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Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, a noted Christian literary scholar recounts how her focus has shifted from American to African literature. Susan VanZanten began her career working on nineteenth-century American literature. A combination of personal circumstances, curricular demands, world events, and unfolding scholarship have led her to teach, research, and write about African literature and to advocate for a global approach to education and scholarship. This is the second book in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments beyond North America.
Joining the Mission is a helpful guide for new (and experienced) faculty at religious colleges and universities. Susan VanZanten here provides an orientation to the world of Christian higher education and an introduction to the academic profession of teaching, scholarship, and service, with a special emphasis on opportunities and challenges common to mission-driven institutions. From designing a syllabus to dealing with problem students, from working with committees to achieving a balanced life, VanZanten s guidebook will help faculty across the disciplines Art to Zoology and every subject between understand better what it means to pursue faithfully a vocation as professor. Susan VanZanten s...
Although Emily Dickinson is sometimes seen as a religious skeptic, she never gave up on God, struggling with issues of faith and doubt throughout her life. Many of her poems depict such struggles, sometimes with humor and sometimes with despair. Reading and reflecting on these poems can be a powerful way to listen to and experience God through the arts. Mending a Tattered Faith presents, first, an accessible introduction to the mysteries of Dickinson's life and poetry, considering her relationships to her family and the church, the significant poetic strategies she employed, and the dramatic family struggle over publishing her poetry that began soon after her death. It then offers twenty-nine carefully selected poems by Dickinson, each with an accompanying meditation. By helping readers unpack Dickinson's intense but brief poems, supplying absorbing historical background and information, and relating some personal stories and reflections, this book encourages readers to embark upon their own meditative journey with Dickinson, whose engaging struggles with faith and doubt can help illuminate our own spiritual questions, sorrows, and joys.
With the publication of Age of Iron--winner of Britain's richest fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year for 1990--J. M. Coetzee is now recognized as one of the foremost writers of our day. In this timely study of Coetzee's fiction, Susan Gallagher places his work in the context of South African history and politics. Her close historical readings of Coetzee's six major novels explore how he lays bare the "dense complicity between thought and language" in South Africa. Following a penetrating description of the unique difficulties facing writers under apartheid, Gallagher recounts how history, language, and authority have been used to marginalize the majority of South Africa's peop...
Despite postmodernism's skepticism about narrative, the dialogue with contemporary fiction, drama, music and film demonstrates that the Christian story can engender and sustain hope.
Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the discourse of human rights has expanded to include not just civil and political rights but economic, social, cultural, and, most recently, collective rights. Given their broad scope, human rights issues are useful touchstones in the humanities classroom and benefit from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural pedagogy in which objects of study are situated in historical, legal, philosophical, literary, and rhetorical contexts. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies is a sourcebook of inventive approaches and best practices for teachers looking to make human rights the focus of their undergraduate and ...
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Preliminary Material -- Critical Appropriations and Hermeneutic Resistance -- Penetration: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country -- Resistance: Waiting for the Barbarians -- Parasitism: Life and Times of Michael K and Age of Iron -- Visitation: Disgrace -- Secrecy: Foe -- (Un)belonging: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime -- Intrusion: The Master of Petersburg and Slow Man -- Fidelities: Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year -- Works Cited -- Index.
In By the Breath of Their Mouths, Mary Jo Bona examines the oral uses of language and the liberating power of speech in Italian American writing, as well as its influences on generations of assimilated Italian American writers. Probing and wide-ranging, Bona's analysis reveals the lasting importance of storytelling and folk narrative, their impact on ethnic, working-class, and women's literatures, and their importance in shaping multiethnic literature. Drawing on a wide range of material from several genres, including oral biographies, fiction, film, poetry, and memoir, and grounded in recent theories of narrative and autobiography, postcolonial theory, and critical multiculturalism, By the Breath of Their Mouths is must reading for students in Italian American studies in particular and ethnic studies and multiethnic literature more generally.
Displays of devout religious faith are very much in evidence in nineteenth-century sentimental novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women, but the precise theological nature of this piety has been little examined. In the first dedicated study of the religious contents of sentimental literature, Claudia Stokes counters the long-standing characterization of sentimental piety as blandly nondescript and demonstrates that these works were in fact groundbreaking, assertive, and highly specific in their theological recommendations and endorsements. The Altar at Home explores the many religious contexts and contents of sentimental literature of the American nineteenth century, from the growth...