The collection of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles consists of rare highland Maya texts, which trace Kaqchikel Maya history from their legendary departure from Tollan/Tula through their migrations, wars, the Spanish invasion, and the first century of Spanish colonial rule. The texts represent a variety of genres, including formal narrative, continuous year-count annals, contribution records, genealogies, and land disputes.
While the Kaqchikel Chronicles have been known to scholars for many years, this volume is the first and only translation of the texts in their entirety. The book includes two collections of documents, one known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. The translation has been prepared by leading Mesoamericanists in collaboration with Kaqchikel-speaking linguistic scholars. It features interlinear glossing, which allows readers to follow the translators in the process of rendering colonial Kaqchikel into modern English. Extensive footnoting within the text restores the depth and texture of cultural context to the Chronicles. To put the translations in context, Judith Maxwell and Robert Hill have written a full scholarly introduction that provides the first modern linguistic discussion of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic structure of sixteenth-century Kaqchikel. The translators also tell a lively story of how these texts, which derive from pre-contact indigenous pictographic and cartographic histories, came to be converted into their present form.
Women of colors and a literature written in corporeal and spiritual scars
The corporeal and spiritual healing in literature by women of colors can be seen to redefine modern thought and printed text. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer traces the impact of colonization and enslavement on Black women and Black women’s contributions to colonial, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature in the US, Brazil, and the Caribbean.
Drawing on intersectional analysis, Ohmer focuses on portrayals of trauma and spirituality in works by Toni Morrison, Conceição Evaristo, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, the Quilombhoje poets, and María de los Reyes Castillo. Ohmer compares literature from different countries along four thematic pathways: ghosts, mirrors, naming, and motherhood. Her analysis unlocks the literature’s power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and thrilling passages of hope and liberation. Throughout, Ohmer weaves in her life story as a Black woman as she reflects on how colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism have impacted her work, traumas, and faith journey.
Kerouac was primarily a religious writer bent on testing and celebrating the profane depths and transcendent heights of experience and reporting both truly. Baptized and buried a Catholic, he was also heavily influenced by Buddhism, especially from 1954 until 1957 when he integrated traditional Eastern belief into several novels. Catholicism remained an essential force in his writing, but his study of Buddhism was serious and not solely in the service of his literary art. As he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1954, "Since I saw you I took up the study of Buddhism and for me it’s the word and the way I was looking for."
Giamo also seeks IT—"a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, suspending for the moment belief in the ‘real’ concrete grey everyday of facts of self and selfhood . . . its various meanings, paths, and oscillations: from romantic lyricism to ‘the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being and from the void-pit of the Great World Snake to the joyous pain of amorous love, and, finally, from Catholic/Buddhist serenity to the onset of penitential martyrhood."
Now a classic, Kerouac’s Crooked Road was one of the first critical works on the legendary Beat writer to analyze his work as serious literary art, placing it in the broader American literary tradition with canonical writers like Herman Melville and Mark Twain. Author Tim Hunt explores Kerouac’s creative process and puts his work in conversation with classic American literature and with critical theory.
This edition includes a new preface by the author, which takes a discerning look at the implications of the 2007 publication of the original typewriter scroll version of On the Road for the understanding of Kerouac and his novel. Although some critics see the scroll version of the novel as embodying Kerouac’s true artistic vision and the 1957 Viking edition as a commercialized compromise of that vision, Hunt argues that the two versions should not be viewed as antithetical but rather as discrete perspectives of a writer deeply immersed in writing as both performance and evolving process.
Hunt moves beyond the mythos surrounding the “spontaneous creation” of On the Road, which upholds Kerouac’s reputation as a cultural icon, to look more closely at an innovative writer who wanted to bridge the gap between the luscious, talk-filled world of real life and the sterilized version of that world circumscribed by overly intellectualized, literary texts, through the use of written language driven by effusive passion rather than sober reflection. With close, erudite readings of Kerouac’s major and minor works, from On the Road to Visions of Cody,Hunt draws on Kerouac’s letters, novels, poetry, and experimental drafts to position Kerouac in both historical and literary contexts, emphasizing the influence of writers such as Emerson, Melville, Wolfe, and Hemingway on his provocative work.
Writing and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day.
