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Yemeni Poetry on the Frontline investigates popular literary responses to conflict in the different regions of Yemen, comparing responses to, and expressions of, traditional conflict with those to the new externally fuelled conflict.In its engagement with diasporic Yemeni communities in the UK, the book explores how storytelling and poetry might heighten and enhance both political and public awareness of the situation in Yemen, and lead to wider cultural understanding of diasporic and refugee communities in the UK. The novelty lies in the focus on literary expressions of conflict and conflict resolution, and the bringing together of projects dealing with the diverse regions of Yemen.This book will primarily appeal to scholars in Yemeni poetry, Arabic literature, Arabic dialectology, and anthropological linguistics.

The Hungarian literary tradition teems with a myriad of works that can contribute significantly to our political knowledge. Politics and literature as an interdisciplinary focus pays little attention to the works of Hungarian authors. Based on this perception, From Ideology to Nostalgia: Excursions with Arthur Koestler and Sándor Márai intends to show that specific novels written by Hungarian authors have significant value from the perspective of political theory. Miklós Bálint Tóth examines works which provide a thorough understanding of problems related to the notion of political order. In three case studies, Tóth analyzes Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Sándor Márai's Ítélet Canudosban (Judgement in Canudos), and another novel by Márai's Szindbád hazamegy (Szindbád Goes Home), focusing on political phenomena such as ideological thought, the dynamics between order and rebellion, and nostalgia.

Nella Storia i grandi balzi in avanti compiuti lungo il sentiero della civiltà sono stati ispirati dagli uomini di pensiero, intellettuali, filosofi che con la loro vi¬sione scuotevano le coscienze e facevano percepire come realizzabili nuovi scenari più progrediti, migliori per la complessa e contraddittoria società umana. Nell'era caotica dei social media e del conformismo mediatico, queste voci ap¬paiono confuse, prive di vigore permeante, incapaci di risvegliare il pensiero critico, nar¬cotizzato dal flusso incessante di dati. Le persone di cultura e gli scrittori, in particolare, avvertono la necessità di tracciare una rotta, di denunciare, come sentinelle della verità. Tuttavia, nell'epoca dell'immagine e del politicamente corretto, anche questa attitudine può sembrare una posa, una strategia di marketing. Difendere gli oppressi, gli ultimi può diventare un'autocertificazione della propria superiorità morale, che rende irrimediabil¬mente vana ogni buona intenzione. Per questo è bene tenere a mente che l'impegno civile è, sì, responsabilità verso gli altri, ma non può prescindere dall'impegno verso la propria autenticità e verso la scrittura.

«The Boom & the Boom, like China Miéville's The City and the City, presents a puzzle involving two parallel worlds. It builds a bridge for both worlds, forms mutually stimulating mirror images for both cultures, and creates a beautiful structure of discursive exploration of the multiplicity of contemporary science fiction beyond national boundaries.» (Mingwei Song, author of Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (2023), SFRA Book Award Winner) «Twenty-five years ago, many of us thought we were in a period of growth: the British SF Boom. Lyu's very readable book locates this radical sf in its political and economic contexts, but his genius is to discuss a parallel event: the Chinese SF Boom. This is a brilliant exploration of the genre outside the Gernsback-Campbell Continuum of American SF.» (Andrew M. Butler, Managing Editor, Extrapolation) «This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of two sf booms, one in Britain, one in China, which until now seemed invisible to each other. LYU Guangzhao's carefully paired readings of key novels show that sf is a global phenomenon but that, like economic globalisation itself, it takes distinctive local forms. Let a hundred schools of thought contend and a hundred science fictions boom!» (Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature, UWE Bristol) The Boom & The Boom provides a comparative study of the recent science fiction renaissances in the UK and China, known as the British and Chinese SF Booms, which emerged in the late 1980s. It contextualizes the two booms within the transformative political and cultural histories of both countries, characterized by the politico-economic shifts initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. In an era marked by the state's retreat from society and the redefinition of social subjects through market competition, science fiction assumes a crucial counter position for cultural critique, envisioning alternatives and possibilities embodied in utopian hopes.

