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193 books match the query 'Empire' and 4 start with d

cover of Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

Dido's Daughters

Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

Margaret W. Ferguson

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing.

Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.
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cover of Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective

Discourses of Empire

The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective

Hans Leander

SBL Press, 2013

This inventive work explores Mark’s Gospel within the contexts of the empires of Rome and Europe. In a unique dual analysis, the book highlights how empire is not only part of the past but also of a present colonial heritage. The book first outlines postcolonial criticism and discusses the challenges it poses for biblical scholarship, then scrutinizes the complex ways with which nineteenth-century commentaries on Mark’s Gospel interplayed with the formation of European colonial identities. It examines the stance of Mark’s Gospel vis-à-vis the Roman Empire and analyzes the manner in which the fibers of empire within Mark are interwoven, reproduced, negotiated, modified and subverted. Finally, it offers synthesizing suggestions for bringing Mark beyond a colonial heritage. The book’s candid use of postcolonial criticism illustrates how a contemporary perspective can illuminate and shed new light on an ancient text in its imperial setting.
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cover of Dusk, Empire: New and Selected

Dusk, Empire

New and Selected

Daniel Tobin

Four Way Books, 2026

Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024 is a panoramic collection of Daniel Tobin’s most exemplary, ambitious, and accomplished poems from nearly forty years at work in the art. These range from his award-winning first book, Where the World is Made, through successive volumes that reveal a progressive deepening of his essential themes even as the poems evolve to an ever more refined technical risk and mastery. These themes include the unflinching encounter with time, suffering, and mortality, as well as what one earlier reviewer called “a quest for transcendence, a search for the sacred.” They seek, in short, to do, as another reviewer observed, what Yeats said was “one ideal for poetry: to hold justice and reality in a single thought.” In so doing, Tobin’s poems probe the individual life in relation to the pressures of history, including his own family’s perilous and traumatic immigration from famine in the 19th century—a backstory he explores in The Narrows, which he has called “a mural in verse.” At the same time, his “Homage to Bartolomeo de las Casas” delves into the fraught early colonial history of the Americas through the eyes of the eponymous friar, a repentant colonizer. 

These earlier works establish Tobin’s mastery of the poetic sequence, among a wide variety of other formal displays, all amply evident in the books that follow, including the lyrically meditative orchestrations of Second Things, the award-winning poems of Belated Heavens, The Net, and Blood Labors, characterized at once by their compendious erudition, their sense of intellectual and cultural history, as well as their emotional urgency and formal variousness. This generous selection from Tobin’s work is intended to be a companion volume to The Mansions, his trilogy of book-length poems that explore twentieth century history, and the counter claims of science and religion, through three exemplary lives, which reviewers said inspired genuine awe. Finally,  Dusk, Empire leads with a gripping selection of new work that engages the enormous pressures and troubles of the present historical moment, set in dialogue with Tobin’s characteristic passion for what would transcend it. Or as he asks in “The Sand Painting,” “What is that joyous singing inside the rock / Though each intricate, lovely thing will be erased?” 

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cover of Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

Dwelling in American

Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

John Muthyala

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

Globalization is not the Americanization of the world, argues John Muthyala. Rather, it is an uneven social, cultural, economic, and political process in which the policies and aspirations of powerful nation-states are entangled with the interests of other empires, nation-states, and communities. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization takes up a bold challenge, critiquing scholarship on American empire that views the United States as either an exceptional threat to the world or the only hope for the future. It does so in order to provincialize America, to understand it from outside the borders of nation and location, and from inside the global networks of trade, power, and culture. Using comparative frames of reference, the book makes its arguments by examining the work of a diverse range of writers including Arundhati Roy (War Talk, Power Politics), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat). This is an original, complex, and often bracingly counterintuitive critique of the idea of American empire that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of globalization.
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