The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is the first human rights treaty to explicitly acknowledge the right to education for persons with disabilities. In order to realize this right, the convention’s Article 24 mandates state parties to ensure inclusive education systems that overcome outright exclusion as well as segregation in special education settings. Despite this major global policy change to tackle the discriminations persons with disabilities face in education, this has yet to take effect in most school systems worldwide.

Focusing on the factors undermining the realization of disability rights in education, Julia Biermann probes current meanings of inclusive education in two contrasting yet equally challenged state parties to the UN CRPD: Nigeria, whose school system overtly excludes disabled children, and Germany, where this group primarily learns in special schools. In both countries, policy actors aim to realize the right to inclusive education by segregating students with disabilities into special education settings. In Nigeria, this demand arises from the glaring lack of such a system. In Germany, conversely, from its extraordinary long-term institutionalization. This act of diverting from the principles embodied in Article 24 is based on the steadfast and shared belief that school systems, which place students into special education, have an innate advantage in realizing the right to education for persons with disabilities. Accordingly, inclusion emerges to be an evolutionary and linear process of educational expansion that depends on institutionalized special education, not a right of persons with disabilities to be realized in local schools on an equal basis with others. This book proposes a refined human rights model of disability in education that shifts the analytical focus toward the global politics of formal mass schooling as a space where discrimination is sustained.

Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.

Transpoetic Exchange  illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.
 
The volume is divided into three parts. “Essays” unites seven texts by renowned scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance by exploring explore the historical background and the different stylistic and cultural influences on the authors, ranging from Latin America and Europe to India and the U.S. The second section, “Remembrances,” collects four experiences of interaction with Haroldo de Campos in the process of transcreating Paz’s poem and working on Transblanco and Galáxias. In the last section, “Poems,” five poets of international standing--Jerome Rothenberg, Antonio Cicero, Keijiro Suga, André Vallias, and Charles Bernstein.

Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.
 
This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined.

Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for those who didn’t fit into the prevailing national image. In analyzing novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire. The events and incidents depicted as taking place literally on the other side of the world, she argues, deeply affected people’s sense of their place in their own society, with transnational implications that are still relevant today.

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn’t travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored and experienced a different place or time without ever leaving her seat. No passport, no currency, no security screening required—the luxury of armchair travel is accessible to us all. In Traveling in Place, Bernd Stiegler celebrates this convenient, magical means of transport in all its many forms.

Organized into twenty-one “legs”—or short chapters—Traveling in Place begins with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre, an account of the forty-two-day “journey around his room” Maistre undertook as a way to entertain himself while under house arrest. Stiegler is fascinated by the notion of exploring the familiar as though it were completely new and strange. He engages writers as diverse as Roussel, Beckett, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Cortázar, Kierkegaard, and Borges, all of whom show how the everyday can be brilliantly transformed. Like the best guidebooks, Traveling in Place is more interested in the idea of travel as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and Stiegler reflects on the different ways that traveling at home have manifested themselves in the modern era, from literature and film to the virtual possibilities of the Internet, blogs, and contemporary art.

Reminiscent of the pictorial meditations of Sebald, but possessed of the intellectual playfulness of Calvino, Traveling in Place offers an entertaining and creative Baedeker to journeying at home.

Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources.

In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act.

The motto “Národ sobě”—“From the Nation to Itself”—inscribed over the proscenium arch of Prague’s National Theatre symbolizes the great importance theater holds for the Czechs. It also belies an extraordinary history of subversion, repression, and an enduring capacity for reinvention. In Trial by Theatre, Barbara Day sets that story in its political and sociological contexts, painting a vivid portrait of the evolving nature and importance of Czech theater that illuminates the nation’s history more broadly.

