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In this book, Miloš Pojar traces the development and transformation of the opinions about Jews and Judaism of the first Czechoslovak president, T. G. Masaryk. Pojar describes the key events and ideas that shaped Masaryk’s attitudes: his first contacts with the Jewish world as a child, and later as a student; his work as a philosopher and sociologist, through which his thinking on Marxism, social issues, Christianity, and Judaism evolved; and his later, pivotal, experience at the time of the anti-Semitic libel trials against Leopold Hilsner, known as the Hilsner Affair. Pojar also details the period when Masaryk, as president, formulated his position on matters such as the Czech-Jewish movement, the question of assimilation, and Zionism. Featuring an entire chapter on Masaryk’s celebrated 1927 trip to Palestine as well as a series of brief profiles of outstanding Jewish figures that explore both Masaryk’s attitudes to their ideas and their opinions of Masaryk, this book is a compelling personal portrait and a substantial contribution to our understanding of the history of Jews in the Czech lands.

The University of Michigan Press announces that it will assume the annual publication of TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, beginning with Volume 7. As the journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship, TEXT has always had a strong commitment to the theory as well as the practice of textual scholarship, and the new imprint strengthens this association. It will continue to be the best single source for keeping up with and following the increasingly active debate within the international textual community.

The Society for Textual Scholarship is an interdisciplinary organization devoted to providing a forum for the discussion of the cross-disciplinary implications of current research in various areas of contemporary textual work. These areas include the discovery, enumeration, description, bibliographical analysis, editing, and annotation of texts in disciplines such as literature, history, musicology, theater, film, linguistics, classical and biblical studies, philosophy, art history, history of science, legal history, computer science, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, and textual and literary theory. The contents of TEXT reflect this interdisciplinary concern and this range of fields.

TEXT 7 continues the tradition of offering its readers a series of sophisticated essays on specific textual problems, written by acknowledged experts in each field, balanced by a certain concern for those general problems in textual scholarship that all editors, bibliographers, and textual critics (not to mention literary critics) must confront. It is thus a further contribution to the "discourse" of the text and is as critical and ideological as it is descriptive and analytical.

The volume is organized in the same way as earlier ones, with an opening section of articles dealing with theoretical matters (e.g., Paul Eggert on document and text and Joseph Grigely on textual space), followed by articles arranged in chronological order of subject from medieval (e.g., Mary-Jo Arn on punctuation and Daniel Mosser on editing the Canterbury Tales) to Renaissance (e.g., Ted-Larry Pebworth on coterie poetry and Ernest W. Sullivan II on Donne) to modern (e.g., Heather Bryant Jordan on T. S. Eliot and Lawrence Rainey on Pound). Most of the essays in the chronological section also have a substantial theoretical argument. The final section of the volume consists of review-essays and reviews that give a thorough account and evaluation of books and editions while situating them in the various current debates on author, text, and culture. Highlights include reviews of editions of Marlowe, Burton, Johnson, and Thackeray and of George Landow's Hypertext, Ian Small and Marcus Walsh's Theory and Practice of Text-Editing, and D. C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship.

D. C. Greetham is Professor of English, City University of New York Graduate Center. W. Speed Hill is Professor of English, City University of New York. Peter Shillingsburg is Professor of English, Mississippi State University. All three are on the board of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

In TV Socialism, Anikó Imre provides an innovative history of television in socialist Europe during and after the Cold War. Rather than uniform propaganda programming, Imre finds rich evidence of hybrid aesthetic and economic practices, including frequent exchanges within the region and with Western media, a steady production of varied genre entertainment, elements of European public service broadcasting, and transcultural, multi-lingual reception practices. These televisual practices challenge conventional understandings of culture under socialism, divisions between East and West, and the divide between socialism and postsocialism. Taking a broad regional perspective encompassing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Imre foregrounds continuities between socialist television and the region’s shared imperial histories, including the programming trends, distribution patterns, and reception practices that extended into postsocialism. Television, she argues, is key to understanding European socialist cultures and to making sense of developments after the end of the Cold War and the enduring global legacy of socialism.

Since its founding in 1921, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the University of London has seen students and teachers come together, socially and intellectually, to engage in lively academic seminars. But for what purpose and with what value?

Talking History provides a defence of the seminar as a central element in historians' teaching, research and sense of community. Covering a range of the IHR’s long-running seminar series, which are differentiated by historical period, region and/or theme, the book presents the seminars as a local, national and international hub for scholarship that emerges from and is sustained by the ongoing learning practices of historians as scholars and people. Talking History bears witness to a seminar culture of evolving, multifarious synergies between teaching, researching and learning, historiography and participation — intertextual, interpersonal, intergenerational and intercultural. Viewed as such, the seminars constitute a living tradition, stimulating and incorporating dynamic change over time to contribute not just to the development of historiography but intellectual life more generally, often in conversation with major political events and cultural phenomena.

