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When his astrologers foretell that his son Josaphat will convert to Christianity, the pagan King Avenir confines him to a palace, allowing him to know only the pleasures of the world, and to see no illness, death, or poverty. Despite the king's precautions, the hermit Barlaam comes to Josaphat and begins to teach the prince Christian beliefs through parables. Josaphat converts to Christianity, angering his father, who tries to win his son back to his religion before he, too, converts. After his father's death, Josaphat renounces the world and lives as a hermit in the wilderness with his teacher...

The fascinating account of how the story of the Buddha was transformed into the legend of a Christian saint. The tale of St. Josaphat, a prince who gave up his wealth and kingdom to follow Jesus, was widely told and read in the Middle Ages, translated into a dozen languages, and even cited by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Only in the nineteenth century did scholars note the parallels between the lives of Buddha and Josaphat. In Search of the Christian Buddha traces the Buddha’s story from India to Persia to Jerusalem and then throughout Europe, as it was rewritten by Muslim, Jewish,...

The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New ...

An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. However, when considering its use in ancient Roman literature, this interpretation proves insufficient. The Captor's Image argues for the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range...

Winner of the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Theories of power have always been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and most persistent metaphor of benign, legitimate rule. The paternal trope gains its strength from its integration of law, body, and affect—in the affirmative model of fatherhood, the biological father, the legal father, and the father who protects and nurtures his children are one and the same, and in a complex system of mutual interdependence, the father...

The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and animal elements that allow movement between, and even confusion of, components of each realm.

From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe raises the issues of species and gender in tandem, asking readers to consider more fully what happens to gender in medieval representations of nonhuman embodiment. The contributors...

Tatjana Aleksic examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkan region. Aleksic further relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. She employs cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies to expose a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

Publication Information: 

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Year of Publication: 2013

Recent historical scholarship has shown the way towards a geographically capacious conception of the early modern world. Featuring essays by nine leading scholars of early modern Asia and Europe, Comparative Early Modernities casts aside the legacies of European exceptionalism to reveal the interconnected multiplicity of the early modern world and of the variety of unexpected pathways linking these histories to the evolving modernities of the 21st century. In their fresh and provocative examinations of topics in literature, philosophy, art history, and political economy, the authors transform...

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny.

Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist...

Jean Genet's masterpiece Les Nègres was first published in 1958, in the midst of the Algerian war, and first performed at the Théâtre de Lutèce in Paris in October 1959. Yet even though the play is more than 50 years old, it remains a fundamental contribution to critical race theory, as Genet unequivocally posits that no matter what a black person does or doesn't do, simply to be black in our times is itself a tragedy.
Placing Genet in the context of Negritude movement, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic equally reveals and examines blackness within the African-American dialogue...

Ever since the 1969 Stonewall Riots, “gay pride” has been the rallying cry of the gay rights movement and the political force behind the emergence of the field of lesbian and gay studies. But has something been lost, forgotten, or buried beneath the drive to transform homosexuality from a perversion to a proud social identity? Have the political requirements of gay pride repressed discussion of the more uncomfortable or undignified aspects of homosexuality? Gay Shame seeks to lift this unofficial ban on the investigation of homosexuality and shame by presenting critical work from the most vibrant...

"Les jeunes filles de Fulani sont enfermées ainsi, parfois pendant des années, dans l'obscurité, jusqu'à leur mariage imposé." A travers des portraits de femmes aux destins rebelles, de conflits de cultures, Frieda Ekotto bouscule les préjugés pour nous proposer une autre vision des rapports humains. Riche de son écriture composite, éclaté, ce récit échappe ainsi aux formes traditionnelles de la narration.

Publication Information: 

Publisher: Editions L'Harmattan

Year of Publication: 2005

Location: Paris, France

The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language.

In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates...

A minority within Judaism, the Karaites are known as a ‘reading community’—one that looks to the Bible as the authority in all areas of life, including intimate relations and hygiene. Here Ruth Tsoffar considers how Egyptian Kariates of the San Francisco Bay Area define themselves, within both California culture and Judaism, in terms of the Bible and its bearing on their bodies. Women’s perspectives play a large role in this ethnography; it is their bodies that are especially regulated by rules of cleanliness and purity to the point where their biological cycles—menstruation, procreation, childbirth...