A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEnovels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors'theopolitical imaginations.Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

This volume explores the process of definition, evolution and representation of the figures of the prince and the condottiero in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy: two roles that often appear as interconnected and, in some cases, are embodied by the same political actor. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach and considering different cultural centres (e.g. Milan, Florence, Naples, Ferrara), the contributions to this book examine different forms and genres through which these key political figures have been portrayed and theorised: historical narratives, political treatises, chivalric romances, historical-epic poetry, and visual and artistic representations. These media overlap in various ways but have been rarely considered through a comparative and unified perspective. This viewpoint helps to highlight the synergies, similarities and specificities of these fields and brings recognition to their contribution to the evolution of political ideologies in the Italian Renaissance.

This volume explores the political life of rage as it has been experienced and mobilized in the Francosphere since 1968. If mai is remembered as a failure to convert insurrectionary feeling into lasting political change, the vast number of activist groups who have alchemized their anger into resistance over the past fifty years are a testament to the continued, necessary role of rage in political life. This volume traces the various morphologies of anger across French-language literature, thought, cinema and activism. From Black feminisms to punk, flamboyance to suicide, cacophonous sound to riotous song, the contributions probe the aesthetics and politics of rage. This collection also examines the uneven legitimization of political anger – how rage is allowed to be expressed, by whom and in which contexts. Rage is often dismissed as inimical to proper academic inquiry: what unites the contributions in this publication is a commitment to thinking with feeling.

Chaos and Cosmos offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political. While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. As is well known, Borges'writing went beyond originality; it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form. This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent of totalitarianism led to sharp and philosophically sophisticated interrogations-in-fiction of the political, understood in this book as related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the forms of society, that of the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and that of the relationship between the same and the other. Chaos and Cosmos introduces the reader to Borges as an experimental writer, as an Argentine citizen, as a thinker of global political phenomena, and as a South American Pragmatist. The book also makes incursions in a political theorizing of its own, intertwining an interpretation of Borges'essays and fiction pieces from the 1930s and 1940s with the central concerns of philosophers and political thinkers such as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Michael Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler.

An orator turns to an actor for advice, citizens expect assemblies to unfold like dramas, and a theater-goer cries at a play thinking of his fallen enemy: no Life escapes the mention of theatrical imagery in Plutarch's paralleled biographies. And yet this is the first book not only to examine Plutarch's consistent and coherent use of this imagery but also to argue that it is systematically employed to describe, explore, and evaluate politics in action. The theater becomes Plutarch's invitation for us to question and uncover key moments of Athenian, Spartan, and Roman history as it unfolds.

This exciting and challenging study reorients how we think about politics in Shakespeare and on the early modern stage. By reading Shakespeare's political drama as a negative mode of political experience and thought, Nicholas Luke allows us to appreciate the imaginative and disruptive elements of plays that might seem politically pessimistic. Drawing on a long religious and philosophical tradition of negativity and considering the writings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida and Badiou, Luke pursues a phenomenology of political spirit that looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse and dream. Through his notion of a negative political theology, he challenges traditional understandings of political theology and shows that Shakespeare's drama of negativity is more than a form of pessimistic critique, but rather a force of freedom and invention that animates the political imaginations of its audience.

A timely and urgent inquiry by one of global literature's leading lights In this concisely argued and illuminating book, the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author Rabih Alameddine takes the subject of politics and art head-on, questioning the very premise of dividing these two pillars of culture into an either/or proposition. He reveals how a political dimension enlarges a work of art rather than making it less beautiful or reducing it to a polemic, as we are so often and carelessly taught. But he also ponders what makes art political to begin with: how essential is the artist's conscious political intent, and what does the reader or viewer contribute to the work's political capability or significance? In exploring these questions, Alameddine engages intensely with his role as an immigrant and a gay author writing inside a globally dominant, often oblivious culture, and invokes the work of numerous writers, from Tayeb Salih and Aleksandar Hemon to Teju Cole and Salman Rushdie, who also struggle to be heard as something more than an “other.” The book features throughout Alameddine's brilliantly relatable voice—shrewd, humorous, challenging, and as honest about his own limitations as he is about his passions.

