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World History through Case Studies: Historical Skills in Practice
by Dave EatonThis innovative textbook demystifies the subject of world history through a diverse range of case studies. Each chapter looks at an event, person, or place commonly included in comprehensive textbooks, from prehistory to the present and from across the globe – from the Kennewick Man to gladiators and modern-day soccer and globalization – and digs deeper, examining why historians disagree on the subject and why their debates remain relevant today.By taking the approach of 'unwrapping the textbook,' David Eaton reveals how historians think, making it clear that the past is not nearly as tidy as most textbooks suggest. Provocative questions like whether ancient Greece was shaped by contact with Egypt provide an entry point into how history professors may sharply disagree on even basic narratives, and how historical interpretations can be influenced by contemporary concerns. By illuminating these historiographical debates, and linking them to key skills required by historians, World History through Case Studies shows how the study of history is relevant to a new generation of students and teachers.
The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition
by Elias MuhannaShihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world—a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. A storehouse of knowledge, this enormous book brought together materials on nearly every conceivable subject, from cosmology, zoology, and botany to philosophy, poetry, ethics, statecraft, and history. Composed in Cairo during the golden age of Islamic encyclopedic activity, the Ultimate Ambition was one of hundreds of large-scale compendia, literary anthologies, dictionaries, and chronicles produced at this time—an effort that was instrumental in organizing the archive of medieval Islamic thought.In the first study of this landmark work in a European language, Elias Muhanna explores its structure and contents, sources and influences, and reception and impact in the Islamic world and Europe. He sheds new light on the rise of encyclopedic literature in the learned cities of the Mamluk Empire and situates this intellectual movement alongside other encyclopedic traditions in the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. He also uncovers al-Nuwayri’s world: a scene of bustling colleges, imperial chanceries, crowded libraries, and religious politics.Based on award-winning scholarship, The World in a Book opens up new areas in the comparative study of encyclopedic production and the transmission of knowledge.
The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition
by Elias MuhannaShihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world—a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. A storehouse of knowledge, this enormous book brought together materials on nearly every conceivable subject, from cosmology, zoology, and botany to philosophy, poetry, ethics, statecraft, and history. Composed in Cairo during the golden age of Islamic encyclopedic activity, the Ultimate Ambition was one of hundreds of large-scale compendia, literary anthologies, dictionaries, and chronicles produced at this time—an effort that was instrumental in organizing the archive of medieval Islamic thought.In the first study of this landmark work in a European language, Elias Muhanna explores its structure and contents, sources and influences, and reception and impact in the Islamic world and Europe. He sheds new light on the rise of encyclopedic literature in the learned cities of the Mamluk Empire and situates this intellectual movement alongside other encyclopedic traditions in the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. He also uncovers al-Nuwayri’s world: a scene of bustling colleges, imperial chanceries, crowded libraries, and religious politics.Based on award-winning scholarship, The World in a Book opens up new areas in the comparative study of encyclopedic production and the transmission of knowledge.
The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept
by Matthew KaiserNineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. The book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. Kaiser gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.
The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters or Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life
by Henry Hitchings'Delightful' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday'Witty, engaging' Sunday Times'Beguiling and intelligent' TLSSamuel Johnson was a critic, an essayist, a poet and a biographer. He was also, famously, the compiler of the first good English dictionary, published in 1755. A polymath and a great conversationalist, his intellectual and social curiosity were boundless. Yet he was a deeply melancholy man, haunted by dark thoughts, sickness and a diseased imagination. In his own life, both public and private, he sought to choose a virtuous and prudent path, negotiating everyday hazards and temptations. His writings and aphorisms illuminate what it means to lead a life of integrity, and his experience, abundantly documented by him and by others (such as James Boswell and Hester Thrale), is a lesson in the art of regulating the mind and the body.Johnson’s story touches on many themes that have enduring significance. He was, and remains, a perceptive commentator on the vanity of human wishes, the rewards and dangers of charity, the need to cultivate kindness, the complexities of family life (especially marriage), the effects of boredom and the fleeting nature of pleasure. He writes and speaks incisively and humanely about the ego, ambition, hypocrisy, fallibility and disorders of the mind, as well as the corrosive effects of obsession, the precariousness of fame and the skulduggery of the literary world. He is a source of profound good sense about what it means to teach, read, write and travel. More than that, though, he continually translates his experience of poverty, scorn, pain and madness into a rich understanding of how to be.
