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The Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries
Edited by Paul F. Diehl
University of Illinois Press, 1998
It's hard to think of Israel without also remembering the country's long-standing problems with its Arab neighbors. Similarly, India and Pakistan have long been less than cordial to each other. The concept of enduring rivalries and conflicts tantamount to militarized competition between two states is rapidly emerging as a subject of research in international relations. The nine contributors to The Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries place the concept in its empirical and theoretical context, exploring how such rivalries arise, what influences their development, and when and how they may escalate to war.
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Ecofeminist Literary Criticism
Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy
Edited by Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Ecofeminist Literary Criticism is the first collection of its kind: a diverse anthology that explores both how ecofeminism can enrich literary criticism and how literary criticism can contribute to ecofeminist theory and activism.

Ecofeminism is a practical movement for social change that discerns interconnections among all forms of oppression: the exploitation of nature, the oppression of women, class exploitation, racism, colonialism. Against binary divisions such as self/other, culture/nature, man/woman, humans/animals, and white/non-white, ecofeminist theory asserts that human identity is shaped by more fluid relationships and by an acknowledgment of both connection and difference.

Once considered the province of philosophy and women's studies, ecofeminism in recent years has been incorporated into a broader spectrum of academic discourse. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism assembles some of the most insightful advocates of this perspective to illuminate ecofeminism as a valuable component of literary criticism.

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Essentials of the Theory of Fiction
Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
What accounts for the power of stories to both entertain and illuminate? This question has long compelled the attention of storytellers and students of literature alike, and over the past several decades it has opened up broader dialogues about the nature of culture and interpretation. This third edition of the bestselling Essentials of the Theory of Fiction provides a comprehensive view of the theory of fiction from the nineteenth century through modernism and postmodernism to the present. It offers a sample of major theories of fictional technique while emphasizing recent developments in literary criticism. The essays cover a variety of topics, including voice, point of view, narration, sequencing, gender, and race. Ten new selections address issues such as oral memory in African American fiction, temporality, queer theory, magical realism, interactive narratives, and the effect of virtual technologies on literature. For students and generalists alike, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction is an invaluable resource for understanding how fiction works.

Contributors. M. M. Bakhtin, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, John Brenkman, Peter Brooks, Catherine Burgass, Seymour Chatman, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Wendy B. Faris, Barbara Foley, E. M. Forster, Joseph Frank, Joanne S. Frye, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gérard Genette, Ursula K. Heise, Michael J. Hoffman, Linda Hutcheon, Henry James, Susan S. Lanser, Helen Lock, Georg Lukács, Patrick D. Murphy, Ruth Ronen, Joseph Tabbi, Jon Thiem, Tzvetan Todorov, Virginia Woolf

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Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, 2nd ed.
Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, eds.
Duke University Press, 1996
This second edition of Essentials of the Theory of Fiction provides a comprehensive view of the theory of fiction from the nineteenth century, through modernism and postmodernism, to the present. Expanded and revised, it has new selections from contemporary theorists, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Peter Brooks, Linda Hutcheon, David Lodge, Barbara Foley, and others.

Selections from: M. M. Bakhtin, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, Peter Brooks, Seymour Chatman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Suzanne C. Ferguson, Barbara Foley, E. M. Forster, Joseph Frank, William Freedman, Norman Friedman, Joanne S. Frye, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gérard Genette, J. Arthur Honeywell, Linda Hutcheon, Henry James, Susan S. Lanser, Mitchell A. Leaska, George Levine, David Lodge, Georg Lukács, Gerald Prince, Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Tzvetan Todorov, Lionel Trilling, and Virginia Woolf

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Friendship, Volume 97
Peter Murphy
Duke University Press
After the culture wars of the past two decades, a turn toward a more constructive and convivial social analysis and critique is occurring today. Along with such themes as cosmopolitanism and ethical politics, the idea of friendship has emerged as central to this new constructivism. Lying at the intersections of ethics and politics as well as eroticism and companionship, friendship involves the personal and the public, sacrifice and joy, need and choice, spirit and body. While giving pleasure, it can also make great moral demands on us all.
While friendship was often discussed by the ancients, moderns have had much less to say on the topic. Leading us into a dialogue with the ancients, the contributors offer a series of far-reaching encounters. Nietzsche debates the meaning of friendship with Socrates; Horatio fulfills the ancient desideratum of the “true friend” in telling Hamlet’s story; and philia becomes the core of a radical ethic through a reconstruction of Marx’s Epicurean ideals. Friendship is also analyzed as the model of a non-narcissistic psychology, on the one hand, and of a “mafia of idealists”—the French Resistance—on the other. Moreover, milieus of friendship are revealed as a unique crucible of creativity for the Benjamin-Bloch cohort in 1920s southern Italy, for Wittgenstein and his Cambridge followers in the 1930s, and for American jazz musicians of the 1950s.

Contributors. Dwight Allman, Fabio Ciaramelli, Marios Constantinou, John Ely, Agnes Heller, Clara Gibson Maxwell (with Ornette Coleman), Peter Murphy, Louis Ruprecht Jr., Jean-Pierre Vernant

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The Media Commons
Globalization and Environmental Discourses
Patrick D Murphy
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses.

The media draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination--and influences just who benefits. Murphy's analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. He identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly--and ominously--individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.

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