Demonstrating that the supposed drawbacks of the humanities are in fact their source of practical value, Jay explores current debates about the role of the humanities in higher education, puts them in historical context, and offers humanists and their supporters concrete ways to explain the practical value of a contemporary humanities education.

Indian soldiers served in France from 1914 to 1918. This book is a selection of their letters. By turns poignant, funny, and almost unbearably moving, these documents vividly evoke the world of the Western Front--as seen through "subaltern" Indian eyes. The letters also bear eloquent witness to the sepoys' often unsettling encounter with Europe, and with European culture. This book helps to map the imaginative landscape of South Asia's warrior-peasant communities.

This book provides a Latino reading of John's prologue with special attention to how the themes of race, kinship, and the empire are part of the gospel's racial rhetoric. By drawing from the insights of Latinx texts and theology, this book reveals how the prologue provides a lens to read the entire gospel with a keen awareness of Jesus's engagement with people groups-from his own family to the Roman authorities. The prologue participates in the gospel's racial rhetoric by shaping the reader's racial imagination even before a person enters the narrative. By doing so, Jesus's identity becomes constructed and defined through racial rhetoric since the opening verses of John's gospel.

This study looks at French women writers and representations of the Occupation in post-'68 France. Two groups of women writers are selected for discussion: The Women Resisters, those who were adult resisters during the war years, and The Daughters of the Occupation, those who were born during or after the war. By examining a number of texts, many of which have received little critical attention to date, this study analyzes how a nascent awareness of gender, representation and political activism informs the texts of an older generation of women writers. Such a perspective is reworked into overtly feminist representations of the Occupation by younger women writers who deal with their familial connection to three wartime memories: resistance, collaboration and Jewish persecution. This gender-conscious approach to women's writing and the Occupation marks this book as a new departure in the study of French literature and the Second World War.

The image of The Girl in contemporary fiction by women today stands in stark contrast to configurations of girlhood in earlier fiction. No longer banished to the realms of the Victorian "marriage or death" plots, girls in contemporary fiction embrace new challenges and freedoms while still struggling with plots centered on their bodies, societal limitations, and the price for freedom and escape. This unique collection tackles the contemporary forces at work on both the girls in fiction created by women and the writers themselves. The Girl investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the 20th century as portrayed in contemporary fiction by women. The essayists show how new fictions of The Girl provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns--including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, female subjectivity, and nationalism--in new ways, while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or overprotection. The first collection of critical essays to examine the portrayal of girls in contemporary women’s fiction within the context of recent sociological and psychological analyses of girls, The Girl proposes that contemporary stories of girlhood constitute a new lens for literary and cultural study. Examining the work of authors such as Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joyce Carol Oates for their revelations and representations in regard to girlhood, these essays speak to, complement, and contest one another in a compelling interrogation of what it means to grow up female at the end of the millennium.

Writing and Muslim Identity is a comparative study of Islam in contemporary German- and English-language literature. At a time when the non-Islamic world seems to be defining itself increasingly in contrast to the Islamic world, this literary exploration of Islam-related issues sheds new and valuable light on the cultural interaction between the Muslim world and 'the West'. Writing and Muslim Identity engages with literary representations of different versions of Islam and asks how travel and migration, the transcultural experiences of migrant and post-migrant Muslims, may have shaped the Islams encountered in today's Germany and Britain. With its comparative approach to 'cultural translations' as creative and challenging interactions between cultures that are constantly in flux, the study develops methods of engaging with notions of home and movement, gender and language, all of which may shape a (post-)migrant's transcultural experience. The book also offers a complex understanding of transcultural writing in relation to 'traditional' (Anglophone) as well as 'marginal' (German) postcoloniality. Frauke Matthes is Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.

Kirk Beattie presents a fresh look at Egyptian politics during the Sadat presidency. Beginning with an examination of the political and economic situation bequeathed by Nasser, he describes Sadat’s succession to the presidency and his consolidation of power. His analysis focuses on Sadat’s effort to chart a new political and economic path, including the daring October 1973 war, liberalization of Egypt’s political economy, the January 1977 food riots, and peace with Israel. Simultaneously, Beattie highlights the important obstacles presented by intra-regime, civilian, and foreign opponents to Sadat’s various political and economic development strategies, explaining the factors that led to Sadat’s assassination. Based on hundred of interviews with key actors representing diverse political viewpoints, this book provides insight into government and opposition behavior during Sadat’s presidency.

The Mail and Guardian bedside book once again selects the best of the paper's features over the last year to bring you an unparalleled snapshot of South Africa (and Africa) in cross-section - from Happy Sindane to Idi Amin, Ventersdorp to Luanda (via Hollywood), in the company of the best journalists in the country. The paper tackles the burning issues of the day - the Aids debate, the oil scandal, and the question of whatever happened to Jimmy Abbott. It pays tribute to giants of the struggle such as Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, and visits a big fat Afrikaner wedding.

Surrealist women's writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers' work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Cesaire, Unica Zurn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet. -- .