The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson University Press)
by Daniel Westover William WrightThe discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry in the twentieth century was a revelation for postwar poets, who discovered in both Hopkins’s style and subject matter a voice seemingly bottled for their own time. This influence has not faded in the twenty-first century; in fact, it has grown all the more pervasive as poets from many backgrounds and nations have found, in the voice of this nineteenth-century Jesuit, a revolutionary way of addressing contemporary concerns relating to human imagination, ecology, “green” ethics, the role of art, and individual spirituality. The poets collected in The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins engage with Hopkins in diverse ways. Some mention Hopkins or address some aspect of his life. Others channel his innovative poetics or address important Hopkinsian themes. All demonstrate the centrality of his influence in contemporary poetry. Unfortunately, critics have mostly neglected the importance of Hopkins as a contemporary model, instead pinning his influence to the early twentieth century. In a climate where high modernism, Whitmanic free verse, and the confessional lyric are often held up as contemporary poetry’s dominant forerunners, this book proposes a more complex genealogy, tracing back to Hopkins and his influential early admirers current strands of emotional and spiritual openness, pleasure in word play and sonic textures, and veneration of the dynamic material world.
The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War
by Allison M. PraschA fresh account of the US presidential rhetoric embodied in Cold War international travel. Crowds swarm when US presidents travel abroad, though many never hear their voices. The presidential body, moving from one secured location to another, communicates as much or more to these audiences than the texts of their speeches. In The World is Our Stage, Allison M. Prasch considers how presidential appearances overseas broadcast American superiority during the Cold War. Drawing on extensive archival research, Prasch examines five foundational moments in the development of what she calls the “global rhetorical presidency:” Truman at Potsdam, Eisenhower’s “Goodwill Tours,” Kennedy in West Berlin, Nixon in the People’s Republic of China, and Reagan in Normandy. In each case, Prasch reveals how the president’s physical presence defined the boundaries of the “Free World” and elevated the United States as the central actor in Cold War geopolitics.
The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War
by Allison M. PraschA fresh account of the US presidential rhetoric embodied in Cold War international travel. Crowds swarm when US presidents travel abroad, though many never hear their voices. The presidential body, moving from one secured location to another, communicates as much or more to these audiences than the texts of their speeches. In The World is Our Stage, Allison M. Prasch considers how presidential appearances overseas broadcast American superiority during the Cold War. Drawing on extensive archival research, Prasch examines five foundational moments in the development of what she calls the “global rhetorical presidency:” Truman at Potsdam, Eisenhower’s “Goodwill Tours,” Kennedy in West Berlin, Nixon in the People’s Republic of China, and Reagan in Normandy. In each case, Prasch reveals how the president’s physical presence defined the boundaries of the “Free World” and elevated the United States as the central actor in Cold War geopolitics.
World Literacy: How Countries Rank and Why It Matters
by Michael C. McKenna John W. MillerInternational literacy assessments have provided ample data for ranking nations, charting growth, and casting blame. Summarizing the findings of these assessments, which afford a useful vantage from which to view world literacy as it evolves, this book examines literate behavior worldwide, in terms of both the ability of populations from a wide variety of nations to read and the practice of literate behavior in those nations. Drawing on The World’s Most Literate Nations, author Jack Miller’s internationally released study, emerging trends in world literacy and their relationships to political, economic, and social factors are explored. Literacy, and in particular the practice of literate behaviors, is used as a lens through which to view countries’ economic development, gender equality, resource utilization, and ethnic discrimination. Above all, this book is about trajectories. It begins with historical contexts, described in terms of support for literate cultures. Based on a variety of data sources, these trends are traced to the present and then projected ahead. The literate futures of nations are discussed and how these relate to their economic and sociocultural development. This book is unique in providing a broader perspective on an intractable problem, a vantage point that offers useful insights to inform policy, and in bringing together an array of relevant data sources not typically associated with literacy status.
