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Covering a period from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century, Aileen A. Feng's engagingly written work identifies and analyzes a Latin humanist precursor to the poetic movement known as Renaissance Petrarchism. Though Petrachism is usually read solely as a vernacular poetic tradition, in Writing Beloveds, Feng recovers the initial political purposes in Latin prose and traces how poetry set the terms for gender, agency, and power in early modern Italy. By revealing the literary motifs in men's and women's writing about gender she maps how certain figures in Petrarch's writing transmitted gendered ideas of power and reflected a growing anxiety about women as public figures. This work includes nuanced analyses of poetry, linguistic treatises, debates on imitation, representations of gender and epistolary correspondence in Latin and Italian. Writing Beloveds is a landmark study that highlights the new social reality of women writers in early modern Europe.

Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, has long been an interpretive puzzle. De Navarre (1492-1549), sister of King Francis I of France, was a controversial figure in her lifetime. Her evangelical activities and proximity to the Crown placed her at the epicenter of her country's internecine strife and societal unrest. Yet her short stories appear to offer few traces of the sociopolitical turbulence that surrounded her.In Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze, however, Elizabeth Zegura argues that the Heptaméron's innocuous appearance camouflages its serious insights into patriarchy and gender, social class, and early modern French politics, which emerge from an analysis of the text's shifting perspectives. Zegura's approach, which focuses on visual cues and alternative standpoints and viewing positions within the text, hinges upon foregrounding'les choses basses'(lowly things) to which the devisante (storyteller) Oisille draws our attention in nouvelle (novella) 2 of the Heptaméron, using this downward, archaeological gaze to excavate layers of the text that merit more extensive critical attention.While her conclusions cast a new light on the literature, life, and times of Marguerite de Navarre, they are nevertheless closely aligned with recent scholarship on this important historical and literary figure.

Walker Percy is one of America's great novelists, and he ought to be known as a political thinker as well. In Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer, Brian A. Smith makes the case that we should understand Percy's novels and essays together as a guide to living in a complex world. Percy cultivated a philosophical and literary approach that revealed the fault lines in the modern mind. He portrayed man as a wayfarer: peristantly unsatisfied and wandering in search of a perfectly complete solution to life's dilemmas. His writing captures the restlessness of the human heart and allows us to comprehend our temptation to escape our sense of alienation and longing. Drawing ideas from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature, Percy's multidimensional account of American political life shows the ways that today's approaches to life often fall short and leave us more unsatisfied with ourselves and others than ever. Percy hoped we would evade the temptations to escape the life of the wayfarer and accept our misplaced longings, alienation, depression, and anxiety as part of the human condition. Failing to do this might lead us to accept ever more extreme political and social ideas as the basis for life. The promise of embracing Percy's political teaching is that we might then be able to accept ourselves as we really are in order to join with others in authentic community.

Moses has long been a source of modern fascination. For Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Moses was a particularly fruitful subject for the study of memory and historiography. He also held great interest for the visual and performing arts. In the 1920s and'30s, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote the three-act opera Moses and Aron. First performed just a few years before his exile to the United States, it required that its audiences distinguish voices from forceful background noise, just as Moses had to confront the burning bush before he could hear the voice of God. In 1974, filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created an avant-garde cinematic adaptation of Schoenberg's opera that continued the composer's examination of the established hierarchies of seeing and hearing. In The Moses Complex, Ute Holl analyzes these major works in detail and deep historical context, synthesizing the complex models of resistance to explore the relationships among media, migration, and politics. Since Moses descended from Sinai with the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, new media and new laws have often emerged simultaneously. Liberation, in particular, has been negotiated through many different cultural media, with psychoanalysis, music, and cinema all describing exodus and exile as a process of force. Offering a dynamic and comprehensive political and cultural theory of migration and violence, The Moses Complex speaks equally well to psychoanalytic, musical, and cinematic thinking as it does to our tendency toward violence in the treatment of migrants today.