In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, " Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality. She shows that the philosophy of madness concedes to the mad a privilege that continues to haunt the Western dream of reason, and that the theory of creative madness always strains the discourse on authenticity...

From the first successful Jesuit mission in 1583 until the disastrous failure of the British trade embassy in 1816, China’s cultural practices transfixed the attention of Western philosophers, theologians, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, and social critics. The direct influences on European culture were many and profound, ranging from Chinese teahouses in European palace gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for the popular stage, from calls for the restructuring of the civil service on the model of Chinese meritocracy to the espousal of Confucian precepts in the moral education of children...

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. ...

A different set of purposes define culture today than those that preoccupied the world in the immediate decades of decolonization. Focusing on art and music in diverse parts of the world, Daniel Herwitz explores a world that has largely shifted from the earlier days of nationalism, decolonization and cultural exclusion, to one of global markets and networks. 

Using examples from India and Mexico to South Africa, Australia and China, Herwitz argues that the cultural politics and art being produced in these places are now post- postcolonial. Where the postcolonial downplayed formerly...

Avant de passer dans le langage courant, « donner le change » désignait la ruse par laquelle un cerf traqué, brouillant la voie, en faisait courir un autre à sa place. Le temps d’une indistinction des corps, la proie se donnait en autre et par là s’échappait. Et si ce vertige au moment de la saisie, ce drame hallucinatoire de la scène de chasse animait encore secrètement nos textes ? À la pensée de Derrida viennent répondre ici Poe, Melville, Flaubert, Michaux, Cendrars et les archives de la vénerie. Aujourd’hui que « donner le change » n’est plus que métaphore, retrouver son sens oublié c’est...

Qui n'a jamais rêvé d'être quelqu'un d'autre ? D'échanger sa place avec un autre ? Debut du XIXe siècle, Philadelphie : un jeune américain, Sheppard Lee, se découvre capable de migrer de corps en corps : il sera un riche, un pauvre, un fou, un esclave. et ses multiples réincarnations vont peu à peu dessiner le portrait de la société américaine, une société folle et cruelle.

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.

Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication,...

When his astrologers foretell that his son Josaphat will convert to Christianity, the pagan King Avenir confines him to a palace, allowing him to know only the pleasures of the world, and to see no illness, death, or poverty. Despite the king's precautions, the hermit Barlaam comes to Josaphat and begins to teach the prince Christian beliefs through parables. Josaphat converts to Christianity, angering his father, who tries to win his son back to his religion before he, too, converts. After his father's death, Josaphat renounces the world and lives as a hermit in the wilderness with his teacher...

The fascinating account of how the story of the Buddha was transformed into the legend of a Christian saint. The tale of St. Josaphat, a prince who gave up his wealth and kingdom to follow Jesus, was widely told and read in the Middle Ages, translated into a dozen languages, and even cited by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Only in the nineteenth century did scholars note the parallels between the lives of Buddha and Josaphat. In Search of the Christian Buddha traces the Buddha’s story from India to Persia to Jerusalem and then throughout Europe, as it was rewritten by Muslim, Jewish,...

The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New ...

An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. However, when considering its use in ancient Roman literature, this interpretation proves insufficient. The Captor's Image argues for the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range...

Winner of the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Theories of power have always been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and most persistent metaphor of benign, legitimate rule. The paternal trope gains its strength from its integration of law, body, and affect—in the affirmative model of fatherhood, the biological father, the legal father, and the father who protects and nurtures his children are one and the same, and in a complex system of mutual interdependence, the father...

The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and animal elements that allow movement between, and even confusion of, components of each realm.

From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe raises the issues of species and gender in tandem, asking readers to consider more fully what happens to gender in medieval representations of nonhuman embodiment. The contributors...

Tatjana Aleksic examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkan region. Aleksic further relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. She employs cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies to expose a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

Publication Information: 

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Year of Publication: 2013

Recent historical scholarship has shown the way towards a geographically capacious conception of the early modern world. Featuring essays by nine leading scholars of early modern Asia and Europe, Comparative Early Modernities casts aside the legacies of European exceptionalism to reveal the interconnected multiplicity of the early modern world and of the variety of unexpected pathways linking these histories to the evolving modernities of the 21st century. In their fresh and provocative examinations of topics in literature, philosophy, art history, and political economy, the authors transform...