In this masterful study, Aníbal González traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own relation to writing. Using an approach that owes much to the recent "turn to ethics" in deconstruction and to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, he examines selected short stories and novels by major Spanish American authors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel Zeno Gandía, Teresa de la Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. He shows how these authors frequently display an attitude he calls "graphophobia," an intense awareness of the potential dangers of the written word.
"The study of transracial adoption has long been dominated by historians, legal scholars, and social scientists, but with the growth of the lively field of humanistic adoption studies comes a growing understanding of the importance of cultural representations to the social meanings and even the practices of adoption itself . . . This book makes a valuable contribution in showing how important the theme of adoption has been throughout the twentieth century in representations of race relations, and in showing that the adoption theme has served to challenge racial norms as well as uphold them."
---Margaret Homans, Yale University
The subject of transracial adoption seems to be enjoying unprecedented media attention of late, particularly as white celebrities have made headlines by adopting children of color from overseas. But interest in transracial adoption is nothing new---it has long occupied a space in the public imagination, a space disproportionate with the number of people actually adopted across racial lines.
Even before World War II, when transracial adoption was neither legally nor socially sanctioned, American authors wrote about it, often depicting it as an "accident"---the result of racial ambiguity that prevented adopters from knowing who is white or black. After World War II, as the real-world practice of transracial and international adoption increased, American literary representations of it became an index not only of the changing cultural attitudes toward adoption as a way of creating families but also of the social issues that informed it and made it, at times, controversial.
Kin of Another Kind examines the appearance of transracial adoption in American literature at certain key moments from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first to help understand its literary and social significance to authors and readers alike. In juxtaposing representations of African American, American Indian, and Korean and Chinese adoptions across racial (and national) lines, Kin of Another Kind traces the metaphorical significance of adoption when it appears in fiction. At the same time, aligning these groups calls attention to their unique and divergent cultural histories with adoption, which serve as important contexts for the fiction discussed in this study.
The book explores the fiction of canonical authors such as William Faulkner and Toni Morrison and places it alongside lesser-known works by Robert E. Boles, Dallas Chief Eagle (Lakota), and Sui Sin Far that, when reconsidered, can advance our understanding both of adoption in literature and of twentieth-century American literature in general.
Kin of Another Kind will appeal to students and scholars in adoption in literature, American literature, and comparative multiethnic literatures. It adds to the growing body of work on adoption in literature, which focuses on orphancy and adoption in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Cynthia Callahan is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, Mansfield.
In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading of literary works, Ann C. Hall offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist and a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study of women characters in the modern dramatic texts of Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard.
This is the first study to treat these three writers in tandem, and while Hall uses the work of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings of specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, and historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new and significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid and necessary part of feminist dramatic criticism but a part of theatrical production as well.
From Pinter’s play A Kind of Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for the patriarchal oppression of women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination of O’Neill’s madonnas, Pinter’s whores, and Shepard’s female saviors as they are represented in O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for theMisbegotten; Pinter’s Homecoming, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska; and Shepard’s Buried Child, True West, and A LieoftheMind.
Since the works of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, Hall hopes that a better understanding of the female characters in these plays will influence the performances themselves.
Pioneers moving into Iowa in the nineteenth century created a distinctly rural culture: family, farm, church, and school were its dominant institutions. After decades of settlement, however, several lively and perceptive generations interpreted their political, economic, and cultural environment—their Iowa—much more imaginatively; they offered such abundant insight, understanding, meaning, and mission that they mentally and spiritually recreates Iowa. In Kinship with the Land historian Brad Burns celebrates this intense period of intellectual and cultural development.
Through their novels, short stories, poems, essays, drawings, and paintings, Iowa's regionalists expressed a rich abstraction of people and place. They conferred meaning, imparted understanding, defined the soil and the folk, conveyed a sense of place. Grant Wood in his overalls—the quintessential symbol of sophisticated talent and rural values—clearly represented regionalism's spiritual solidarity with the land and the people who worked it. Burns lets these Iowans speak for themselves, then interprets their distinctive voices to present a cogent case for and an understanding of the rural in an overwhelming urban America.
Kinship with the Land emphasizes the importance of Iowa's intellectual and cultural history and reaffirms the state's identity at the very moment that standardization threatened to eradicate it. By endowing Iowa with vibrant, independent art and literature, regionalists made refreshing sense of their environment. Readers from every state will appreciate their generous legacy.
