This book presents two extraordinary texts - The Shining of Swords by Al-Qarakhi and a new translation for a contemporary readership of Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat - illuminating the mountain war ...between the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus and the imperial Russian army from 1830 to 1859. The authors offer a complete commentary on the various intellectual and religious contexts that shaped the two texts and explain the historical significance of the Russian-Muslim confrontation. It is shown that the mountain war was a clash of two cultures, two religious outlooks and two different worlds. The book provides an important background for the ongoing contest between Russia and indigenous people for control of the Caucasus.
Abstract
The decision of Gladstone’s government to invade and occupy Egypt in 1882 remains one of the most contentious in late nineteenth-century British political and imperial history. This article ...examines the decision-making process in June and July 1882, revisiting Robinson and Gallagher’s influential study in the light of more recent historiographical research and previously unused sources. It looks at who made the critical decisions, what their preoccupations were, and how they were able to get Cabinet approval. Hartington and Northbrook were the two key figures, who co-operated to overturn Gladstone’s and Granville’s policy in June 1882. Yet their co-operation was momentary and they found themselves on different sides of the argument over the participation of Indian forces and international support. Although they shared a sense of Egypt’s importance to British imperial security, they each had a distinctive approach, so that the decision to occupy cannot be reduced to a conflict between Whig pragmatists and Radical idealists. The article also shows how the Alexandria riot on 11 June altered the context of decision-making by shifting the mood in the parliamentary Liberal party towards intervention. Parliament, not the press, was the crucial site of ‘public opinion’ in the Egyptian crisis in June and July 1882.
In Faith in Freedom
, Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so
many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in
fact, the result of a strategic campaign of ...religious
propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the
nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations
of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the
resultant "Christian nationalism" of today were crafted by secular
elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of
the national motto, "In God We Trust," revises the very meaning of
the contemporary American nation.
Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman,
and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising
executives, and military public relations experts, exploited
denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite
Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold
War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant
support for free economic markets, local control of education and
housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences
were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of
right-wing positions including anti-communism, the Jim Crow status
quo, and limited taxation and regulation.
Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American
religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of
three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light
on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides
that describe the American polity today.
The forces of globalization have transformed literary studies in
America, and not for the better. The detailed critical reading of
artistic texts has been replaced by newly minted catchphrases
...describing widely divergent snippets and anecdotes-deemed mere
documents-regardless of the critic's expertise in the appropriate
languages and cultures. Visions of Global America and the Future of
Critical Reading by Daniel T. O'Hara traces the origin of this
global approach to Emerson. But it also demonstrates another,
tragic tradition of vision from Henry James that counters the
Emersonian global imagination with the hard realities of being
human. Building on this tradition, on Lacan's insights into the
Real, and on Badiou's original theory of truth, O'Hara points to
how we can, and should, reground literary study in critical
reading. In Emerson's classic essay "Experience" (1844), America
appears in and as a symptom of the critic's self-making that
sacrifices the power of love to this visionary project-a literary
version of the American self-made man. O'Hara rescues critical
reading using James's late work, especially The Golden
Bowl (1904), and builds on this vision with examinations of
texts by St. Paul, Emerson, Wallace Stevens, James Purdy, John
Cheever, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, and others.
If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and
rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works
organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly
indebted, ...at the level of form and content, to imperialist and
scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has
obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly
worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition
that accompanied science's shrinking of the world. Realism's
modernization is inseparable from nostalgia. In Realism's
Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century
Novel , Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist
fiction's stance toward both progress and the foreign or
supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has
assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and
Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world
due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss
and to generate the complications required for narrative, these
three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the
metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and
rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker's book examines the
consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers'
understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows
Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that
frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a
significant shift in the development of the novel.
These letters among two women and their husband offer a rare look into the personal dynamics of an LDS polygamous relationship. Abraham "Owen" Woodruff was a young Mormon apostle, the son of ...President Wilford Woodruff, remembered for the Woodruff Manifesto, which called for the divinely inspired termination of plural marriage. It eased a systematic federal judicial assault on Mormons and made Utah statehood possible. It did not end polygamy in the church. Some leaders continued to encourage and perform such marriages. Owen Woodruff himself contracted a secretive, second marriage to Avery Clark. Pressure on the LDS church revived with hearings regarding Reed Smoot's seat in the U. S. Senate. After church president Joseph F. Smith issued the so-called Second Manifesto in 1904, polygamy and its more prominent advocates were mostly expunged from mainstream Mormonism. Owen Woodruff was not excommunicated, as a couple of his apostolic colleagues were. He and his first wife, Helen May Winters, had died suddenly that same year after contracting smallpox in Mexico. Owen Woodruff had often been "on the underground," moving frequently, traveling under secret identities, and using code names in his letters to his wives, while still carrying out his administrative duties, which, in particular, involved supervision of the nascent Mormon colonies in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming.