This book delves into the intricate and, as argued, essential relationship between poetics and religion in Pindar. It explores how performance, cult, and religious attitudes intersect, offering readers a nuanced approach to Pindaric poetry concerning the relationship between mortals and the divine.Marinis approaches the world of Pindaric poetry within its historical context, enabling readers to explore the cultural and religious foundations of Pindar's lyric verse. The chapters examine both epinician poetry and cultic songs, the two major genres of the Pindaric corpus. This monograph focuses on the interconnectedness of poetics and religion, a central question that is essential for understanding the distinctive nature of Pindaric poetry. It examines the diverse ways in which Pindaric poetic tropes intersect with religious themes through detailed analysis and scholarly research. Readers gain an understanding of the significance of performance and cult in the public enactment of Pindar's works, exploring the relations between mortals – the composer of the song, its performer, and the victor in the case of epinician poetry – and the divine, highlighting the complexities of ancient Greek literature regarding religious practices and attitudes. Through its rigorous examination of Pindaric poetics and religious themes, this book offers readers a profound insight into the religious dimensions of ancient Greek poetry and the enduring legacy of Pindar's oeuvre.Poetics and Religion in Pindar is suitable for scholars and students working on ancient Greek literature, particularly the works of Pindar and lyric poetry, as well as those interested in classical literature and ancient Greek religion and culture more broadly.

En este volumen se explora la política como disciplina, categoría, entidad y proceso, cuestiones, todas ellas, que requieren ser revisitadas y repensadas crítica y cuidadosamente en nuestros tiempos, considerando tanto sus devastaciones como sus deseos. A lo largo de los capítulos, se examina y desenvuelve la política desde las perspectivas de la historia, la sociología, la literatura, el género, los estudios urbanos, la economía, la política y la política “religiosa”. Con la participación de colegas de la mayor parte de los centros de estudios de El Colegio de México, la obra busca ofrecer una mirada amplia, considerada y diversa sobre un tema de suma importancia en el mundo social actual, con la finalidad de impulsar el diálogo transdisciplinar y trasnacional.

Eine Lyrikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, die die politischen Ansprüche von Metrik und Medialität analysiert Seit der Goethezeit steht Literatur in Verdacht, sich in die Privatsphäre verabschiedet zu haben. Dabei wird übersehen, dass sich neben der sogenannten literarischen Autonomie eine Emanzipationsbestrebung Bahn bricht, die nicht darauf verzichtet, mit Literatur Politik zu machen. Dafür steht die Ode des 18. Jahrhunderts. Hier wird die Geschichte dieser alternativen lyrischen Moderne im deutschsprachigen Raum erzählt: von den Anfängen, als Johann Christian Günther die erhabene Unordnung der absolutistischen Ode Frankreichs gegen den römisch-deutschen Kaiser wendet, über die lyrikpolitischen Kämpfe, die zwischen Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit anlässlich der Thronfolge Friedrichs II. ausbrechen, bis zu Klopstocks lautstark für die Ideen von 1789 Partei nehmenden Revolutionsoden - und deren geschichtsphilosophischer Umdeutung und Entpolitisierung in den Gesängen Hölderlins. In staatspolitischer Perspektive wird der erhabene Ton odischen Gesangs zum'heißen Medium'(McLuhan) einer Verstärkung souveräner Stimmen. Immer größere Teile der Gesellschaft sehen sich eingeladen, diesen zirkulierenden Stimmen ihre Stimme zu leihen und damit eine souveräne (Un-)Ordnung zu artikulieren, die der Literatur und der Politik Gesetze geben will.

How widespread was authorship among rulers in the premodern Islamic world? The writings of different types of rulers in different regions and periods are analyzed in this book, from the early centuries in the central lands of Islam to 19th century Sudan. The composition of poetry appears as the most fertile area for authorship among rulers. Prose writings show a wide variety, from astrology to bookmaking, from autobiography to creeds. Some of the rulers made claims to special knowledge, but in all cases authorship played a special role in the construction of the rulers'authority and legitimacy. Contributors: Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk, Sean W. Anthony, María Luisa Ávila†, Teresa Bernheimer, Philip Bockholt, Sonja Brentjes, Christiane Czygan, David Durand-Guédy, Anne-Marie Eddé, Sinem Eryılmaz, Maribel Fierro, Adam Gaiser, Angelika Hartmann†, Livnat Holtzman, Maher Jarrar, Robert S. Kramer, Christian Mauder, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Letizia Osti, Jürgen Paul, Petra Schmidl, Tilman Seidensticker.

