The five essays presented here—Rhetoric, Style, Language, Conversation, and Greek Literature—were published together for the first time in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey in 1889–1890. Frederick Burwick brings the essays together again in this volume, introducing them by tracing the sources and development of a belletristic theory of rhetoric, which he says “is one of the most original, and for a few critics, the most puzzling of the nineteenth century.” Burwick makes the edition complete with a comprehensive index and a selected bibliography.
A comprehensive military history of one of the most important empires of Late Antiquity
The Sasanian Empire at War: Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651 is the first comprehensive study in English examining war and society in one of the most important empires in world history: the Persian Empire of 224-651 AD, ruled by the Sasanian clan. At its height the Sasanians governed lands from the Indus River in the east to Egypt and the Mediterranean in the west. Adversaries of Rome, they also faced grave challenges from nomadic powers from Central Asia, notably the Huns and Turks. The Sasanians were able to maintain their empire for hundreds of years through nearly constant warfare, but when their expansion was checked in the north by the Byzantines at Constantinople in 626, and with the Muslim invasions to their south and west beginning in the 630s, the empire could no longer be sustained, and it finally collapsed.
In this book, Michael J. Decker examines Sasanian warfare, including military capabilities, major confrontations, organization and weapons of the Persian army. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the conflicts that marked this vital period in the history of Eurasia, The Sasanian Empire at War challenges long cherished notions of the inferiority of Sasanian military capabilities and renders a new image of a sophisticated, confident culture astride the heart of Eurasia at the end of the ancient world and birth of the Silk Road. Persian arms were among the many features of their culture that drew widespread admiration and was one of the keys to the survival of Iranian culture beyond the Arab Conquest and into the present day.
Most scholars who write on social contract and classical natural law perceive an irreconcilable tension between them. Social contract theory is widely considered the political-theoretic concomitant of modern philosophy. Against the regnant view, The Social Contract in the Ruins, argues that all attempts to ground political authority and obligation in agreement alone are logically self-defeating. Political authority and obligation require an antecedent moral ground. But this moral ground cannot be constructed by human agreement or created by sheer will—human or divine. All accounts of morality as constructed or made collapse into self-referential incoherence. Only an uncreated, real good can coherently ground political authority and obligation or the proposition that rightful government depends on the consent of the governed. Government by consent requires classical natural law for its very coherence.
The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn is a critical edition and translation of a long narrative poem written by the secretary to the French ambassador in London within two weeks of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It was intended as a diplomatic dispatch, relating the astonishing news of the queen’s demise (along with that of five alleged lovers). Uniquely among diplomatic correspondence, this dispatch was written in verse form. It thus straddles the domains of literature and history, of chronicle and fiction.
The base text for this edition is a previously unstudied manuscript housed at the British Library. Variants are given from all other known manuscripts found in Europe, including several key verses that were previously unpublished and that shed new light on the interpretation of the poem. The book features a sense-for-sense translation into modern English in free verse form, along with extensive explanatory notes. It also provides a study focusing on the historical background to the poem, an essay on the poet and the reception of his work, and a literary analysis of the poem.
A detailed discussion by the editor complements this critical edition and translation of the phonetical treatise (Pratisakhya) of the Saunaka Samhita, one of two versions of the second oldest Indian text, the Saunaka Atharvaveda.
The 19th century edition of the text by W.D. Whitney has long been out of date; this reevaluation provides insights into early grammatical thought and helps to re-establish the textual tradition of the Atharvaveda. The book deals with the phonetically correct pronunciation of that text which has received only preliminary treatment thus far. It is also one of the few in its genre.
St. Paul and Epicurus was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Everyone who is interesting in the meaning of the Bible will find this a revealing study, for it opens up a new window on the New Testament, a window that was walled up centuries ago by prejudice. Professor DeWitt throws new light on the writings of the Apostle Paul by showing how they were influenced by the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.
The Epicureanism could have a place in Christian religion may come as a surprise to those familiar with the conventional concept of the philosophy of Epicurus. As demonstrated in the meaning of the English word epicure,derived from the name of the ancient philosopher, the modern world has long associated Epicurus with the indulgence of sensual pleasure in food and drink.
