This book traces the theme of justice throughout the narrative of Exodus in order to explicate how yhwh's reclamation of Israel for service-worship reveals a distinct theological ethic of justice grounded in yhwh's character and Israel's calling within yhwh's creational agenda. Adopting a synchronic, text-immanent interpretive strategy that focuses on canonical and inner-biblical connections, Nathan Bills identifies two overlapping motifs that illuminate the theme of justice in Exodus. First, Bills considers the importance of Israel's creation traditions for grounding Exodus's theology of justice. Reading Exodus against the backdrop of creation theology and as a continuation of the plot of Genesis, Bills shows that the ethical disposition of justice imprinted on Israel in Exodus is an application of yhwh's creational agenda of justice. Second, Bills identifies an educational agenda woven throughout the text. The narrative gives heightened attention to the way yhwh catechizes Israel in what it means to be the particular beneficiary and creational emissary of yhwh's justice. These interpretative lenses of creation theology and pedagogy help to explain why Israel's salvation and shaping embody a programmatic applicability of yhwh's justice for the wider world. This volume will be of substantial interest to divinity students and religious professionals interested in the themes of exodus, exile, and return.

Nawab Faizunnesa (1834-1903) challenged established notions regarding women's position in a Muslim society in colonial Bengal. Her "RupJalal" was the first literary text written by a Bengali Muslim woman. The translated text is placed in the historical context of colonialism and the nationalist movement of colonial Bengal. An analysis of the text is also included in order to invite readers to explore the woman question in context of Islam and/in imperial society. With the translated text, along with a critical overview and textual analysis, this book traces in Faizunnesa's life and works the emergence of a self-conscious female voice by addressing the issues of social, political, and economic marginality of women in an Islamic, nationalist, and imperialist culture of colonial Bengal.

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

The Real Western Canon

Larry McMurtry, the preeminent chronicler of the American West, celebrates the best of contemporary Western short fiction, introducing a stellar collection of twenty stories that represent, in various ways, the coming-of-age of the legendary American frontier.

Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken as a whole, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. The featured tales are not so concerned with the American West of history and geography as they are with the American West of the imagination -- one that is alternately comic, gritty, individual, searing, and complex.

Contributors
Wallace Stegner * Dave Hickey * Dao Strom * Dagoberto Gilb * William Hauptman * Jack Kerouac * Ron Hansen * Diana Ossana * Robert Boswell * Tom McGuane Louise Erdrich * Max Apple * Mark Jude Poirier * Rick Bass * Jon Billman * Richard Ford * Raymond Carver * Annie Proulx * Leslie Marmon Silko * William H. Gass

In this highly readable collection of essays, Francis Jarman ranges over such different topics as race, sex, the Second World War, detective novels, Kipling, torture, widow-burning, the Great Indian Novel, travel writing, the Srebrenica Massacre, the Indian Mutiny, and the reasons why writers write. What all the contributions have in common is a concern with problems of perception and communication across cultures. Complete with Notes, Bibliographies, and detailed Index.

"Paul Celan: Studies in His Early Poetry" scrutinizes the influences detectable in the poems written during 1938-48. Among German writers, Buchner, Goethe, Gottfried von Strassburg, Gryphius, Morike, the poet of the "Nibelungenlied," Novalis, Rilke, and Trakl all provided motifs that, often repeated, make for a dense network inviting attention to the self-referential and self-revealing patterns in Celan's early work. In addition, there are many poems that contain motifs gleaned from Greek mythology and/or biblical data. These references, on occasion quite clear, more often so obscure as to be hazy allusions, yield the view that during his first decade of poetic activities Celan becomes increasingly recondite. When these references or allusions stand side-by-side in a given poem, they acquire a surrealistic tint and threaten to withhold clear meaning. Ambiguities, deliberately cultivated in the earliest poems, begin to boomerang and read like so many preludes to the struggles with language evident in the poetry of Celan's maturity. It is a certainty that Celan reacted quickly, if not immediately, to the events befalling the scenes of his early years (Czernowitz and the forced-labor camp). This phenomenon mandates the view of his poems as so many pieces of autobiography. It thus is inevitable that as early as 1940 he wrote against the backdrop of war, and soon thereafter in the shadow of the Holocaust that was destined to brand his mind forever. This volume is meant for anyone interested in Celan, close reading of modern poetry in general, comparative literature, motif studies, poetic reactions to Holocaust events, or even in a Jew's concept regarding the role of the deity in the destruction of those for whom the poet speaks.