World Literacy: How Countries Rank and Why It Matters
by Michael C. McKenna John W. MillerInternational literacy assessments have provided ample data for ranking nations, charting growth, and casting blame. Summarizing the findings of these assessments, which afford a useful vantage from which to view world literacy as it evolves, this book examines literate behavior worldwide, in terms of both the ability of populations from a wide variety of nations to read and the practice of literate behavior in those nations. Drawing on The World’s Most Literate Nations, author Jack Miller’s internationally released study, emerging trends in world literacy and their relationships to political, economic, and social factors are explored. Literacy, and in particular the practice of literate behaviors, is used as a lens through which to view countries’ economic development, gender equality, resource utilization, and ethnic discrimination. Above all, this book is about trajectories. It begins with historical contexts, described in terms of support for literate cultures. Based on a variety of data sources, these trends are traced to the present and then projected ahead. The literate futures of nations are discussed and how these relate to their economic and sociocultural development. This book is unique in providing a broader perspective on an intractable problem, a vantage point that offers useful insights to inform policy, and in bringing together an array of relevant data sources not typically associated with literacy status.
World Literature After Empire: Rethinking Universality in the Long Cold War (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Pieter VanhoveThis book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.
World Literature After Empire: Rethinking Universality in the Long Cold War (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Pieter VanhoveThis book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.
World Literature and Dissent
by Lorna Burns Katie MuthWorld Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts including the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness. Addressing a broad range of examples, from the Maghrebian humanist Ibn Khaldūn to India’s Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic. It asks the urgent question: how critical practice might cultivate radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression?
World Literature and Dissent
by Lorna Burns Katie MuthWorld Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts including the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness. Addressing a broad range of examples, from the Maghrebian humanist Ibn Khaldūn to India’s Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic. It asks the urgent question: how critical practice might cultivate radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression?
World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950 (New Comparisons in World Literature)
by Michael NiblettLocated at the intersection of world-literary studies and the environmental humanities, this book analyses how fiction and poetry respond to the ecological transformations entailed by commodity frontiers. Examining the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil frontiers in Trinidad, Brazil, and Britain, World Literature and Ecology shows how literary texts have registered the relationship between the re-making of biophysical natures and struggles around class, race, and gender. It combines a materialist theory of world-literature with the insights of the world-ecology perspective to generate compelling new readings of writers such as Rhys Davies, Yseult Bridges, Lewis Jones, José Lins do Rego, Ellen Wilkinson, Jorge Amado, Gwyn Thomas, and Ralph de Boissière. The book represents a timely intervention into a series of field-defining debates around peripheral realisms and modernisms, ecocriticism, and the energy humanities.
World Literature and Hedayat’s Poetics of Modernity (Canon and World Literature)
by Omid AzadibougarThis book introduces the canonical figure Sadegh Hedayat (1903–1951) and draws a comprehensive image of a major intellectual force in the context of both modern Persian Literature and World Literature. A prolific writer known for his magnum opus, The Blind Owl (1936), Hedayat established the use of common language for literary purposes, opened new horizons on imaginative literature and explored a variety of genres in his creative career. This book looks beyond the reductive critical tendencies that read a rich and diverse literary profile in light of Hedayat’s suicide, arguing instead that his literary imagination was not solely the result of genius but rather enriched by a vast network of the world’s literary traditions. This study reflects on Hedayat’s attempts at various genres of artistic creation, including painting, fiction writing, satire and scholarly research, as well as his persistent struggles for artistic authenticity, which transcended solidly established literary and artistic norms. Providing a critical reading of Hedayat’s work to untangle aspects of his writing – including reflections on science, religion, nationalism and coloniality – alongside his pioneering work on folk culture, and how humor informs his writings, this text offers a critical review of the status of Persian literature in the contemporary landscape of the world’s literary studies.
World Literature and the Postcolonial: Narratives of (Neo) Colonialization in a Globalized World
This volume approaches literary representations of post and neocolonialism by combining their readings with respective theoretical configurations. The aim is to cast light upon common characteristics of contemporary texts from around the world that deal with processes of colonization. Based on the epistemic discourses of postimperialism/postcolonialism, globalization, and world literature, the volume’s chapters bring together international scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities, including Comparative Cultural Studies, Slavic, Romance, German, and African Studies. The main concern of the contributions is to conceptualize an autonomous category of a world literature of the colonial, going well beyond established classifications according to single languages or center-periphery dichotomies.