In Modern Arabic Poetry, Waed Athamneh addresses enduring questions raised from the 1950s to the present as she investigates the impact of past and contemporary Middle Eastern politics on its poetry. Focusing on the works of three prominent poets, Iraqi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (1926–1999), Egyptian Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Ḥijāzī (b. 1935), and Palestinian Maḥmūd Darwīsh (1941–2008), Athamneh argues that political changes in the modern Arab world—including the 1967 war and the fall of Nasserism, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, in Ḥijāzī's case, the 2011 Arab Uprising and its aftermath—inspired transitions and new directions in these poets'works. Enhanced by Athamneh's original translations of a number of the Arabic texts discussed, as well as translations published previously, Modern Arabic Poetry brings these poets fully into the purview of contemporary literary, political, and critical discourse. It argues that their individual responses to political changes proceed in three distinct directions: the metapoetic, in which the poet disengages from the poetry of political commitment to find inspiration in artistic (self-)exploration; the recommitted, in which new political revolutions inspire the poet to resume writing and publishing poetry; and the humanist, in which the poet comes to terms of coexistence with permanent or unresolved conflict.

El peronismo, además de lo que cuenta la Historia, fue una masa humana que se podía simbólicamente situar en un espacio urbano, algo físico, casi palpable, que se percibía desde los sentidos y cuya experiencia emocional dividió el país. El relato de esta vivencia primordial es lo que se ha interesado rescatar desde la perspectiva imaginativa y apasionada de la literatura. Por estas páginas comparece un elenco de nombres que van desde la derecha a la izquierda tradicional, pasando por los pocos que eligieron el peronismo: Jauretche, Borges, Bioy, Manuel Gálvez, María Rosa Oliver, Beatriz Guido, Cortázar, Martínez Estrada y Marechal. En todos ellos surge el conflicto entre el individuo y la masa movilizada por un poderoso discurso político.“Navascués aporta una mirada desprejuiciada pero nunca indiferente, incisiva pero delicada, a un embarazoso problema ético-político que el gremio literario a menudo prefiere tapar.” (Norman Cheadle, Laurentian University)'Con una implacable y elegante'hermenéutica de la sospecha', Navascués analiza los textos producidos tanto por la prensa como por la literatura opositoras, que suelen coincidir en un abanico básico de imágenes negativas proyectadas sobre el enemigo común.(…)A la vez, Navascués pone en paralelo estas alarmas narrativas con los itinerarios biográficos de los literatos opositores, quienes, mientras les fue posible, de hecho continuaron manejando el campo de la cultura, y, desde revistas e instituciones prestigiosas, como Sur, la Sociedad Argentina de Escritores o la Academia Argentina de Letras, ejercieron un poder de veto y exclusión sobre aquellos pares (la minoría) que simpatizaron con el peronismo o se plegaron a él.'(María Rosa Lojo)

This book seeks to fill a double lacuna in Borges scholarship. For one, this scholarship has been largely developed through the lens of literary and cultural studies, and not by political theorists who bring a distinct disciplinary perspective into the reading of literary works. Secondly, mainstream interpreters have overlooked or have not analyzed enough Borges's political sympathies. This book doesnot evaluate if these sympathies are truthful to political and historical facts or philosophical theories; rather, she shows in which aspects and around which topics Borges finds inspiration and gives literary form to the political. His texts abound with concepts and events such as liberty, individuality, war, and revolution, and they deal with topics such as the legitimacy of authority, the limits of reason, and the principle of representation, among others. This book also addresses Borges's democratic sensitivity and his critique of populism and militarism as related to salient national and global historical events that inspired his works. Above all, it calls attention to Borges's belief in the pre-eminence of individual liberty, his rejection of political oppression, and his warning against civic indifference brought about by an isolated individualism. This book may be of interest to students and professors of politics, philosophy and literature. It may also interest literary critics and readers who want to approach Borges's works with a political rather than a literary or a cultural lens.

The Marcos dictatorship that ruled the Philippines from 1965-1986 produced a wealth of art and literature dedicated to dismantling an unjust social order. This book documents and decribes that body of work thought the poets engaged in the narrtives of the complex tensions of power and resistance of that area.

While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet Eliza Haywood insisted she ‘never wrote any thing in a political way'. This study of the life and works, the first full-length biography of Haywood in nearly a century, takes the measure of her duplicity.

A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare's plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare's England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In this monumental work, Peter Lake reveals, more than any previous critic, the extent to which Shakespeare's plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination. Lake reveals the complex ways in which Shakespeare's major plays engaged with the events of his day, particularly regarding the uncertain royal succession, theological and doctrinal debates, and virtue and virtù in politics. Through his plays, Lake demonstrates, Shakespeare was boldly in conversation with his audience about a range of contemporary issues. This remarkable literary and historical analysis pulls the curtain back on what Shakespeare was really telling his audience and what his plays tell us today about the times in which they were written.

Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His publications include Visions of Venice in Shakespeare, with Laura Tosi, and Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, with Annalisa Oboe.

The essays in this collection examine the connections between the forces of empire and women's lives in the early Americas, in particular the ways their narratives contributed to empire formation. Focusing on the female body as a site of contestation, the essays describe acts of bravery, subversion, and survival expressed in a variety of genres, including the saga, letter, diary, captivity narrative, travel narrative, verse, sentimental novel, and autobiography. The volume also speaks to a range of female experience, across the Americas and across time, from the Viking exploration to early nineteenth-century United States, challenging scholars to reflect on the implications of early American literature even to the present day.

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks'Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of'truth'it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

La science-fiction prend de plus en plus d'espace dans la culture populaire. Le phénomène planétaire que représente Star Wars, ou encore les séries télévisées iconiques telles Star Trek, constituent des preuves convaincantes de la popularité du genre. Comme toutes les formes d'art populaire, la science-fiction a le formidable talent de parler franchement de la société qui la con-çoit et la consomme. Qui plus est, parce qu'elle permet de voir ce qui pourrait être, elle se fait le miroir de nos craintes collectives les plus criantes ; elle est éminemment politique. Les auteurs de cet ouvrage, des amateurs de science-fiction spécialistes de la politique, de l'éthique ou des technologies, se penchent sur les représentations politiques portées par des œuvres de science-fiction afin de faire ressortir les rapports de force et les relations de pouvoir — existants ou anticipés — qui s'exercent dans le monde occidental contemporain. D'Isaac Asimov à Andrew Scott Card, en passant par les superhéros de Marvel ainsi que les mondes de Star Wars et de Star Trek, et inspirés par ce qu'ont fait certains éthiciens et philosophes, les auteurs offrent un éclairage nouveau sur les enjeux sociaux, politiques et éthiques soulevés par la science-fiction. Que nous disent ces interprétations de notre monde? Quels avenirs projettent-elles? Reflètent-elles les luttes réelles de pouvoir au sein de nos sociétés occidentales? Que nous disent-elles sur nos craintes, nos inquiétudes politiques, nos dilemmes éthiques? Comment interpréter les différentes visions du monde présentées dans ces œuvres? L'ouvrage offre un portrait détaillé des liens entre les œuvres de science-fiction et la science politique.

The essays collected in this book examine different aspects of change in literature and culture of the Anglophone world. The contributors analyse literary theory as well as individual literary works ranging from John Dryden's poetry, through the 18th-century English novel, to the 20th-century drama and prose. The contributions also focus on visual arts and film, the socio-political context, and concern various aspects of British and American history, culture and economy.

An uncompleted manuscript that combines lyric poetry and prose commentary, the Banquet (or Convivio) is one of Dante Alighieri's most important and least understood philosophical texts. As Maria Luisa Ardizzone shows, its language and logic are deeply connected to medieval culture and the philosophical debates of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.In Reading as the Angels Read, Ardizzone reconstructs the cultural and socio-political background that provided the motivation for the Banquet and offers a bold new reading of this ambitious work. Drawing on a deep knowledge of Dante's engagement with biblical, Augustinian, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian philosophy, she suggests that the Banquet is not an encyclopedia of learning as many have claimed, but Dante's attempt to articulate a theory of human happiness in which perfect knowledge is the natural basis for a well-organized political community.

Este trabajo es una manera de participar en el diálogo entre la historia y la actualidad. Luego de los atentados en las Torres Gemelas en septiembre del 2001 y de lo sucedido hasta hoy, la pregunta acerca del poder de la religión se hizo nuevamente presente en las sociedades: al analizar la presencia estética y la función del discurso religioso en la literatura bajo un régimen autoritario, se revela la importancia de la religión y asimismo, de la función de la literatura, en tiempos de terror y de tortura, como una herramienta de crítica social y política en respuesta a la violencia.'La crítica literaria argentina vería en este trabajo un nuevo camino de estudios que permitiría a su vez volver a considerar obras y acontecimientos literarios del periodo estudiado bajo una nueva luz.'Dra. Susana Gómez (Profesora de Literatura Argentina, UNC/Argentina)

