet companion, a World War I flying ace, or a flying car. Their reactions to war, as reflected in their writing, yield important lessons about the complicated legacy of the 20th century's two great conflicts and their long-lasting impact--through children--on society at large.
This book offers a detailed examination of the professional military education system in the United States, from a critical, insider's perspective. The mission of America's war colleges is to educate senior military officers in both the ways of war and the defence of peace. But are these colleges doing the best job possible in carrying out that important mission? Military education faces many demands, including a lack of preparation by the students, uneven quality of the faculty, and confusion over the curriculum. Many officers attend resident programs at the war colleges programs against the career advice of their leadership, despite the fact that they are virtually guaranteed graduation af...
None
Central America has a long history as a site of cultural and political exchange, from Mayan and Nahua trade networks to the effects of Spanish imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. In Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context, instructors will find practical, interdisciplinary, and innovative pedagogical approaches to the cultures of Central America that are adaptable to various fields of study. The essays map out classroom lessons that encourage students to relate writings and films to their own experience of global interconnectedness and to read critically the history that binds Central America to the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. In the context of debates ...
Much of the scholarship examining British culture of the First World War focusses on the 'high' culture of a limited number of novels, memoirs, plays and works of art, and the cultural reaction to them. This collection, by focussing on the cultural forms produced by and for a much wider range of social groups, including veterans, women, museum visitors and film goers, greatly expands the debate over how the war was represented by participants and the meanings ascribed to it in cultural production. Showcasing the work of both established academics and emerging scholars of the field, this book covers aspects of British popular culture from the material cultures of food and clothing to the repr...
'The war went on; life went on; Paris went on.' In A Son at the Front, her only novel dealing with World War I, Edith Wharton offers a vivid portrait of American expatriate life in Paris, as well as a gripping portrayal of a complex modern family. The painter John Campton is divorced from the mother of his son, George, and although Julia's second husband, Anderson Brant, a wealthy banker, has been a devoted stepfather to George, Campton resents his presence in George's life. This family drama is ruptured by the outbreak of fighting, which requires George, born in France, to report for military service despite his parents' belief that he should be exempted. Reflecting Wharton's own experiences, A Son at the Front documents the shock of the outbreak of war, the early hope of a quick victory for the Allies, the terrible human cost of the war, and the relief when, belatedly, the United States enters the conflict. The novel's tone reflects the realities of life in Paris, and the profound disillusionment of the post-war period, standing as not only an important part of Wharton's oeuvre, but a landmark in the literature of the First World War.
In The Absent Dialogue, Anit Mukherjee examines the relations between politicians, bureaucrats, and the military in India and argues that the pattern of civil-military relations in India hampers the effectiveness of the Indian military. Informed by more than a hundred and fifty interviews with high ranking officials, as well as archival material, this book sheds new light on both India's political and military history, as well as democratic civilian control and military effectiveness more generally.
In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dia...
Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself, exploring how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, the problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.