But, as Professor DeWitt makes clear both in this volume and in its predecessor, Epicurus and His Philosophy, the pleasures which the ancient Greek espoused as constituting the chief good of life were not the pleasures of the flesh. The merit and the lure, however, of the Epicurean ethic, which allied happiness with pleasure, were so appealing and so widely acknowledged that Paul had no choice but to adopt it and bless it for his followers with the sanction of religion. He could not, though, admit indebtedness to a philosopher who had long been accused of sensualism and atheism, and there was no choice, therefore, but to consign Epicurus to anonymity.
Through his scholarly investigation into the Epicurean source of certain portions of the Epistles, Professor DeWitt provides new explanations or translations for seventy-six biblical verses. The close scrutiny of biblical passages is carried out, not in a spirit of vandalism, but in a quest for accuracy, and the result is a challenging, readable, and absorbing book.
Contributors: Chris King Chi Chan, Chu Yiu-Wai, Alexander Day, Arif Dirlik, Han Shaogong, Pun Ngai, Fengzhen Wang, Wang Hui, Wang Shaoguang, Shaobo Xie, Yu Keping
A study of interlocutor reference that significantly deepens our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction, based on the analysis of Southeast Asian languages.
Terms used by speakers to refer to themselves and their interlocutors form one of the ways that language expresses, defines, and creates a field for working out social relations. Because this field of study in sociolinguistics historically has focused on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on references to the addressee—for example, the choice between tu and vous when addressing someone in French. This book uses the study of Southeast Asian languages to theorize interlocutor reference more broadly, significantly deepening our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. As the authors explain, Southeast Asian systems exceed in complexity and nuance the well-described cases of Europe in two basic ways. First, in many languages of Southeast Asia, a speaker must select an appropriate reference form not only for other/addressee but also for self/speaker. Second, in these languages, in addition to pronouns, speakers draw upon a range of common and proper nouns including names, kin terms, and titles, in referring to themselves and the addressee. Acts of interlocutor reference, therefore, inevitably do more than simply identify the speaker and addressee; they also convey information about the proposed relation between interlocutors. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanized communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this is an important contribution to the regional linguistic and anthropological literature.
The Spanish element in Texas water law is a matter of utmost importance to many landholders whose livelihood is dependent on securing water for irrigation and to many communities particularly concerned about water supply.
Titles to some 280,000 acres of Texas land originated in grants made by the Crown of Spain or by the Republic of Mexico. For these lands, the prevailing law, even today, is the Hispanic American civil law. Thus the question of determining just what water rights were granted by the Spanish Crown in disposing of lands in Texas is more than a matter of historical interest. It is a subject of great practical importance.
Spanish law enters directly into the question of these lands, but its influence is by no means confined to them. Texas water law in general traces its roots primarily to the Spanish law, not to the English common law doctrine of riparian rights or to the Western doctrine of prior appropriation (both of which were, however, eventually incorporated in Texas law). A clear understanding of this background might have saved the state much of the current confusion and chaos regarding its water law.
Dobkins’s book offers an intensive and unusually readable study of the subject. The author has traced water law from its origin in the ancient world to the mid-twentieth century, interpreting the effect of water on the counties concerned, setting forth in detail the development of water law in Spain, and explaining its subsequent adoption in Texas. Copious notes and a complete bibliography make the work especially valuable.
The idea for this book came in the midst of the great seven-year drought in Texas, from 1950 to 1957. The author gave two reasons for her study: “One was my belief that the water problems, crucial to all Texas, can be solved only when Texans become conscious of their imperative needs and only if they become informed and aroused enough to act.
“The second reason came from a realization that water—common, universal, and ordinary as it is—had been overlooked by the historian. It is high time that this oversight be corrected. In American history the significance of land, especially in terms of the frontier, has been spelled out in large letters. The importance of water has been recognized by few.”