Kinyras, in Greco-Roman sources, is the central culture-hero of early Cyprus: legendary king, metallurge, Agamemnon’s (faithless) ally, Aphrodite’s priest, father of Myrrha and Adonis, rival of Apollo, ancestor of the Paphian priest-kings, and much more. Kinyras increased in depth and complexity with the demonstration in 1968 that Kinnaru—the divinized temple-lyre—was venerated at Ugarit, an important Late Bronze Age city just opposite Cyprus on the Syrian coast. John Curtis Franklin seeks to harmonize Kinyras as a mythological symbol of pre-Greek Cyprus with what is known of ritual music and deified instruments in the Bronze Age Near East, using evidence going back to early Mesopotamia. Franklin addresses issues of ethnicity and identity; migration and colonization, especially the Aegean diaspora to Cyprus, Cilicia, and Philistia in the Early Iron Age; cultural interface of Hellenic, Eteocypriot, and Levantine groups on Cyprus; early Greek poetics, epic memory, and myth-making; performance traditions and music archaeology; royal ideology and ritual poetics; and a host of specific philological and historical issues arising from the collation of classical and Near Eastern sources.
Kinyras includes a vital background study of divinized balang-harps in Mesopotamia by Wolfgang Heimpel. This paperback edition contains minor corrections, while retaining the foldout maps of the original hardback edition as spreads, alongside illustrations and artwork by Glynnis Fawkes.
In this skillfully written essay on the fiction of imperialism, John McClure portrays the colonialist—his nature, aspirations, and frustrations—as perceived by Kipling and Conrad. And he relates these perceptions to the world and experiences of both writers.
In the stories of the 1880s, McClure shows, Kipling focuses with bitter sympathy on “the white man’s burden” in India, the strains produced by early exile, ignorance of India, and the interference of liberal bureaucrats in the business of rule. Later works, including The Jungle Book and Kim, present proposals for imperial education intended to eliminate these strains.
Conrad also explores the strains of colonial life, but from a perspective antithetical in many respects to Kipling’s. In the Lingard novels and Lord Jim he challenges the imperial image of the colonialist as a wise, benign father protecting his savage dependents. The pessimistic assessment of the colonialist’s motives and achievements developed in these works finds full expression, McClure suggests, in Heart of Darkness. And in Nostromo Conrad explores the human dimensions of large-scale capitalist intervention in the colonial world, finding once again no cause to celebrate imperialism.
John McClure’s interpretation is forceful but ever attuned to the complexities of the texts discussed.
As scholars have remarked, the word kleos in the Iliad and the Odyssey alike refers to something more substantive and complex than “fame” or “glory.” Kleos distinctly supposes an oral narrative—principally an “oral history,” a “life story” or ultimately an “oral tradition.” When broken down into its twin constituents, “words” and “actions” or “deeds,” a hero’s kleos serves to define him as a fully gendered social being.
This book is a meditation on this concept as expressed and experienced in the adult society Telemachos find himself in. Kleos is the yardstick by which his psychological change was appreciated by Homer’s audiences. As this book shows through philological and interdisciplinary analysis, Prince Telemachos grows up in the course of the Telemachy and arguably even beyond (in book 24): his education, which is conceived largely as an apprenticeship on land and sea, admits him gradually if unevenly to a full-fledged adult kleos—a kleos that nonetheless necessarily remains minor in comparison to that of his father and other elders.
P'ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. The singer both narrates the story and dramatizes all the characters, male and female. Performances require as long as six hours and make extraordinary vocal demands. In the first book-length treatment in English of this remarkable art form, Pihl traces the history of p'ansori from its roots in shamanism and folktales through its nineteenth-century heyday under highly acclaimed masters and discusses its evolution in the twentieth century. After examining the place of p'ansori in popular entertainment and its textual tradition, he analyzes the nature of texts in the repertoire and explains the vocal and rhythmic techniques required to perform them.
Pihl's superb translation of the alternately touching and comic "Song of Shim Ch'ong"—the first annotated English translation of a full p'ansori performance text—illustrates the emotional range, narrative variety, and technical complexity of p'ansori literature. The Korean Singer of Tales will interest not only Korean specialists, but also students of comparative literature, folklore, anthropology, and music.
The author argues that reading poetry in Kiswahili provides important insights into questions of language and power, as well as into discussions of socialist practice in East Africa and East African resistance to colonialism and neo-colonialism. Includes the text of numerous poems and footnotes.
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