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny.

Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist...

Jean Genet's masterpiece Les Nègres was first published in 1958, in the midst of the Algerian war, and first performed at the Théâtre de Lutèce in Paris in October 1959. Yet even though the play is more than 50 years old, it remains a fundamental contribution to critical race theory, as Genet unequivocally posits that no matter what a black person does or doesn't do, simply to be black in our times is itself a tragedy.
Placing Genet in the context of Negritude movement, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic equally reveals and examines blackness within the African-American dialogue...

Ever since the 1969 Stonewall Riots, “gay pride” has been the rallying cry of the gay rights movement and the political force behind the emergence of the field of lesbian and gay studies. But has something been lost, forgotten, or buried beneath the drive to transform homosexuality from a perversion to a proud social identity? Have the political requirements of gay pride repressed discussion of the more uncomfortable or undignified aspects of homosexuality? Gay Shame seeks to lift this unofficial ban on the investigation of homosexuality and shame by presenting critical work from the most vibrant...

"Les jeunes filles de Fulani sont enfermées ainsi, parfois pendant des années, dans l'obscurité, jusqu'à leur mariage imposé." A travers des portraits de femmes aux destins rebelles, de conflits de cultures, Frieda Ekotto bouscule les préjugés pour nous proposer une autre vision des rapports humains. Riche de son écriture composite, éclaté, ce récit échappe ainsi aux formes traditionnelles de la narration.

Publication Information: 

Publisher: Editions L'Harmattan

Year of Publication: 2005

Location: Paris, France

The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language.

In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates...

A minority within Judaism, the Karaites are known as a ‘reading community’—one that looks to the Bible as the authority in all areas of life, including intimate relations and hygiene. Here Ruth Tsoffar considers how Egyptian Kariates of the San Francisco Bay Area define themselves, within both California culture and Judaism, in terms of the Bible and its bearing on their bodies. Women’s perspectives play a large role in this ethnography; it is their bodies that are especially regulated by rules of cleanliness and purity to the point where their biological cycles—menstruation, procreation, childbirth...

In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, " Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality. She shows that the philosophy of madness concedes to the mad a privilege that continues to haunt the Western dream of reason, and that the theory of creative madness always strains the discourse on authenticity...

From the first successful Jesuit mission in 1583 until the disastrous failure of the British trade embassy in 1816, China’s cultural practices transfixed the attention of Western philosophers, theologians, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, and social critics. The direct influences on European culture were many and profound, ranging from Chinese teahouses in European palace gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for the popular stage, from calls for the restructuring of the civil service on the model of Chinese meritocracy to the espousal of Confucian precepts in the moral education of children...

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho's reception; what we now call "Sappho" is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics. ...

A different set of purposes define culture today than those that preoccupied the world in the immediate decades of decolonization. Focusing on art and music in diverse parts of the world, Daniel Herwitz explores a world that has largely shifted from the earlier days of nationalism, decolonization and cultural exclusion, to one of global markets and networks. 

Using examples from India and Mexico to South Africa, Australia and China, Herwitz argues that the cultural politics and art being produced in these places are now post- postcolonial. Where the postcolonial downplayed formerly...

Avant de passer dans le langage courant, « donner le change » désignait la ruse par laquelle un cerf traqué, brouillant la voie, en faisait courir un autre à sa place. Le temps d’une indistinction des corps, la proie se donnait en autre et par là s’échappait. Et si ce vertige au moment de la saisie, ce drame hallucinatoire de la scène de chasse animait encore secrètement nos textes ? À la pensée de Derrida viennent répondre ici Poe, Melville, Flaubert, Michaux, Cendrars et les archives de la vénerie. Aujourd’hui que « donner le change » n’est plus que métaphore, retrouver son sens oublié c’est...

Qui n'a jamais rêvé d'être quelqu'un d'autre ? D'échanger sa place avec un autre ? Debut du XIXe siècle, Philadelphie : un jeune américain, Sheppard Lee, se découvre capable de migrer de corps en corps : il sera un riche, un pauvre, un fou, un esclave. et ses multiples réincarnations vont peu à peu dessiner le portrait de la société américaine, une société folle et cruelle.

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.

Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication,...