Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing. It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect. Travelling through Classical Greece, Ashoka's India, Tang dynasty China, and many other epochs, this triumphal new history reveals the crossing points which have not only inspired the humanities, but which have made us human.

Co-winner of the Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for 2009

When Lord Byron identified the periodical industry as the "Literary Lower Empire," he registered the cultural clout that periodicals had accumulated by positioning themselves as both the predominant purveyors of scientific, economic, and social information and the arbiters of literary and artistic taste. "British Periodicals and Romantic Identity "explores how periodicals such as the "Edinburgh," "Blackwood's," and the "Westminster" became the repositories and creators of "public opinion." In addition, Schoenfield examines how particular figures, both inside and outside the editorial apparatus of the reviews and magazines, negotiated this public and rapidly professionalized space. Ranging from Lord Byron, whose self-identification as lord and poet anticipated his public image in the periodicals, to William Hazlitt, equally journalist and subject of the reviews, this engaging study explores both canonical figures and canon makers in the periodicals and positions them as a centralizing force in the consolidation of Romantic print culture.

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light presents the latest research in animal perception and cognition in the context of rhetorical theory. Alex C. Parrish explores the science of animal signaling that shows human and nonhuman animals share similar rhetorical strategies-such as communicating to manipulate or persuade-which suggests the vast impact sensory modalities have on communication in nature. The book demonstrates new ways of seeing humans and how we have separated ourselves from, and subjectified, the animal rhetor. This type of cross-species study allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing a deeper and more inclusive history of rhetoric than ever before.

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.

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.

This book draws on literary, cultural, and critical examples forming a menstrual imaginary-a body of work by women writers and poets that builds up a concept of women's creativity in an effort to overturn menstrual prejudice. The text addresses key arbiters of the menstrual imaginary in a series of letters, including Sylvia Plath the initiator of 'the blood jet', Helene Cixous the pioneer of a conceptual red ink and the volcanic unconscious, and Luce Irigaray the inaugurator of women's artistic process relative to a vital flow of desire based in sexual difference. The text also undertakes provocative against-the-grain re-readings of the Medusa, the Sphinx, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Red Shoes, as a means of affirmatively and poetically re-imagining a woman's flow. Natalie Rose Dyer argues for re-envisioning menstrual bleeding and creativity in reaction and resistance to ongoing and problematic societal views of menstruation.

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.

Drawing on recent findings of cognitive science, Mark Bracher here employs widely taught literary texts - including Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Voltaire's Candide, Camus's "The Guest," and Coetzee's Disgrace - to provide detailed demonstrations of how literary study can be used to develop cosmopolitanism, defined as a commitment to global justice. Cosmopolitanism, Bracher explains, is motivated by compassion for peoples who are distant and different from oneself, and compassion for them is dependent on perceiving their need, their deservingness, and their humanity. These perceptions are often prevented by faulty mindsets, or cognitive schemas, that can be corrected by the pedagogical practices described here.

Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation focuses on the process of translation and its implications. The volume explores the translation of works of science fiction (SF) from one language to another and the translation of SF tropes, terms, and ideas of SF theory into cultures outside the West. Providing a comprehensive examination of the state of translation into English, the essays consider how representative the body of translated work of SF is from the source language/culture. It also considers the social, political, and economic choices in selecting a work to translate. The book illustrates the dramatic growth both in SF production outside the Anglosphere, the translation of works from other languages into English, and the practice of translating English-language SF into other languages. Altogether, the essays map the theory, practice, and business of SF translation around the world.