This short work is a collection of four essays by nineteenth-century author and transcendentalist Samson Reed. "A Dissertation: On the Evidence from the Light of Nature of a Future Retribution" is a religious treatise that laid the groundwork for his aesthetic theory; the "Oration on Genius" is a vibrant speech which is probably America's earliest Romantic manifesto; "Observations on the Growth of the Mind" reflects the aesthetic theory embraced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England transcendentalists; and Reed's preface to the 1838 edition of "Observations," which showed his growing disenchantment with the transcendentalist movement he helped to inspire.
Edited by George F. Dole, the collection contains a preface by Sylvia Montgomery Shaw giving the historical context to these writings.
This book introduces the life and spiritual thought of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). A Swedish scientist and statesman, he underwent an extraordinary religious experience at age 55 and spent his last twenty-seven years producing thirty volumes that detailed his visionary experiences. Richly illustrated, the book includes a chronology of Swedenborg's life, a bibliography of his works, and an outline of his key theological concepts.
Cuba has long been a social policy pioneer in Latin America. Since the 1959 revolution, its government has developed ambitious social policies to address health care, higher education, employment, the environment, and broad social inequalities, among other priorities. Cuban strategies emphasized universal rights and benefits, provided free of financial cost to users, and implemented under centralized and unitary policy design.
Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, funds for these policies came under strain, although systematic efforts have been made to sustain them. Poverty rates and inequality have risen. Access to higher education has become more difficult. Access to health care has become less reliable. Environmental policies are both more salient and more difficult to sustain. The government has resisted privatization policies, but has sought to decentralize the implementation of various policies, fostering non-state cooperatives as well. At the same time, many Latin American governments have experimented with new social policies that, in this century, reduced poverty rates significantly and in some countries somewhat reduced various inequalities.
Still facing severe economic challenges, Cuba may look to learn from the policies of its Latin American neighbors, in some instances for the first time ever. This book analyzes these issues comparatively and in depth.
Social Forces in Southeast Asia was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
"Forces are at work in Southeast Asia which deserve the most judicious attention of diplomats, the best analysis by social scientists, and a highly serious interest on the part of all responsible people in the Western World."
The application of cultural anthropology to problems of world politics and economics presented here has been made by a ranking authority in the field. Dr. Du Bois is the author of The People of Alor and before World War Two she was anthropologist at Sarah Lawrence College. During the war she was associated with the Office of Strategic Services in charge of Indonesian and South Asian research, with headquarters at Kandy, Ceylon. Since October 1945 she has been chief of the Southern Areas Branch, Office of Intelligence Research, Department of State.
Siam, Burma, French Indochina, Malaya, and Indonesian Archipelago, and the Philippines offer a geographic unit rich in material for the social scientist, including, as it does, more diverse cultural strains than any other area of the world. The author considers the impact of European colonization on the region, analyzes the tensions created by value difference between East and West, and offers predictions on the course Southeast Asia will take in the future.
Dr. Du Bois has risen above statistical science and narrow specialization to wide interpretation and application. The book is full of exciting theses and suggestive ideas which should open new areas for both factual investigation and creative speculation.
Dr. Du Bois sees a growing consciousness of nationality in these states of Southeast Asia—and eagerness to work out their common problems and a desire to participate in the United Nations, but she does not minimize the grave economic difficulties of the area or the chance that it will become another powder keg if the states become pawns of the big powers.
The São Paulo Law School, the oldest institution of higher learning in Brazil, has long been the chief training center for that country’s leadership. For the members of the school’s secret Burschenschaft society, the training consisted principally in leading demonstrations for liberal causes, such as the abolition of slavery and the overthrow of the monarchy. During the Old Republic (1889–1930), the Brazilian presidency and other high posts in Rio de Janeiro were usually occupied by alumni of the powerful society, while its members in São Paulo continued to agitate for political reform. But in the 1920s, when they formed the Nationalist League and the Democratic Party, schisms resulted. Thus the Burschenschaft was weakened before the long rule of Brazil by Getúlio Vargas, starting in 1930, brought an end to the society’s influence.
The role of the school in these and other historical events is carefully reviewed by Dulles before he turns to the school’s well-known resistance to the dictatorship of Vargas. That resistance, the most persistent confronting the dictator, appeared to be unified—especially when it provoked the police into shooting the students. But, as Dulles discovered when interviewing participants and consulting documents and scrapbooks of the early 1940s, the movement was characterized by heated internal strife. In the end, however, the idealism and courage of the participants and the ultimate effectiveness of the movement contributed mightily to the fall of Vargas.