Men and women struggling for control of marriage and sexuality; narratives that focus on trickery, theft, and adultery; descriptions of sexual activities and body parts, the mention of which is prohibited in polite society: such are the elements that constitute what Nicole Nolan Sidhu calls a medieval discourse of obscene comedy, in which a particular way of thinking about men, women, and household organization crosses genres, forms, and languages. Inviting its audiences to laugh at violations of what is good, decent, and seemly, obscene comedy manifests a semiotic instability that at once supports established hierarchies and delights in overturning them.In Indecent Exposure, Sidhu explores the varied functions of obscene comedy in the literary and visual culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. In chapters that examine Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and Legend of Good Women; Langland's Piers Plowman; Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford, Troy Book, and Fall of Princes; the Book of Margery Kempe, the Wakefield'Second Shepherds'Play'; the Towneley'Noah'; and other works of drama, Sidhu proposes that Middle English writers use obscene comedy in predictable and unpredictable contexts to grapple with the disturbances that English society experienced in the century and a half following the Black Death. For Sidhu, obscene comedy emerges as a discourse through which writers could address not only issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage but also concerns as varied as the conflicts between Christian doctrine and lived experience, the exercise of free will, the social consequences of violence, and the nature of good government.

Dans ce quatrième et dernier volume de Conscience humaine et violence de l'État, Pierre Lamblé s'intéresse tout particulièrement à trois œuvres fondamentales traitant de la naissance et du développement de l'idéologie nazie à l'intérieur de consciences occidentales : Sa Majesté des mouches, écrit par William Golding ; Rhinocéros, de Ionesco ; et Si c'est un homme, de Primo Levi.

Dans ce premier volume consacré aux rapports entre la conscience humaine et la violence de l'Etat, Pierre Lamblé étudie particulièrement quelques mythes de fondation de cité ainsi que les plus grands textes de la littérature grecque, de Sophocle à Platon, pour décortiquer la complexité des rapports conflictuels entre les exigences de la conscience individuelle et la toute-puissance d'un pouvoir arbitraire qui refuse par principe toute contraction.

Dans ce deuxième volume de Conscience humaine et violence de l'État, Pierre Lamblé s'attache tout particulièrement à l'étude de la pensée et de l'action politiques de Jules César, et de son influence sur l'Europe de la Renaissance au XVIIIe siècle, en montrant comment la pensée de Machiavel a nourri toute la réflexion politique des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle, de Corneille à Voltaire et Leibnitz, en passant par Shakespeare.

Dans ce troisième volume de Conscience humaine et violence de l'État, Pierre Lamblé étudie le développement du conflit entre les exigences de la liberté individuelle et la structure de plus en plus oppressive de l'appareil d'État, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à l'aube du XXe, à travers Le Contrat social de Rousseau, la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel, Lorenzaccio de Musset, Résurrection de Tolstoï et Le Procès de Kafka.

This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore the various ways in which travel texts represent actual political conditions and thus engage in discussions about national, transnational, and global citizenship; how they propose real-world political interventions in the places where the traveler goes; what tone they take toward political or socio-political violence; and how they intersect with political debates. Travel writing can be viewed as political in a purely instrumental sense, but, as this volume also demonstrates, travel writing's reception and ideological interventions also transform personal and cultural realities. This book thus examines the ways in which politics'material effects inform and intersect with personal experience in travel texts and engage with travel's dialectic of mobility and stasis. In spite of globalization and efforts to eradicate the colonial vision in travel writing and in travel writing criticism, this vision persists in various and complex ways. While the travelogue can be a space of discursive and direct oppression, these essays suggest that the travelogue is also a narrative space in which the traveler employs the genre to assert authority over his or her experiences of mobility. This book will be an important contribution for interdisciplinary scholars with interests in travel writing studies, global and transnational studies, women's studies, multicultural studies, the social sciences, and history.

‘All you have do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality.'TerryHarold Pinter's Party Time (1991) is an extraordinary distillation of the playwright's key concerns. Pulsing with political anger, it marks a stepping stone on Pinter's path from iconic dramatist of existential unease to Nobel Prize-winning poet of human rights. G. D. White situates this underrated play within a recognisably ‘Pinteresque'landscape of ambiguous, brittle social drama while also recognising its particularity: Party Time is haunted by Augusto Pinochet's right-wing coup against Salvador Allende's democratically elected government in Chile.This book considers Party Time and its confederate plays in the dual context of Pinter's literary career and burgeoning international concern with human rights and freedom of expression, contrasting his uneasy relationship with the UK's powerful elite with the worldwide acclaim for his dramatic eviscerations of power.

Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present. David DiMeo focuses on the work of three leading writers whose socially committed fiction was adapted to the disenchantment and discontent of the late twentieth century: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Despite their disappointments with the direction of Egyptian society in the decades following the 1952 revolution, they kept the spirit of committed literature alive through a deeply introspective examination of the relationship between the writer, the public, and political power. Reaching back to the roots of this literary movement, DiMeo examines the development of committed literature from its European antecedents to its peak of influence in the 1950s, and contrasts the committed works with those of disillusionment that followed. Committed to Disillusion is vital reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature and the modern history and politics of the Middle East.

Hamlet's Moment identifies a turning point in the history of English drama and early modern political culture: the moment when the business of politics became a matter of dramatic representation. Drama turned from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. Tragedies of state turned into tragedies of state servants, inviting the public to consider politics as a profession-to imagine what it meant to have a political career. By staging intelligence derived from diplomatic sources, and by inflecting the action and discourse of their plays with a Machiavellian style of political analysis, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use in claiming social distinction. In Hamlet's moment, the public stage created the political competence that enabled the rise of the modern public sphere.

Broken Masculinities portrays the post-dictatorial novel of the 1970s in all its complexity, and introduces the reader to a 1968-era Turkey, a period which challenges Turkey's now reinforced Islamic image by portraying the quest for sexual liberation and critical student uprisings. Günay-Erkol argues that the literature written after the 1971 coup in Turkey constitutes a coherent sub-genre and needs to be considered together. These novels share a common ground which is rich in images of men and women craving for power: general isolation, sexual-emotional frustration, and a traumatic sense of solitude and alienation. This book is an original and significant contribution to two major fields of study: (1) gender and sexuality with respect to formation of subjectivity through literature, and (2) modern literature and history through the study of Turkish literature. The chief concern in this book is not only literature's response to a particular period in Turkey, but also the role of literature in bearing witness to trauma and drastic political acts of violence—and coming to terms with them.B

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare's political outlook by comparing some of the playwright's best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ‘between'these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright's work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare's corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodies—caring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare's plays that illuminate the playwright's major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.

Imperial Tapestries represents a transnational approach to questions of monarchical power and literary form in early modern Europe. In line with Barbara Fuchs's recent call for considerations of center versus periphery in Old World contexts, it explores the ways in which some of the most significant authors of the early modern era questioned the structures of Spanish Habsburg authority through “imperial texts”—texts that call attention to their organizational process—in order to mirror authors'perceptions of the structures of Habsburg power.With a contextual basis in Fuchs'notion of imperium studies, ideas of self-fashioning, and theories of early modern reading, the study explores the ways in which complex narrative forms in the early modern period reflected the concerns with the structures of Habsburg imperial power subtly portrayed within the narratives themselves. A close reading of the various strands that form the tapestries of the texts at issue reveals a deep undercurrent of misgivings toward various manifestations of Spanish Habsburg power on the part of authors who had experienced its effects first-hand. Whether the complex narrative devices in question cast the Habsburg monarchs as monster, misogynist, sorceress, aloof shepherdess, or mad would-be knight errant, they all have one thing in common: the spatialized forms that they create correspond directly with the ways in which the authors in question perceive the more disillusioning aspects of Habsburg hegemony. Authors studied in the volume include Ludovico Ariosto, Garcilaso de la Vega,Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel de Cervantes, and María de Zayas.

With the passage into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, rights took on new legal, political, and social significance in Canada. In the decades following, Canadian jurisprudence has emphasised the importance of rights, determining their shape and asserting their centrality to legal ideas about what Canada represents. At the same time, an increasing number of Canadian novels have also engaged with the language of human rights and civil liberties, reflecting, like their counterparts in law, the possibilities of rights and the failure of their protection.In A Culture of Rights, Benjamin Authers reads novels by authors including Joy Kogawa, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Jeanette Armstrong alongside legal texts and key constitutional rights cases, arguing for the need for a more complex, interdisciplinary understanding of the sources of rights in Canada and elsewhere. He suggests that, at present, even when rights are violated, popular insistence on Canada's rights-driven society remains. Despite the limited scope of our rights, and the deferral of more substantive rights protections to some projected, ideal Canada, we remain keen to promote ourselves as members of an entirely just society.