This book demonstrates the power of poetry and the ways in which academics can utilize poetry to go beyond the scholarly realm and create works of art which, unlike traditional academic works, problematize and question reality rather than simply describe it. Through its disciplinary, scholarly, and personal construction, poetry holds the potential to “erase” what we know and build a new world. The purpose of this book is to show how professors and students who write poetry can be emboldened to imagine new forms of government and political arrangements, promote social change and challenges to power structures, and detail radical ways of living with each other more generally. Conceiving of the “republic” as a democratic republic, or representative democracy, the author calls attention to the idea of poetry as evidence-based, which, despite the absence of verifiable data, nonetheless gives structure to ideas and experiences filtered through human cognition, imagination, and senses.Grounded in theory, arts-based research, and poetic inquiry and supplemented with practical class assignments, pedagogical strategies, and reflective items, this volume will appeal to faculty, scholars, and postgraduate students working across research methods, arts-based research and practice, and language and linguistics.

An incisive and erudite survey of Machiavelli, the catastrophes of his times and ours, and his counsel for responding to an era of constant crises

Land ownership—and engagement with land more generally—constituted a crucial dimension of female independence in eighteenth-century Britain. Because political citizenship was restricted to male property owners, women could not wield political power in the way propertied men did. Given its foundational sociopolitical function, land necessarily generated copious writing that vested it with considerable aesthetic and economic value. This book, then, situates these issues in relation to the historical transformation of landscape under emergent capitalism. The women writers featured herein—including Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Sarah Scott, and Elizabeth Montagu—participated in this transformation by celebrating female estate stewardship and evaluating the estate stewardship of men. By asserting their authority in such matters, these writers acquired a degree of independence and self-determination that otherwise proved elusive.

This book argues that E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf engaged sustainedly with real and imagined places as sites of counter-cultural politics. These writers used architectural images in diaries, essays, novels, poems, and plays to express their dissatisfaction with imperial London: from the glorification of war to the erosion of local religious and linguistic traditions, and rigidly gendered practices in domestic and public life. Drafty Houses shows that each author experienced post-war modernity as intimate spatial dislocation—in Egypt (Forster), in the church (Eliot), or in London's museums and streets (Woolf)—and traces connections between their personal experiences and lesser read publications to theorize about the impact of places on their writerly perspectives. By closely examining each author's negotiation of space symbolic of Englishness, empire, and global politics, Drafty Houses considers the limitsand the open-ended possibilities of liberal humanism, Christian conservatism, and feminist pacifism.

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between political thought and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field – particularly one that shows in detail how we can think more freely and creatively about political possibilities by reading and reflecting on politically significant literature. This volume offers analytically acute and culturally rich ways of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about political literature and what kind of distinctive conceptual progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in political issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide, while offering something that has not been done quite in this way and for which the time certainly seems right.

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers'congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

This book posits that Shakespeare's First Tetralogy draws inspiration from the Italian “politic histories” of the early modern period. These works of history, influenced by the Roman historian Tacitus, delve into the exploration of the machinations of power politics in governance and the shaping of historical events. The argument is that closely analysing these Italian “politic histories” can significantly enhance our understanding of the “politic” aspects dramatized in Shakespeare's early English History plays. Specifically, the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli are highlighted as contributing to this understanding. These “politic histories” were accessible (in a variety of forms) to many English early modern writers, including Shakespeare. Thus, they serve as foundation for political and strategic analogies, enriching our interpretation of Shakespeare's politic histories.While delving into the Italian “politic” historians can illuminate Shakespeare's achievement, it is suggested that we should regard the English History plays as “politic histories” in their own right. In essence, they are dramatized versions of precisely the same kinds of “politic” historical writing, with its emphasis on ragion di Stato or raison d'état. This emphasis on what the Elizabethans called “stratagems” introduces new approaches to interpreting the plays. Considering the motivation and action of its characters entails novel approaches that challenge the established reading of the plays'‘Machiavellian'characters (particularly Richard III) and shed light on previously overlooked characters (particularly Buckingham and Stanley), revealing their considerably greater strategic acumen. This exploration provides fresh avenues for reading the Shakespeare's politic histories and better appreciate their Italian connection.