This book is another in Dulles’s series of narrative histories in which he gives flesh and blood to the names and breathes life into the events of twentieth-century Brazilian politics.
Sir Thomas Browne was first published in 1950. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This original and perceptive study of the writings of the great seventeenth-century author of Religio Medici offers the general reader a view of the intellectual world of Browne's time, and for the special student of the period provides a more extended exploration of Browne's religious philosophy than has previously been available.
Mr. Dunn recognizes that Browne is primarily an artist and that his books must not be forced into the framework of any mere logical system. But although Browne is only secondarily a philosopher, the acknowledged greatness of his writing is due in part to the brilliance and power of his thought. Accordingly, his philosophy is here examined seriously and shown in its relations to the main intellectual currents of his time. Mr. Dunn, because he combines an appreciation of Browne's poetic and imaginative power with an informed insight into its philosophical basis, can be recommended as the ideal critic of this compelling literary figure.
Browne's books emerge form this study as more than the charming haunt of the antiquarian and esthete. At one of the most dramatic moments of European cultural history—the point of transition between the decaying tradition of the Middle Ages and the opening phase of modern science — they nobly express a great humanist's convictions about the meaning of the universe and of human life.
The present volume is a complete revision of a work published in 1926 and long out of print.
Diverted by the dramatic military and political events of July 1944, few Americans realized the significance of an international conference taking place at Bretton Woods, a mountain resort in New Hampshire, far from the battle zones. There United Nations experts were completing plans for a world monetary and financial system that they hoped would create a prosperous, efficient global economy and avert economic tensions that might lead to another world war. Until the dollar crisis of 1971, decisions made at Bretton Woods provided the institutions and rules for international finance. The conference ushered in an era of unprecedented expansion of world trade and prosperity.
Based on extensive research in previously unavailable sources, A Search for Solvency relates intriguing and often complicated issues of economic analysis and diplomatic history. It offers a succinct and comprehensive survey of international monetary development from the collapse of the pre–World War I gold standard to the devaluation of the dollar in 1971. In effect, it explains the origins of late twentieth-century global inflation and currency problems.
The author details how the ghost of the Great Depression, the failure of monetary reconstruction efforts after World War I, and the memory of the nineteenth-century gold standard guided efforts to construct the Bretton Woods system. This preoccupation with the past, as well as political constraints, produced a monetary system protected against past dangers—fluctuating currencies, controls, and deflation—but dangerously vulnerable to inflationary pressures. The weaknesses of Bretton Woods, a system geared to an era in which economic power was concentrated in the United States, became visible in the 1960s and painfully apparent by the mid-1970s.
The New York Times Book Review said that Peter Edelman adheres "to a high-minded worldview"—and he does not hesitate to emphasize that in the Preface to this new paperback edition of Searching for America's Heart by declaring, "I have one voice, but for my part, I will continue to speak what I believe to be the truth."
The truth is—from the time Edelman was a close aide to RFK, to when he resigned from the Clinton Administration in protest over the latter's welfare bill (which ended a sixty year federal commitment to poor children)—poverty continues to be a source of shame to the richest nation on earth. Fueled by a vision of economic justice he shared with Robert Kennedy, related here, he advocates an active federal government in correcting inequities in American life. Based partly on initiatives begun by Kennedy, he advocates government support for school reform and more community-based economic development initiatives.
Peter Edelman is one of those rare beings in public and political life: a man not only with a conscience, but also with a vision, and the eloquence to speak out for the poor—and the children in poverty—among us.
Confederate general Joseph O. Shelby and his legendary Iron Brigade refused to acknowledge the end of the Civil War. Instead, they fought their way to Mexico in search of a place where they could continue to defy the U.S. government. These veteran Missouri cavalrymen clawed their way for fifteen hundred miles, fighting Juaristas, Indians, desperados, and disgruntled gringos. They disbanded only after they had offered their services to Emperor Maximilian and were turned down.