Contemporary research on Caribbean literature displays a rich variety of themes, literary and cultural categories, forms, genres, languages. Still, the concept of a unified Caribbean literary space remains questionable, depending upon whether one strictly limits it to the islands, enlarges it to adopt a Latin-American perspective, or even grants it inter-American dimensions. This book is an ambitious tentative to bring together specialists from various disciplines: neither just French, Spanish, English, or Comparative studies specialists, nor strictly "Caribbean literature" specialists, but also theoreticians, cultural studies scholars, historians of cultural translation and of intercultural transfers. The contributions tackle two major questions: what is the best possible division of labor between comparative literature, cultural anthropology and models of national or regional literary histories? how should one make use of "transversal" concepts such as: memory, space, linguistic awareness, intercultural translation, orature or hybridization? Case studies and concrete projects for integrated research alternate with theoretical and historiographical contributions. This volume is of utmost interest to students of Caribbean studies in general, but also to anyone interested in Caribbean literatures in Spanish, English and French, as well as to students in comparative literature, cultural studies and transfer research.

"Collective Creativity "combines complex and ambivalent concepts. While 'creativity' is currently experiencing an inflationary boom in popularity, the term 'collective' appeared, until recently, rather controversial due to its ideological implications in twentieth-century politics. In a world defined by global cultural practice, the notion of collectivity has gained new relevance. This publication discusses a number of concepts of creativity and shows that, in opposition to the traditional ideal of the individual as creative genius, cultural theorists today emphasize the collaborative nature of creativity; they show that 'creativity makes alterity, discontinuity and difference attractive'. Not the Romantic "Originalgenie," but rather the agents of the 'creative economy' appear as the new avant-garde of aesthetic innovation: teams, groups and collectives in business and science, in art and digital media who work together in networking clusters to develop innovative products and processes. In this book, scholars in the social sciences and in cultural and media studies, in literature, theatre and visual arts present for the first time a comprehensive, inter- and transdisciplinary account of collective creativity in its multifaceted applications. They investigate the intersections of artistic, scientific and cultural practice where the individual and the collective merge, come together or confront each other.

Texts about the nocturnal journey of the Prophet Muhammad (Mi'raj) abound in the Muslim world and outside. International attention has never been afforded to any version of text in any language of the Indonesian archipelago. One old version of the text from the area, the Malay Hikayat Mir'aj Nabi Muhammad is presented here in Malay and English translation. The introductory chapters place the text in a wider context in Indonesian literatures while the manuscript of the text (Cod.Or. Leiden 1713) is described in detail. The text and translation purport to enhance interest in this important text in the Muslim world as seen from the Malay/Indonesian perspective.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"These engaged conversations are extremely well-informed, interesting, readable, and revealing. "Critics at Work" is a beautifully composed work and both fun and rewarding to read."
--Vincent B. Leitch, editor of "The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,"

Featuring interviews with nineteen leading U.S. literary and cultural critics, Critics at Work offers a unique picture of recent developments in literary studies, critical theory, American studies, gay and lesbian studies, philosophy, and other fields. It provides informative, timely, and often provocative commentary on a broad range of topics, from the state of theory today and the prospects for cultural studies to the role of public intellectuals and the place of political activism. These conversations also elicit illuminating and sometimes surprising insights into the personal and professional lives of its contributors.

Individually, each interview gives a significant overview of a critic's work. Taken together, they provide an assessment of literary and cultural studies from the establishment of theory and its diffusion, in recent years, into various cultural and identity studies. In addition to the interviews themselves, the volume includes useful short introductions to each critic's work and biography.

Interviewees: K. Anthony Appiah, Lauren Berlant, Cathy Davidson, Morris Dickstein, Stanley Fish, Barbara Foley, Nancy Fraser, Gerald Graff, Alice Kaplan, E. Ann Kaplan, Robin D.G. Kelley, Paul Lauter, Louis Menand, Richard Ohmann, Andrew Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick, and Alan Wald.

Anarchism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective contributes to the continuing debate on the encounter of the classical anarchisms (1860s 1940s) and the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the same period, probing its dimensions and limits. Case studies on Dadaism, decadence, fauvism, neo-impressionism, symbolism, and various anarchisms explore the influence anarchism had on the avant-gardes and reflect on avant-garde tendencies within anarchism. This volume also explores the divergence of anarchism and the avant-gardes. It offers a rich examination of politics and arts, and it complements an ongoing discourse with theoretical tools to better assess the aesthetic, social, and political cross-pollination that took place between the avant-gardes and the anarchists in Europe.

