Bernard Goldstein’s memoir describes a hard world of taverns, toughs, thieves, and prostitutes; of slaughterhouse workers, handcart porters, and wagon drivers; and of fist-and gunfights with everyone from anti-Semites and Communists to hostile police, which is to say that it depicts a totally different view of life in prewar Poland than the one usually portrayed. As such, the book offers a corrective view in the form of social history, one that ...
In the mid-1800s, tens of thousands of Chinese workers migrated to Cuba, Peru, Mexico, and Panama in search of a better life. As they and their descendants assimilated into their new host countries, they contributed significantly to the economies of these countries through their work in agriculture, transportation, and other industries. However, through the years and throughout their work and assimilation, they also made distinguished literary, ...
Theory of Mind is what enables us to «put ourselves in another's shoes.» It is mindreading, empathy, creative imagination of another's perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability and a very basic necessity for human communication. Theory of Mind is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of ...
This book is the first full-length study to examine Moliere’s evolving (and at times contradictory) authorial strategies, as evidenced both by his portrayal of authors and publication within the plays and by his own interactions with the seventeenth-century Parisian publishing industry. Historians of the book have described the time period that coincides with Moliere’s theatrical activity as centrally important to the development of authors’ rig ...
The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth's major works of fiction for the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth's challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an a ...
Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in thi ...
Adopting an empirical and systematic approach, this interdisciplinary study of medieval Persian Sufi tradition and ?Attar (1145-1221) opens up a new space of comparison for reading and understanding medieval Persian and European literatures. The book invites us on an intellectual journey that reveals exciting intersections that redefine the hierarchies and terms of comparison. While the primary focus of the book is on reassessing the significanc ...
Some of the most important writers of the twentieth century, including Borges, Cortazar, Rulfo, and Garcia Marquez, have explored ambiguous sites of a disquieting nature. Their characters face merging perspectives, deferral, darkness, or emptiness. Such a space is neither a site of projection (as utopia or dystopia) nor a neutral setting (as the topos). For the characters, it is real and active, at once elusive and transforming. Despite the chal ...
Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels-Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock-that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from B ...