World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890
by Kedar Arun KulkarniWorld Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound, wide availability of print technology. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity.
World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890
by Kedar Arun KulkarniWorld Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound, wide availability of print technology. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity.
World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon
by Zhang LongxiThe rise of world literature is the most noticeable phenomenon in literary studies in the twenty-first century. However, truly well-known and globally circulating works are all canonical works of European or Western literature, while non-European and even "minor" European literatures remain largely unknown beyond their culture of origin. World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon argues that world literature for our time must go beyond Eurocentrism and expand the canon to include great works from non-European and "minor" European literatures. As much of the world’s literature remains untranslated and unknown, the expansion will be an exciting process of discovery. By discussing fundamental questions around canon, circulation, aesthetic values, translation, cosmopolitanism, and the literary universal, Zhang Longxi proposes a new and liberating concept of world literature that will shape world literature worthy of its name. This book speaks for a more inclusive idea of world literature and shows students and scholars alike that all the literary traditions, particularly non-European traditions, will be able to make important contributions and expand the canon of world literature.
World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon
by Zhang LongxiThe rise of world literature is the most noticeable phenomenon in literary studies in the twenty-first century. However, truly well-known and globally circulating works are all canonical works of European or Western literature, while non-European and even "minor" European literatures remain largely unknown beyond their culture of origin. World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon argues that world literature for our time must go beyond Eurocentrism and expand the canon to include great works from non-European and "minor" European literatures. As much of the world’s literature remains untranslated and unknown, the expansion will be an exciting process of discovery. By discussing fundamental questions around canon, circulation, aesthetic values, translation, cosmopolitanism, and the literary universal, Zhang Longxi proposes a new and liberating concept of world literature that will shape world literature worthy of its name. This book speaks for a more inclusive idea of world literature and shows students and scholars alike that all the literary traditions, particularly non-European traditions, will be able to make important contributions and expand the canon of world literature.
World Literature Decentered: Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Ian AlmondWhat would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the “West”? Starting with the provocative premise that the “‘West’ is ten percent of the planet”, World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history – not just by deconstructing or historicizing them, but by actively providing an alternative. Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the “West”. The non-West, the book argues, is no fringe group or token minority in need of attention – on the contrary, it constitutes the overwhelming majority of this world.
World Literature Decentered: Beyond the “West” through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Ian AlmondWhat would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the “West”? Starting with the provocative premise that the “‘West’ is ten percent of the planet”, World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history – not just by deconstructing or historicizing them, but by actively providing an alternative. Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the “West”. The non-West, the book argues, is no fringe group or token minority in need of attention – on the contrary, it constitutes the overwhelming majority of this world.
World Literature in Spanish [3 volumes]: An Encyclopedia [3 volumes]
Containing roughly 850 entries about Spanish-language literature throughout the world, this expansive work provides coverage of the varied countries, ethnicities, time periods, literary movements, and genres of these writings.Providing a thorough introduction to Spanish-language literature worldwide and across time is a tall order. However, World Literature in Spanish: An Encyclopedia contains roughly 850 entries on both major and minor authors, themes, genres, and topics of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the present day, affording an amazingly comprehensive reference collection in a single work.This encyclopedia describes the growing diversity within national borders, the increasing interdependence among nations, and the myriad impacts of Spanish literature across the globe. All countries that produce literature in Spanish in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia are represented, covering both canonical authors and emerging contemporary writers and trends. Underrepresented writings—such as texts by women writers, queer and Afro-Hispanic texts, children's literature, and works on relevant but less studied topics such as sports and nationalism—also appear. While writings throughout the centuries are covered, those of the 20th and 21st centuries receive special consideration.
World Literature in Theory
by David DamroschWorld Literature in Theory provides a definitive exploration of the pressing questions facing those studying world literature today. Coverage is split into four parts which examine the origins and seminal formulations of world literature, world literature in the age of globalization, contemporary debates on world literature, and localized versions of world literature Contains more than 30 important theoretical essays by the most influential scholars, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hugo Meltzl, Edward Said, Franco Moretti, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gayatri Spivak Includes substantive introductions to each essay, as well as an annotated bibliography for further reading Allows students to understand, articulate, and debate the most important issues in this rapidly changing field of study