When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland ...undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict. This translation makes a key historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience. Rereading this work in the context of today’s political violence in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on sectarianism, class rebellion, foreign invasions, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and nationalist tropes of reconciliation. “The first English translation of this foundational text offered alongside a fantastic historical introduction, this is an excellent and much-needed contribution from uniquely qualified scholars.” STEPHEN SHEEHI, author of The Arab Imago BUTRUS AL-BUSTANI was a nineteenth century Ottoman Arab educator and public intellectual regarded by many as the first Syrian nationalist owing to the publication of his Nafir Suriyya following the 1860 communal disturbances in Mt. Lebanon and Damascus. JENS HANSSEN is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. He is author of Fin de Siècle Beirut and coeditor of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age. HICHAM SAFIEDDINE is Assistant Professor of History of the Modern Middle East at King’s College, London. He is author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon, cofounder of Al-Akhbar English, and editor of The Legal Agenda English Edition.
A rich examination of the influence of Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce
In this book, Fran O'Rourke examines the influence of Aristotle
and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce, arguing that both ...thinkers
fundamentally shaped the philosophical outlook which pervades the
author's oeuvre. O'Rourke demonstrates that Joyce was a
philosophical writer who engaged creatively with questions of
diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the
reliability of knowledge.
Beginning with an introduction to each thinker, the book traces
Joyce's discovery of their works and his concrete engagement with
their thought. Aristotle and Aquinas equipped Joyce with
fundamental principles regarding reality, knowledge, and the soul,
which allowed him to shape his literary characters. Joyce
appropriated Thomistic concepts to elaborate an original and
personal aesthetic theory.
O'Rourke provides an annotated commentary on quotations from
Aristotle that Joyce entered into his famous Early Commonplace Book
and outlines their crucial significance for his writings. He also
provides an authoritative evaluation of Joyce's application of
Aquinas's aesthetic principles.
The first book to comprehensively illuminate the profound impact
of both the ancient and medieval thinker on the modernist writer,
Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas offers readers a rich
understanding of the intellectual background and philosophical
underpinnings of Joyce's work.
A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian
D. G. Knowles
This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, that reads ecological forms alongside ...aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. As a theoretical model working from these traditions, it illuminates a new direction for formalist attention to literature by connecting it to embodiment, ecology, and material substances, and a novel path for feminist materialists by suggesting historical objects and situations where human and nonhuman agencies might be clearer. As I demonstrate in readings of Karel Čapek and Virginia Woolf, this model of reading also might help reinvigorate ways of approaching early-twentieth-century modernism in our time of ecological crisis, but without looking for signs of our concerns and epistemologies in the past.
Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi
Dangarembga , by Laura Green, seeks to account for
the persistent popularity of the novel of formation, from
nineteenth-century English through ...contemporary Anglophone
literature. Through her reading of novels, memoirs, and essays by
nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century women writers,
Green shows how this genre reproduces itself in the elaboration of
bonds between and among readers, characters, and authors that she
classifies collectively as "literary identification." Particular
literary identifications may be structured by historical and
cultural change or difference, but literary identification
continues to undergird the novel of formation in new and evolving
contexts. The two nineteenth-century English authors discussed in
this book, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, established the
conventions of the novel of female formation. Their
twentieth-century English descendants, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe
Hall, and, Jeanette Winterson, challenge the dominance of
heterosexuality in such narratives. In twentieth- and
twenty-first-century narratives by Simone de Beauvoir, Jamaica
Kincaid, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, the female subject is shaped not
only by gender conventions but also by colonial and postcolonial
conflict and national identity.. For many contemporary critics and
theorists, identification is a middlebrow or feminized reading
response or a structure that functions to reproduce the
middle-class subjectivity and obscure social conflict. However,
Green suggests that the range and variability of the literary
identifications of authors, readers, and characters within these
novels allows such identifications to function variably as well: in
liberatory or life-enhancing ways as well as oppressive or
reactionary ones.
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