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Alawia Sobh's acclaimed Arabic novel of the Lebanese Civil War is a rare depiction of women's experience across class, sect, and generation in this region-defining conflict. Rich with everyday detail, uncovering the collusions of ordinary and extraordinary violence, and mixing female voices of different ages and beliefs, Sobh's work is not only an illumination of an important historical period at a new scale. It is also a unique meditation on the nature of storytelling. In The Keeper of Stories, stories struggle to survive the erasures of war and to rescue the sweetness of living, and connect the tellers and their audience in sometimes welcome, sometimes maddening ways. The transformation of pain and love into art is both the subject and substance of this necessary new book, sensitively brought into English by a translator who shares aspects of Sobh's background and worked with the author on the translation.
The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century is a sustained critical examination of the developments in the field of literary studies from the early 2000s onwards within the context of the systematic problems in the humanities. This volume analyzes the origins of the current methods—including New Historicism, empiricism, New Formalism, postcritique, and others—and posits alternatives to the present state of literary studies. At a time when many aspects of current methods show a desire to adopt values from other disciplines to solve internal crises, this volume advocates a renewed focus on questions of form by means of the praxis of aesthetic study, close reading, and other modes of engaging directly with literary texts.
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire examines how at the height of empire Britain was threaded through with Indian influences and ideas, in spite of colonial divisions. Throughout, the study is motivated by the notion that Indian travellers learned from the friendships they made in the west but also that they contributed to the development of a late Victorian cosmopolitanism of which they were an intrinsic part. Tracing the intricateencounters that took place between 'arriving' Indians and their British hosts, often through the medium of literature and journalism, the book paints a more textured picture than has been available to date ofcross-cultural contact between Indians and Britons and in so doing explores the myriad ways in which the centre of the nineteenth-century imperial world was criss-crossed by its margins, just as the margins were by the centre. Indian Arrivals offers a sustained reflection on what it is to arrive in another culture, in all senses of the word.
This is one of the first books to trace the development of Roberto Bolaño's work from the beginning to the end of his career. It will appeal to graduates and researchers working on Bolaño and Latin American Literature generally, particularly the novel, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.
The Age of Silver considers how commerce fueled the emergence of the novel around the globe, examining the evolution of epochal works of national literature from Don Quixote in 1605 to Robinson Crusoe in 1719.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that sectarianism is intrinsically linked to violence, bloodshed, or social disharmony, Max Weiss uncovers the complex roots of Shiʿi sectarianism in twentieth-century Lebanon. The template for conflicted relations between the Lebanese state and Shiʿi society arose under French Mandate rule through a process of gradual transformation, long before the political mobilization of the Shiʿi community under the charismatic Imam Musa al-Sadr and his Movement of the Deprived, and decades before the radicalization linked to Hizballah. Throughout the period, the Shiʿi community was buffeted by crosscutting political, religious, and ideological currents: transnational affiliations versus local concerns; the competing pull of Arab nationalism and Lebanese nationalism; loyalty to Jabal ʿAmil, the cultural heartland of Shiʿi Lebanon; and the modernization of religious and juridical traditions. Uncoupling the beginnings of modern Shiʿi collective identity from the rise of political Shiʿism, Weiss transforms our understanding of the nature of sectarianism and shows why in Lebanon it has been both so productive and so destructive at the same time.
The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus on English and Irish literature to explore the contributions of artists from countries like the US, Cuba, Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria.
The 2019 congress of the International Comparative Literature Association attracted many hundreds of scholars from all around the world to Macau. This volume contains a modest selection of papers to discuss the four hottest fields of the discipline: the future of comparison, the position of national and diaspora literature in the context of globalization, the importance of translation, and the concepts of world literature. The contributions cover huge geographical and cultural areas, but pay special attention to the connections between Western (both American and European) and Asian (especially Indian and East-Asian) literatures. The literatures of the world might be different but they are also connected.
One of the most important functions of religion is to serve as a basis of identity. This collection of essays by Ali A. Mazrui, a distinguished scholar of Islam, discusses how Islam differentiates Muslims from non-Muslims and affects how Muslims view each other. In the light of the upheaval currently occurring in the Muslim world, this collection provides readers with valuable context for the challenges of modernity and multiculturalism faced by Muslims. In these essays, Mazrui deploys his formidable knowledge of theology, history, and Muslim societies to analyze the theological, historical, and political influences on Muslim identity. In his usual style of comparative analysis, Mazrui draws most frequently in these essays from examples in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Muslim communities in the West. These essays delve into the complexities of Muslim identity and stratification, and provide contributions to key debates on modern Islamic political ideology. These essays will be of interest to readers engaged with Islam, religion, culture, comparative politics and international relations.