James Ellroy has mined the darkest corners of the American experience, public and private, to paint a landscape of corrupt hearts, minds, and institutions. Ellroy is particularly notable for exploring the connection between the murder of his own mother, when he was ten years old, and his troubled adolescence and early adulthood struggles with addiction. “Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively,” he wrote in the memoir My Dark Places. Dark Places: Crime and Politics in the Personal Noir of James Ellroy will explore connections between politics, art, history, memory, and crime -- Ellroy's personal noir. The editors here present an interdisciplinary collection of essays, each with insight and argument into the pressurized, and at times, highly personal literary production of one of the most critically and commercially successful authors of our time. These contributions, scholarly yet accessible, offer compelling and provocative maps into the terrain of Ellroy's fiction and non-fiction, drawing focus as well on film adaptations of his work.

In Changing Minds: Women and the Political Essay, 1960–2000, Ann Jurečič documents the work of five paradigm-shifting essayists who transformed American thought about urgent political issues. Rachel Carson linked science and art to explain how pesticides threatened the Earth's ecosystems. Hannah Arendt redefined “evil” for a secular age after Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem. Susan Sontag's interest in the intersection of politics and aesthetics led her to examine the ethics of looking at photographs of suffering. Joan Didion became a political essayist when she questioned how rhetoric and sentimental narratives corrupted democratic ideals. Patricia J. Williams continues to write about living under a justice system that has attempted to neutralize race, gender, and the meaning of history. These writers reacted to the stressors of the late twentieth century and in response reshaped the essay for their own purposes in profound ways. With this volume, Jurečič begins to correct the longstanding dearth of scholarly studies on the importance of women and their political essays—works that continue to be relevant more than two decades into the twenty-first century.

Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children's books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with her writing that spans the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid period, and that addresses themes such as HIV/Aids, language and culture, home and belonging. Magona worked as a teacher and domestic worker, and spent two decades working for the United Nations in the United States of America. She has received many awards for her fearless writing ‘truth to power'. Her written work is often informed by her lived experience of being a black woman resisting subjugation and poverty. These essays bring to life many facets of Magona's personal history as well as her deepest convictions, her love for her country and despair at the problems that continue to plague it, and her belief in her ability to activate change. They demonstrate Magona's mastery of the essay form and serve as meaningful supplements to her fictional works, offering insightful responses to the conditions that inspired them.

The Dissident Politics in Václav Havel's Vaněk Plays: Who Is Ferdinand Vaněk Anyway focuses on Ferdinand Vaněk, a semi-autobiographical character created by Václav Havel and featured in a series of nine plays written by Havel himself and three other dissident writers – Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovský, and Jiří Dienstbier. By exploring the ‘Vaněk experience,'Carol Strong details a multi-episodic, absurdist journey that provides an ‘insider's view'of the challenges facing those daring enough to question the status quo, a view that remains relevant today. Strong's contention is that the lines found in these plays served as a ‘secret language'of dissent in Cold War Czechoslovakia, which called the citizenry to contemplate the need for societal reform. As the plays were written at a time when the work of Havel and other dissidents were banned, the plays were never performed publicly, but through clandestine living room performances and the sharing of samizdat scripts the plays found an audience. Select phrases were indeed whispered throughout underground networks and helped forge a sense of oppositional solidarity among potential activists. Strong's argument is that the ‘Vaněk experience'metaphorically highlights how official power mechanisms are among the least insidious forms of societal power, as the state must follow predictable patterns of legal jurisprudence. By contrast, non-governmental forms of power – as exercised by one's fellow citizens through informal social channels – can challenge oppositional actors more because of the personal tone they adopt. Using this approach, Strong presents a timelessly relevant critique of modern society with its consumerist / conformist tendencies.

This seminal study reveals how Constance Fenimore Woolson participated in debates on nineteenth-century political topics considered the province of men. She commented on the most important issues of her time: monetary policy, post-Reconstruction legal decisions, racial justice and interracial marriage, women's rights, religious hypocrisy, environmental destruction, destabilizing international developments, and the moral character of the nation. The innovative essays in this book introduce her techniques and the political concerns that inspired her complicated art, encouraging scholars to begin the process of rereading and reanalyzing Woolson's oeuvre to understand the compelling allegories and satires she created. The oppositional, intertextual, and referential techniques she developed allowed her to enter contested political conversations about compelling nineteenth-century problems like few women of her century, sometimes making her work political commentary as much as fiction.