Product Description: In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this contemporary fascination with the theological underpinnings of modern politics, Victoria Kahn proposes a return to secularism—whose origins she locates in the art, literature, and political theory of the early modern period—and argues in defense of literature and art as a force for secular liberal culture...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare's famous play, Hamlet, has been the subject of more scholarly analysis and criticism than any other work of literature in human history. For all of its generally acknowledged virtues, however, it has also been treated as problematic in a raft of ways...read more

Product Description: This book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the democratic reconfiguration of the European and non-European cultural and political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is the traumatic experience of its designers among whom Voltaire, Kant, Herder, the Schlegel brothers and Goethe, resp...read more

Product Description: The book offers ten essays which explore the interaction between literature and politics. The authors investigate a variety of genres including young-adult fiction, national poetry, novels, autobiography, and performance art from different time periods ranging from the 18th up to the 21st century from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East...read more

Product Description: Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways...read more

Product Description: This study of Aristophanes provides the basis for a total re-assessment not only of Aristophanes as a poet and playwright, but also of our perception of politics and the role of the theatre in classical Athens. It shows how Aristophanes used allegorical means to comment on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians, in particular the problems presented by the gradual emergence of Alcibiades as one of the most powerful figures in the state...read more

Product Description: Rome and the Spirit of Caesar, providing a fresh interpretation of Julius Caesar, is a thorough examination of Shakespeare’s presentation of the final throes of republican Rome’s political decay and demise and the rise of Caesarism...read more

Product Description: Set in the future dystopia of Panem, The Hunger Games trilogy follows the rise of a provincial rebellion against the wealthy and tyrannical "Capitol." As narrator and heroine, Katniss Everdeen comes to embody the hope of the long oppressed for a new order...read more

Product Description: This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena...read more

Product Description: Politics and Literature shows how important insights about genocide, poverty, state violence, world terrorism, the clash of civilizations, and other phenomena haunting the world at the turn of the millennium can be derived from contemporary novels...read more

More than two hundred black-and-white photographs illustrate this new roster of Hollywood's worst in categories including the most embarrassing nude scene in Hollywood history, the worst performance by Ronald Reagan, and the worst biker movie of all time

Product Description: Revolutionary Subjects demonstrates that East and West German literary interests in Latin America coincided with debates about the political relevance of literature in the Cold War. Through a combination of close reading, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Trnka examines textual instances of aesthetic solidarity, which, she argues, anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global...read more

Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy is an inquiry into a fundamental political problem made visible through the tragic poetry of Sophocles. In part I Badger offers a detailed exegesis of three plays: Ajax, Antigone, and Philoctetes. These plays share a common theme, illuminating a persistent feature of political life, namely the antagonism between the heroic commitment to the beautiful and the transcendent on the one hand, and the community’s need for bodily safety and material security on the other. This conceptual structure not only helps us understand these plays but also establishes a distinctive vision of the tragic dimension of political life―a vision that can be applied fruitfully to examinations of political projects quite distant from the world of fifth-century Athens. Such an application is the aim of part II, in which Badger coordinates the results of the inquiries of part I and applies them to a consideration of the competing claims of three strands of medieval and early modern political philosophy: ecclesiastical rule, scientific domination, and liberal government. Badger identifies the last of these―early modern liberalism―as a "tragic politics" that seeks to sustain and contain the tension between transcendent longing and material need.

Product Description: Fantasy is often condemned as escapist, unsophisticated and superficial. This collection of new essays puts such easy dismissals to the test by examining the ways in which Fantasy narratives present diverse, politically relevant discourses--gender, race, religion or consumerism--and thereby serve as indicators of their real-world contexts...read more

Product Description: More than twenty years after its publication in 1991, Leslie Marmon Silko’s monumental novel Almanac of the Dead continues to disconcert, move, provoke, and outrage readers. In a work that is overtly and often uncomfortably political, Silko’s overflowing cast of characters includes representatives from a range of cultures and communities who are united by common experiences of dispossession, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and poverty...read more

Product Description: The great helmsman, the watchdog of the people, the medicine the state needs: all these images originated in ancient Greece, yet retain the capacity to influence an audience today. This is the first systematic study of political imagery in ancient Greek literature, history and thought, tracing it from its appearance, influenced by Near Eastern precursors, in Homer and Hesiod, to the end of the classical period and Plato's deployment of images like the helmsman and the doctor in the service of his political philosophy...read more

Product Description: Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who gradually transformed himself into the English writer, Joseph Conrad, was a mercurial personality. He left Poland for the sea, though he had no experience with salt water. He left the Polish language for French, and then for English...read more

Product Description: Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy...read more