The royal judge was an archetypal character in French tragedy during the 17th century. This figure impersonated the king by asserting his judicial authority and bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world. In Passing Judgement, Hélène Bilis examines how an overlooked character-type—the royal judge—remained a constant of the tragic genre throughout the 17th century, although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage. Her readings analyze how this royal decision-maker stood at the intersection of political and theatrical debates, and evolved through a process of trial and error in which certain portrayals of kingship were deemed obsolete and were discarded, while others were promoted as culturally allowable and resonant. In tracing the royal judge's persistent presence and transformation, Bilis argues that we can better grasp the weighty political stakes of theatrical representations under the ancien régime.

Poli Sci Fi: An Introduction to Political Science through Science Fiction allows readers, students, and instructors to explore the multiple worlds of science fiction while gaining a firm grasp of core political science concepts. This carefully composed text is comprised of sixteen brief chapters, each of which takes a prominent science fiction film or television episode and uses it to explore fundamental components of political science. The book is designed to serve as a supplemental text for undergraduate political science courses, especially Introduction to Political Science. The structure and content of the volume is shaped around the organization and coverage of several leading texts in this area, and includes major parts devoted to theory and epistemology, political behavior, institutions, identity, states, and inter-state relations. Its emphasis on science fiction—and particularly on popular movies and television programs—speaks to the popularity of the genre as well as the growing understanding that popular culture can be an extraordinarily successful vehicle for communicating difficult yet foundational concepts, especially to introductory level college students.

Stages of Engagement is a compelling and wonderfully varied account of the relationship between theatre in the United States and the social, cultural, and political forces that shaped it during one of the most formative periods in the nation's history.Joshua E. Polster applies key thematic perspectives – Colonialism, Religion, Race and Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality, Economic Systems, and Systems of Government – to seminal moments in US history. In doing so he explores the ways in which the theatre has responded to these turning points, through the work of some of its principal dramatists, directors, designers, and theatre companies.His approach tackles questions such as:• How did the plays of this period reflect the nation's concerns and anxieties?• How did theatre, culture, and politics interconnect as the United States took to the world stage?• Which critical viewpoints are most useful to us when examining these cultural phenomena?• How did performances and productions attempt to influence their audiences'social and civic engagement?On its own, or in tandem with its companion volume The Routledge Anthology of US Drama 1898–1949, this is the ideal text for any course in US Theatre. By examining each cultural moment from a range of critical perspectives and drawing upon a diverse range of sources, it is designed specifically for today's interdisciplinary and multicultural curriculum.

By developing a new analytical method of narrative discourse analysis, this study introduces new insights from literary studies and narratology into International Relations. This method examines the romantic narratives of pirates in Somalia, rebels in Libya and private military and security companies in Iraq and argues that these best resonate with an audience if they are able to connect to culturally embedded narratives found in literature, media and pop-culture. Dominant romantic narratives marginalise other, less flattering, stories about these actors, in which they are constituted as terrorists and held responsible for human rights violations.Focusing on the three narrative elements of setting, characterization and employment, the book argues that narratives are of fundamental importance for human cognition and identity construction. They help us understand the social and political world in which we live. The book emphasises the idea of intertextual narratability which holds that for narratives to become dominant they have to link themselves to previously existing stories.

Since the establishment of the Northern Irish state in 1921, theatre has often captured and reflected the political, social, and cultural changes that the North has experienced. From the mid–twentieth century, theatre has played a particularly important role in documenting women's experiences and in showing how women's social and political status has changed with the transformation of the state. Throughout the North's history, women's dramatic writing and performance have often contradicted mainstream narratives of the sectarian conflict, creating a rich and daring trove of counternarratives that contest the stories promoted by the government and media.Moving beyond the better-known women theatre practitioners of the North such as Marie Jones, Christina Reid, Anne Devlin, and the Charabanc Theatre Company, Coffey recovers the lost history of lesser-known, early playwrights and highlights a new generation of women writing during peacetime. She examines how Northern women have historically used the theatrical stage as aform of political activism when more traditional avenues were closed off to them. Tracing the development of women's involvement in Northern theatre, Coffey ultimately illuminates how issues such as feminism, gender roles, violence, politics, and sectarianism have shifted over the past century as the North moves from conflict into a developing and fragile peace.

This book demonstrates how authors performing the role of a public intellectual discuss ideas and opinions regarding society while using literary strategies and devices in and beyond the text. Their assumed persona thereby reads the world as a book - interpreting it and offering alternative scenarios for understanding it.