Fred Beiser, renowned as one of the world's leading historians of German philosophy, presents a brilliant new study of Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), rehabilitating him as a philosopher worthy of serious attention. Beiser shows, in particular, that Schiller's engagement with Kant is far more subtle and rewarding than is often portrayed. Promising to be a landmark in the study of German thought, Schiller as Philosopher will be compulsory reading for any philosopher, historian, or literary scholar engaged with the key developments of this fertile period.

"In a language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, the language contains neither ideas nor sounds that pre-exist the linguistic system, but only conceptual differences and phonic differences issuing from this system." (From the posthumous Course in General Linguistics, 1916.)
No one becomes as famous as Saussure without both admirers and detractors reducing them to a paragraph's worth of ideas that can be readily quoted, debated, memorized, and examined. One can argue the ideas expressed above - that language is composed of a system of acoustic oppositions (the signifier) matched by social convention to a system of conceptual oppositions (the signified) - have in some sense become "Saussure," while the human being, in all his complexity, has disappeared. In the first comprehensive biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, John Joseph restores the full character and history of a man who is considered the founder of modern linguistics and whose ideas have influenced literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and virtually every other branch of humanities and the social sciences.
Through a far-reaching account of Saussure's life and the time in which he lived, we learn about the history of Geneva, of Genevese educational institutions, of linguistics, about Saussure's ancestry, about his childhood, his education, the fortunes of his relatives, and his personal life in Paris. John Joseph intersperses all these discussions with accounts of Saussure's research and the courses he taught highlighting the ways in which knowing about his friendships and family history can help us understand not only his thoughts and ideas but also his utter failure to publish any major work after the age of twenty-one.

"Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn "is a study which situates Behn's early plays within their historical and political context. Behn (c.1640-1689), the first professional female playwright in England, is a fascinating study, having traveled to Surinam as a young woman, served as a spy for Charles II, and evidently supported her family through her writing, including plays, poetry, fiction, and translation. Her early plays have often been dismissed as romances, largely because they treat such social and/or gender issues as forced marriage and female desire. This study argues that these same social issues frequently serve as tropes for political commentary and propaganda in support of foreign and domestic policies. Behn's plays clearly demonstrate staunch loyalist support of the Stuart government, yet within the dramatic construction, she-like her contemporary male colleagues, offers fascinating covert political criticism.

This collection of essays explores how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in the earth sciences and related fields (paleontology, mining, archeology, seismology, oceanography, evolution, etc.) impacted on contemporary French culture. They reveal that geological ideas were a much more pervasive and influential cultural force than has hitherto been supposed. From the mid-eighteenth century, with the publication of Buffon s seminal "Theorie de la Terre" (1749), until the early twentieth century, concepts and figures drawn from the earth sciences inspired some of the most important French philosophers, novelists, political theorists, historians and popularizers of science of the time. This book charts the original and influential ways in which French writers and thinkers, such as Buffon, d Holbach, Balzac, Sand, Verne, Gide and Malraux, exploited the earth sciences for very different ends. This volume will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of French literature in the modern period, cultural historians of modern France, scholars of European studies, of French political history, of the History of Ideas or the History of Science as well as researchers in landscape and physical geography.

Jewish American literature covers a broad range of genres and literary works. Some of the United States' most compelling literature centers on the American Jewish experience; some of the most acclaimed authors write from the heart of their experience as Jewish Americans. This ground-breaking work is intended to guide readers and those who advise readers in selecting fiction and nonfiction books that match specific reading interests. It is the first readers' advisory guide to Jewish American literature. Like other titles in the Genreflecting Advisory Series, the book organizes titles by genre--mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy, stories of romance, and literary fiction. In addition, there are chapters on holocaust literature and on biography/autobiography. More than 700 titles are categorized and described. Each chapter is further organized by subgenre and theme. Award-winning titles are noted, as are books that appeal to young adult readers and titles appropriate for book clubs and reading discussions. In addition, the author presents guidelines for building and maintaining a collection of Jewish literature, tips for advising readers, and lists of further resources for exploring the genre; making this a thorough and practical resource. Young adult and adult - Grades 9 and up.