Shelby’s adjutant, journalist John N. Edwards, first published his story of the exploits of this superb mounted brigade and its quixotic final march in 1872. Conger Beasley provides a lively introduction that includes the first biographical sketch of the author. The 1969 movie The Undefeated starring John Wayne and Rock Hudson was based upon Shelby’s expedition.
Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene’s audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.
A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
This is the second volume of Irvin Ehrenpreis's trilogy, and deals with the period 1699-1714. The years between 1699 and 1710 were a time of training—in some ways unfortunate, as Ehrenpreis shows—for the dramatic four years which followed for Swift, as a political journalist in England.
Swift's ecclesiastical career, his search for preferment and the gradual transformation of his social life are examined. The author also scrutinizes Swift's attachment to Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, the evolution of his political principles, and his unconscious motivations, and he reaches some original conclusions. Above all, however, Ehrenpreis concentrates on Swift's literary works of this period; and for some of these, such as An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, The Conduct of the Allies, and A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions, he provides analyses that can stand as independent critical essays.
Volume Two lives up in every way to the high hopes generated for it by Volume One. It draws widely on contemporary documents and on modern research into Swift's life and times, providing much new information as well as judgements that are both judicious and original.
Grounded in the intellectual legacies of two pioneering scholars of oral literature, Milman Parry (1902–1935) and Albert Lord (1912–1991), Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century gathers reflections on what the study of oral poetry might mean today across diverse poetic traditions, especially in light of ongoing global transformations that have dramatically reshaped and destabilized the very notion of tradition. This collection of essays spans disciplinary perspectives from Classics and comparative literature to musicology and anthropology. Oral traditions from ancient Greece and modern southeastern Europe, on which Parry and Lord focused, remain central in the present volume, but the book also offers important perspectives from regions beyond Europe, especially across Asia.
The title’s “singers and tales”—both in the plural, as opposed to an individual “singer of tales”—signals interest both in the polyphony of oral traditions and in the proliferation of methodologies and objects of study inspired by the work of Parry and Lord. Their notion of what has become known as the Oral-Formulaic Theory remains a necessary starting point—but only a starting point—for research on a whole range of verbal and musical arts.
Sex and religion are inevitably and intricately linked. There are few realms of human experience other than sex in which religion has greater reach and influence. The role of religion, of any faith, to prohibit, regulate, condemn, and reward, is unavoidably prominent in questions of sex—namely with whom, when, how, and why. In Sex and Religion, Dag Øistein Endsjø examines the myriad and complex religious attitudes towards sex in cultures throughout the world.
Endsjø reflects on some of the most significantly problematic areas in the relationship between sex and religion—from sex before or outside of marriage to homosexuality. Through many examples from world religions, he outlines what people mean by sex in a religious context, with whom it’s permissible to have sex, how sex can be a directly religious experience, and what consequences there are for deviance, for both the individual and society. As Endsjø explains, while Buddhist monks call attention to gay sex as a holy mystery, the Christian church questions a homosexual’s place in the church. Some religions may believe that promiscuity leads to hurricanes and nuclear war, and in others God condemns interracial marriage. Sex and Religion reveals there is nothing natural or self-evident about the ways in which various religions prescribe or proscribe and bless or condemn different types of sexuality. Whether sex becomes sacred or abhorrent depends entirely on how a religion defines it.
Sex and Religion is a fascinating investigation of mores, meanings, rituals, and rules in many faiths around the globe, and will be of interest to anyone curious about the intersection of these fundamental aspects of human history and experience.
More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences.
As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism’s heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends.
By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn’t, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.
The Silences of Hammerstein, the latest work from one of Germany’s most significant contemporary authors, engages readers with a blend of a documentary, collage, narration, and fictional interviews. The gripping plot revolves around the experiences of real-life German General Kurt von Hammerstein and his wife and children. A member of an old military family, a brilliant staff officer, and the last commander of the German army before Hitler seized power, Hammerstein, who died in 1943 before Hitler’s defeat, was nevertheless an idiosyncratic character. Too old to be a resister, he retained an independence of mind that was shared by his children: three of his daughters joined the Communist Party, and two of his sons risked their lives in the July 1944 Plot against Hitler and were subsequently on the run till the end of the war. Hammerstein never criticized his children for their activities, and he maintained contacts with the Communists himself and foresaw the disastrous end of Hitler’s dictatorship.