Drawing on a range of oral and written sources, as well as her unique personal experience of cultural and historical events in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s, Day offers a sweeping view of Czech theater, its colorful personalities, and international connections. Her story details: the days of the National Awakening in the nineteenth century, when theater took the place of politics, becoming an instrument of national identity in the hands of the revivalists; theater as a symbol of independence during the Nazi occupation; its survival of Socialist Realism and Stalinism and subsequent blossoming in the “Golden Sixties”; and theater’s essential role in Prague Spring and beyond, when for two decades theater operated in provisional spaces like gymnasiums, bars, trade union halls, art galleries, and living rooms. Trial by Theatre culminates in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a year that saw the installation of Václav Havel—a playwright—as the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia.

Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference.

     Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.

In the early 1600s, in a haunting tale titled New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon imagined the discovery of an uncharted island. This island was home to the descendants of the lost realm of Atlantis, who had organized themselves to seek “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Bacon’s make-believe island was not an empire in the usual sense, marked by territorial control; instead, it was the center of a vast general expansion of human knowledge and power.  

           

Rosalind Williams uses Bacon’s island as a jumping-off point to explore the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, the apotheosis of the modern ambition to increase knowledge and power in order to achieve world domination. Confronting an intensely humanized world was a singular event of consciousness, which Williams explores through the lives and works of three writers of the late nineteenth century: Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson. As the century drew to a close, these writers were unhappy with the direction in which their world seemed to be headed and worried that organized humanity would use knowledge and power for unworthy ends. In response, Williams shows, each engaged in a lifelong quest to make a home in the midst of human empire, to transcend it, and most of all to understand it. They accomplished this first by taking to the water: in life and in art, the transition from land to water offered them release from the condition of human domination. At the same time, each writer transformed his world by exploring the literary boundary between realism and romance. Williams shows how Verne, Morris, and Stevenson experimented with romance and fantasy and how these traditions allowed them to express their growing awareness of the need for a new relationship between humans and Earth.

           

The Triumph of Human Empire shows that for these writers and their readers romance was an exceptionally powerful way of grappling with the political, technical, and environmental situations of modernity. As environmental consciousness rises in our time, along with evidence that our seeming control over nature is pathological and unpredictable, Williams’s history is one that speaks very much to the present.

Challenging the sentimentalized and moralized view of comedy that prevails in modern criticism, Christopher Herbert outlines a theory of comedy as a mode whose dominant motive and function is the glorification of pleasure. Using this model, he presents a detailed study of Anthony Trollope that sharply contradicts the persistent image of this novelist as a conventional writer and complacent spokesman for middle-class pieties.

The comic mode as Herbert describes it was antagonistic to the repressive moral ethos widely prevalent in Victorian England. Herbert shows how Trollope, under a mask of self-proclaimed conventionality, employed this mode in a steady, sometimes scandalous critique of the Victorian subversion of pleasure. Drawing on Trollope's unpublished notes on seventeenth-century drama and bringing to light many instances in the novels of direct borrowings from old plays, Herbert demonstrates the inventiveness and subtlety of Trollope's deployment of comic materials. Thematically organized around such subjects as Trollope's investigations of sex, his formal structures, and his principles of "realism," Herbert's study includes detailed readings of two of the nineteenth century's most ambitious exercises in comedy: The Way We Live Now and Trollope's neglected masterpiece, Ayala's Angel.

Of primary importance for readers of Trollope and students of comedy, Herbert's study will also prove valuable to those interested more generally in Victorian and modern fiction and the cultural history of the Victorian age.

Tropes, Parables, Performatives collects J. Hillis Miller’s essays on seven major twentieth-century authors: Lawrence, Kafka, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Hardy, and Conrad. For all their evident differences, these essays from early to late explore a single intuition about literature, which may be framed by three words: “trope,” “parable,” and “performative.”
Throughout these essays Miller is fascinated with the tropological dimension of literary language, with the way figures of speech turn aside the telling of a story or the presentation of a literary theme. The exploration of this turning leads to the recognition that all works of literature are parabolic, “thrown beside” their real meaning. They tell one story but call forth something else.
Miller further agrees that all parables are fundamentally performative. They do not merely name something or give knowledge, but rather use words to make something happen, to get the reader from here to there. Each essay here attempts to formulate what, in a given case, the reader perfomatively enters by way of parabolic trope.

