Modernity is surrounded by an almost magic aura that casts a spell over people all over the world. To connect with modernity, various ways and means are used, among them magic practices and religious ideas. Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity deals with the magic in and of modernity and asks about its current significance for the dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in this area, the contributors to this wide-ranging volume demonstrate how religious concepts contribute to meeting the challenges of modernity. Against this background, religion and modernity are no longer perceived as in contradiction; rather, it is argued that a revision of the western notion of religion is required to understand the complexity of 'multiple modernities' in a globalised world.. Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and Modernity is part of the series Global Asia, published by Amsterdam University Press (AUP) in close collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

The Baby Boomer generation (known as 68ers in Europe) pulled out all stops when it came to rebelling against their elders, but were treated with kid gloves by the 'pig system' they affected to overthrow. What would happen, though, if a new generation decided to rebel against "them?"

That's exactly what occurs when a group of young Tasmanians embark on an extended campaign of subversion, exposing the many hypocrisies of the Boomer establishment...

"The Hungry Wolves of Van Diemen's Land" is a satire that works on a number of levels. It is a book desperately needed by the Zeitgeist of this pivotal era..."

Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work. Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials-from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts. Soon after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading poets with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history, aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience he called objectism. A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons he used against generalized life and identity. This volume begins with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Considerable attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.

From the Chihuahuan deserts of Mexico to the cellars of the Pentagon and the flaming ruins of Iraq, this poetry compilation merges the personal with the political. While retaining an intimate and unembellished tone, it confronts topical issues--notably the United States' wars abroad--and explores various universal themes, including aging, coping honestly with regret, dealing with fear, and desiring forgiveness. Powerful and lyric, these poems cut to the heart of the often painful, difficult, and deceptive human condition.

Like many a pioneer exiting the eastern forests, Paul Christensen felt the strangeness of an alien landscape when he first arrived in Texas in 1974. Schooled in the cool colors of life and poetry in the urban East, he approached his new career in the Southwest with missionary zeal and purpose: to discover the land and the kind of people and poetry it produced.
"West of the American Dream" is a multifaceted account of that search. Christensen shares his feelings of culture shock in eastcentral Texas as he meets the cowboy version of the bluecollar Texan and his Mexican American neighbors. He introduces readers to the convoluted history of poetry in Texas, a tradition, started by women, that shifted from a focus on the land to the quotidian habits of urban living. Using a unique dissection of the public ritual of a poetry reading, Christensen assesses the origins of modern poetry, the value of imagination in modernist and postmodernist verse, and what Texas poets achieved and how their work evolved after World War II.
Taking a break here and there to describe characters who crossed his path and who embodied different aspects of Texas mythology, Christensen then presents three portraits of modern Texas artist/poets--Vassar Miller, Charles Gordone, and Ricardo Sanchez--to show the results of twentiethcentury poetic evolution in Texas. He concludes that in order for Texas poetry to achieve maturity and fulfillment, writers must turn away from selfreflection and become "new Whitmans" who will instill moral passion and delight into poems that offer a vision of nature and a sense of responsibility for the earth.
"West of the American Dream" will find an appreciative audience in all readers who respect the deep purpose of environmental action and the important role poets can play in its nurture, in Texas and elsewhere.

The minds and eccentrics of Berkeley and San Francisco come to life in these two novels by poet Philip Whalen. Set in the late Fifties and early Sixties, You Didn't Even Try and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head provide a window on the nascence of a counterculture.