In The Silences of Hammerstein, Hans Magnus Enzensberger offers a brilliant and unorthodox account of the military milieu whose acquiescence to Nazism consolidated Hitler’s power and of the heroic few who refused to share in the spoils.
On the wings of Laura Erickson’s award-winning book For the Birds comes Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids. Easy and fun to use, Sharing the Wonder is a delightful book that helps caring adults introduce kids to the fascinating world of birds.
Chock-full of creative activities, this hands-on guide goes way beyond teaching bird identification. In her light-hearted style, Erickson paves the way for children to discover—with a little help from you—the beauty and significance of birds, how their bodies work, why they behave as they do, and why it’s critical to protect and care for them.
Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids will show you how to kindle children’s interest in birds, giving them the joy and pride of discovering these natural treasures for themselves.
In the first book to use fiction as theory, Barbara L. Estrin reverses chronological direction, beginning with contemporary novels to arrive at a re-visioned Shakespeare, uncovering a telling difference in the stories that script us and that influence our political unconscious in ways that have never been explored in literary-critical interpretations. Describing the animus against foreign blood, central to the dynamic of the foundling and lyric plots that form the nexus of her study, Estrin describes how late modern writers change those plots. Reading backward through the theoretical lens of their revisions allows us to rethink the Shakespeare we thought we knew. That innovative methodology, in turn, encourages us to read forward again with different tellings, ones that challenge the mythological homogeneity of the traditional classifications and that suggest new formulaic paradigms.
With close readings of four contemporary novels and three Shakespeare plays, Estrin identifies the cultural walls that contribute to political gate-keeping as she chronicles the connection between plot variations and gender revisionism in the work of Caryl Phillips, Liz Jensen, Anne Michaels, and W.G. Sebald, as well as two film-makers (Mona Hatoum and Mieke Bal) who demonstrate an understanding that mythical repercussions prove dangerous in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries even as they suggest how the heritage shaping their work, and to which they are themselves drawn, in turn proposes an alternative Shakespeare, one who frees us to ask other questions: At the time that the nation state was beginning to coalesce, what does Shakespeare’s frequent use of the foundling plot and his significant variations portend? How does his infusion of a revised lyric dynamic in The Merchant of Venice, Othello and The Winter’s Tale change our reading of plays where the two plots coalesce as they do in the contemporary novels that shape Estrin’s late modern interpretations? All the works in this study share the underlying premise that the connection between cultural origins and political destinies is reciprocal and that it is necessary and possible to transform the constructs—in memory and imagination—that continue to shape our lives.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Gabriel Farrell tells the story of blindness historically and from a social point of view. He describes the achievements of sightless persons, and he emphasizes the responsibility of society toward the blind. Blindness may befall anyone, through accident at any age or through the normal degeneration of sight in old age. Farrell stresses the economic provision that must be made for the blind and he tells how the blind have been helped to overcome their deficiencies in various ways.
The author offers a comprehensive record of the work for the blind, including the deaf-blind, through the centuries, and in many countries. He approaches his subject both analytically and historically. Many interesting points are raised for their connection with the subject—such as the fact that the typewriter was invented as the result of searching for a writing machine for the blind. Of course the full story of braille is covered, as are many other educational matters that have been prepared and developed for use by the blind.
Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil brings together the work of ten artists who reflect upon the long-standing histories of oppressive power structures in the territory now known as Brazil. Blurring the line between art and activism and spanning installation, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video, these artists contribute to local and global conversations about the state of democracy, racial injustice, and the violence inflicted by the nation-state. This first English-language, book-length study of contemporary Brazilian art in relationship to activism assembles artist-authored texts, interviews, essays, and a conceptual mapping of Brazilian history to illuminate the function of art as a platform for critical engagement with the historical, political, and cultural configurations of a particular place. By refusing to remain neutral, these artists create spaces of vibrant and vital community and self-construction to explore how healing and justice may be possible, especially in the Black, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous communities to which many of them belong.
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