In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency—or the capacity to resist domination—of those oppressed. Aravamudan’s analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century.
“Tropicalization” is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed and the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, Addison’s Cato, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and The Drapier’s Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson’s Rasselas, Beckford’s Vathek, Montagu’s travel letters, Equiano’s autobiography, Burke’s political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency.
Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary theory.

 Despite the extensive critical attention that has been paid to the work of W. B. Yeats, we are still very much in the process of understanding both the greatness and the modernity of this poet. The assessment of his poetry has rested primarily on the scope, intensity, and memorability of his lyrics, but his romantic beginnings have made it problematic to acknowledge him as a modernist, while his failure to produce a long poem has for some time raised questions about his greatness. Don’t major poets, the argument runs, produce major poems?

            In this meticulous analysis of The Tower, David Young addresses both these issues, showing that this powerful volume represents Yeats at his best and most modern, and that its careful construction makes it the deliberate equivalent to the long poems of tradition.

            By tracing the careful ordering of the poems in The Tower, Young demonstrates the volume’s overall vision, giving careful readings of each poem and illustrating the growing repetition of images that create a whole which is both emotionally and dramatically greater than the sum of its parts. Young contends that the best way to read Yeat’s lyrics is through attention to the context he created for them. Their interdependence, he asserts, is the true key to their modernity.

            This eminently readable study appears at a time when most readers are in danger of losing touch with the particular achievement of Yeat’s individual volumes as he conceived them. Most students and readers now encounter Yeats in anthologies, in a volume of selected poems, or in a somewhat misleadingly presented complete Poems. Young convinces us that by persisting in this approach we will lose sight of a significant aspect of a foremost modern poet and the very elements that make him a true modern.

Great Power competition is back. On the two sides of the Atlantic, however, this concept often means different things. While the United States is focused on China, Europe is preoccupied with Russia. Yet shifting American priorities toward Asia requires reconceptualizing the future role of NATO. In Europe, this shift has led to serious thought about how to achieve strategic autonomy that will allow Europe to guarantee its own security regardless of strategic choices made in Washington. As Chinese strategy focuses on dividing European actors and making them more economically dependent on Beijing, these developments may undermine Washington’s influence in Europe while limiting potential European action against Chinese interests.

With a mix of research methodologies applied by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, Turbulence Across the Sea offers a comprehensive analysis of relations among European and North American actors in the context of strategic competition among the United States, Europe, Russia, and China. In doing so, it demonstrates that a reaffirmation of transatlantic cooperation is necessary to maintain security in the face of aggressive moves by both Russia and China. By analyzing attitudes from the perspective of both the various actors (Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union) and various sectors (intelligence cooperation, foreign direct investments, technology, and the defense industry), this book provides readers with a comprehensive perspective on the challenges and opportunities in the shifting landscape of security in the twenty-first century.

Two Stories of Prague signifies the maturation of a poet and of a people. Although most readers know Rilke as a mature, cosmopolitan poet, here we can discern a young writer self-consciously exploring his development as a man and his emergence as an artist. Angela Esterhammer writes that in symbolic, stylistic, and biographical terms these stories "record the process by which Rilke fashions himself into an independent, empowered individual."

How were the first fonts made? Who invented italics? When did we figure out how to print in color?

Many of the standard features of printed books were designed by pioneering typographers and printers in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Johannes Gutenberg is credited with printing the first books in Europe with moveable type in the fifteenth century, but many different European printers and publishers went on to find innovative solutions to replicate the appearance of manuscript books in print and improve on them throughout the Renaissance. The illustrated examples in Typographic Firsts originate in those early decades, bringing into focus the influences and innovations that shaped the printed book and established a Western typographic canon.

From the practical challenges of polychromatic printing and sheet music printing to the techniques for illustrating books with woodcuts and producing books for children to the design of the first fonts, these stories chart the invention of the printed book, the world’s first means of mass communication. Also covering title pages, maps, printing in gold, and printing in color, this book shows how a mixture of happenstance and brilliant technological innovation came together to form the typographic and design conventions of the book.