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Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small publisher, magical style, and setting in a remote Caribbean village were hardly the usual ingredients for success in the literary marketplace. Yet today it ranks among the best-selling books of all time. Translated into dozens of languages, it continues to enter the lives of new readers around the world. How did One Hundred Years of Solitude achieve this unlikely success? And what does its trajectory tell us about how a work of art becomes a classic? Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, from the mome...
The book has two related themes. The first is a story of an improbable friendship between a rural, semi-literate, violent, heroin addicted Chicano and a Brooklyn bred Jew, who bonded almost immediately. Life drew them apart for almost half a century and when the friendship resumed, both Santana and Saul realized, to their satisfaction, that their feelings for the other had remained strong. In the intervening years, however, their circumstances had changed radically. Santana, after spending much of his life in California prisons for violent crimes, had become a devout Christian and church pastor. Saul had become a successful businessman and remained an atheist. The book shows how the strong bond survives the difference both in life circumstances and belief and suggests a way for others to follow.
What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers ...
This book showcases recent work about reading and books in sociology and the humanities across the globe. From different standpoints and within the broad perspectives within the cultural sociology of reading, the eighteen chapters examine a range of reading practices, genres, types of texts, and reading spaces. They cover the Anglophone area of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, multilingual space constituted by the readership of the Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech Republic; twentieth century Swahili readings in East Africa; contemporary Iran; and China during the cultural revolution and the...
The history of sociology overwhelmingly focuses on 'the winners' from the classical 'canon' - Marx, Durkheim, and Weber - to today's most celebrated sociologists. This book strikingly demonstrates that restricting sociology in this way impoverishes it as a form of historically reflexive knowledge and obscures the processes and struggles of sociology's own making as a form of disciplinary knowledge. Sociological Amnesia focuses on singular contributions to sociology that were once considered central to the discipline but are today largely neglected. Chapters explore the work of illustrious predecessors such as Raymond Aron, Erich Fromm and G.D.H. Cole as well as examining exceptional cases of...
The existence of World Literature depends on specific processes, institutions, and actors involved in the global circulation of literary works. The contributions of this volume aim to pay attention to these multiple material dimensions of Latin American 20th and 21st century literatures. From perspectives informed by materialism, sociology, book studies, and digital humanities, the articles of this volume analyze the role of publishing houses, politics of translation, mediators and gatekeepers, allowing insights into the processes that enable books to cross borders and to be transformed into globally circulating commodities. The book focusses both on material (re)sources of literary archives, key actors in literary and cultural markets, prizes and book fairs, as well as on recent dimension of the digital age. Statements of some of the leading representatives of the global publishing world complement these analyses of the operations of selection and aggregation of value to literary texts.
Translation Classics in Context carefully considers the relationship between translation and the classics. It presents readers with revelatory and insightful case studies that investigate translations produced as part of nexuses of colonial resistance and liberation across Africa and in Ireland; translations of novels and folklore collections that influence not just other fictions, but stage productions and entire historical disciplines; struggles over Ukrainian and Russian literature and how it is shaped and transferred; and the role of the academy and the curriculum in creating notions of classic translations. Along the way it covers oral poetry, saints, scholars, Walter Scott and Jules Verne, not to mention Leo Tolstoy and the Corpse Bride making her way from folklore to Frankenstein and into the world of Disney animation. Contributors are all leading scholars, and the book is accessible and engaging, assuming no specialist knowledge.
Women's creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women's diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women's contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures. With an international, intergenerational set of contributors using diverse methodologies, essays explore women working in publishing transatlantically, on the continent, and beyond the Anglosphere. The book combines new work on high-profile women publishers and editors alongside analysis of women's work as translators, illustrators, booksellers, advertisers, patrons, and publisher's readers; complemented by new oral histories and interviews with leading women in publishing today. The first collection of its kind, the companion helps establish and shape a thriving new research field.
This Handbook offers a comprehensive examination of Gabriel García Márquez's life, oeuvre, and legacy, the first such work since his death in 2014. It incorporates ongoing critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, while elucidating key aspects of his work, such as his Caribbean-Colombian background; his use of magical realism, myth, and folklore; and his left-wing political views. Thirty-two wide-ranging chapters coverthe bulk of the author's writings, giving special attention to the global influence of García Márquez.
In The Gardeners' Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics, Noah Toly engages Christian and classical Greek ideas of the tragic to illuminate the enduring challenges of environmental politics. He suggests that Christians have unique resources for responsible engagement with global environmental politics.