This original and significant book therefore reflects upon, and gives further expression to, the ongoing evolution of historical research and its role in wider society today.

The year 1543 marked the beginning of a new global consciousness in Japan with the arrival of storm-blown Portuguese merchants in Tanegashima Island in southern Japan. Other Portuguese rapidly followed and Japan became aware of a world beyond India. The Portuguese brought with them the musket, which was quickly copied and began to change Japanese warfare. Francis Xavier arrived in 1549 and other Christian missionaries soon after. This is not a new story but it is the first time that Japanese, Portuguese and other European accounts have been brought together and presented in English.

Part travelogue, part memoir, and part cookbook, this addition to the Haus Armchair Traveller series offers a dynamic journey through Spain, one where the focus is on culinary delights found everywhere from Madrid’s cafes to Barcelona’s fish markets.

H. M. van den Brink paints an evocative scene of everyday life in Spain. Readers see the urban shop windows displaying famous serrano ham and Spanish sweet cakes, taste crispy pigs’ ears along with rich chickpea soup, and smell the strong coffee and steaming tortillas often enjoyed while breakfasting outdoors. An appealing blend of historical background and personal recollections, Tasting Spain shapes a lively account of the country and its culture, both in the city and out in the countryside. From exquisite restaurants to private settings, this is a book about eating—meals that Van den Brink has enjoyed solo or with friends—and about the vivid and sustaining memories such meals can create.

“I am not a cook, nor a historian, nor a critic,” writes Van den Brink. “I am just an eater.” With Tasting Spain, he opens new vistas on Spanish cuisine that will tickle the taste buds of readers and leave them hungry for more of this beautiful land.

“This is the first book to systematically examine the variation in policies of Eastern European countries. There is a theoretical contribution to understandings of variation in tax policies, but just as impressive is the in-depth empirical analysis and in particular the data from interviews with key players in the process.”
—Yoshiko Herrera, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2016 witnessed an unprecedented shock to political elites in both Europe and America. Populism was on the march, fueled by a substantial ignorance of, or contempt for, the norms, practices, and institutions of liberal democracy. It is not surprising that observers on the left and right have called for renewed efforts at civic education. For liberal democracy to survive, they argue, a form of political education aimed at “the people” is clearly imperative.

In Teachers of the People, Dana Villa takes us back to the moment in history when “the people” first appeared on the stage of modern European politics. That moment—the era just before and after the French Revolution—led many major thinkers to celebrate the dawning of a new epoch. Yet these same thinkers also worried intensely about the people’s seemingly evident lack of political knowledge, experience, and judgment. Focusing on Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill, Villa shows how reformist and progressive sentiments were often undercut by skepticism concerning the political capacity of ordinary people. They therefore felt that “the people” needed to be restrained, educated, and guided—by laws and institutions and a skilled political elite. The result, Villa argues, was less the taming of democracy’s wilder impulses than a pervasive paternalism culminating in new forms of the tutorial state.
Ironically, it is the reliance upon the distinction between “teachers” and “taught” in the work of these theorists which generates civic passivity and ignorance. And this, in turn, creates conditions favorable to the emergence of an undemocratic and illiberal populism.
 

The books in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series chronicle the heretofore neglected stories of women between 1400 and 1700 with the aim of reviving scholarly interest in their thought as expressed in a full range of genres: treatises, orations, and history; lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry; novels and novellas; letters, biography, and autobiography; philosophy and science. Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Modern Europe complements these rich volumes by identifying themes useful in literature, history, religion, women's studies, and introductory humanities courses. The volume's introduction, essays, and suggested course materials are intended as guides for teachers--but will serve the needs of students and scholars as well.

Technologies of Empire looks at the ways in which writers of the long eighteenth century treat writing and imagination as technologies that can produce rather than merely portray empire. Authors ranging from Adam Smith to William Wordsworth consider writing not as part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed ways, but as a dynamic technology that organizes these subjects and transforms these spaces. Technologies of Empire reads the imagination as an instrument that works in tandem with writing, expanding and consolidating the networks of empire. Through readings across a variety of genres, ranging from Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction and Wordsworth’s epic poetry, this study offers a new account of writing’s role in empire-building and uncovers a genealogy of the romantic imagination that is shot through by the imperatives of imperialism.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

Temptation in the Archives is a collection of essays by Lisa Jardine, that takes readers on a journey through the Dutch Golden Age. Through the study of such key figures as Sir Constantjin Huygens, a Dutch polymath and diplomat, we begin to see the Anglo-Dutch cultural connections that formed during this period against the backdrop of unfolding political events in England.Temptation in the Archives paints a picture of a unique relationship between the Netherlands and England in the 17th century forged through a shared experience – and reveals the lessons we can learn from it today.

Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit well-known works associated with the British empire, including Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Thomas Macaulay's History of England, Charles Pearson's National Life and Character, and Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. They explore anticolonial texts in which authors such as C. L. R. James and Mohandas K. Gandhi chipped away at the foundations of imperial authority, and they introduce books that may be less familiar to students of empire. Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other.

Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Elleke Boehmer, Catherine Hall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Aaron Kamugisha, Marilyn Lake, Charlotte Macdonald, Derek Peterson, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud, André du Toit

A timely exploration of the political uses of language and rhetoric

Camille Desmoulins, a journalist writing under the Montagnard regime of 1793-94, remarked that France’s government had replaced “the language of democracy” with “the cold poison of fear, which paralyzed thought in the bottom of people’s souls, and prevented it from pouring forth at the tribunal, or in writing.” How this happened, how the Reign of Terror reached even into the realms of thought and language, is the subject of Caroline Weber’s book, a revealing look into the paradoxical embargo on free expression that underpinned the Robespierrists’s self-proclaimed “despotism of liberty” during the French Revolution.

Weber examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and the Robespierrists’s articulation of a series of initiatives designed to curtail and control the dissemination of alternative political and philosophical messages in the republic. Here Weber underscores the internal contradictions and limitations of an enterprise that promised universal freedom while oppressing particularism, and that railed against the very language that it was compelled to adopt as a principal political tool. The book then focuses on two eloquent contemporary critics of this phenomenon, Desmoulins and the Marquis de Sade, the infamous libertine author. Weber demonstrates how Desmoulins reconfigured the Montagnard regime’s rhetoric to conjure up a political system based on tolerance, not terror, and how Sade deftly parodied the Robespierrists’s brutality and hypocrisy, proposing a republic based on the ruthless elimination of dissident voices and on the unabashed celebration of despotism and bloodshed.A balanced account of how the “discourse of totality” actually restricted particular freedoms in the wake of the French Revolution, this book provides a highly original—and timely—exposition of the political uses of rhetoric and of the links between language and power.

The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire. During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, the book analyzes the British obsession with Indian shawls through a convergence of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theories. Surveying a wide range of materials—plays, poems, satires, novels, advertisements, and archival sources—Suchitra Choudhury argues that while Cashmere and Paisley shawls were popular accoutrements in Romantic and Victorian Britain, their significance was not limited to fashion. Instead, as visible symbols of British expansion, for many imaginative writers they emerged as metaphorical sites reflecting the pleasures and anxieties of the empire. Attentive to new theorizations of history, fashion, colonialism, and gender, the book offers innovative readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Frederick Niven, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In determining a key status for shawls in nineteenth-century literature, Textile Orientalisms reformulates the place of fashion and textiles in imperial studies. The book’s distinction rests primarily on three accounts. First, in presenting an original and extended discussion of Cashmere and Paisley shawls, Choudhury offers a new way of interpreting the British Empire. Second, by tracing how shawls represented the social and imperial experience, she argues for an associative link between popular consumption and the domestic experience of colonialism on the one hand and a broader evocation of texts and textiles on the other. Finally, discussions about global objects during the Victorian period tend to overlook that imperial Britain not only imported goods but also produced their copies and imitations on an industrial scale. By identifying the corporeal tropes of authenticity and imitation that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century imaginative production, Choudhury’s work points to a new direction in critical studies.

A testament to the "spirit of poesy" that informs the life and work of Geza von Molnar, this volume of essays comes together around his principal preoccupations: the philosophical foundations of Goethe's writings, the structure and reception of German romanticism, the ethics of reading, and the fate of European Jewry. At the center of this work is the idea of a genuinely free humanity—from its ambiguous presence in the aesthetic projects of Goethe and German romanticism to its utter absence in the Nazi extermination camps. Combining works in philosophy, literature, and Jewish studies by established and younger scholars, this collection contributes significantly to an understanding of German culture.

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.

 

Called "the best poem by the best poet," Virgil's Aeneid is perhaps the most famous work in Latin literature. It tells the story of Rome's founding by the Trojan prince Aeneas after many years of travel, and it contains many of the most famous stories about the Trojan War. It also reveals much of what the Romans felt and believed about themselves- the sensitive reader will see that these same values and issues often trouble us today.
In this new translation Edward McCrorie has performed the difficult task of rendering Virgil's compact, dense Latin into fine, readable, modern English verse. The sometimes complex text is made clear and comprehensible even for first-time readers, and a glossary of names helps identify characters and place-names in the poem. The translation is well suited for students at all levels, and readers already familiar with Virgil will find many fresh images and ideas.
"A brilliant effort."--Robert Bly
"I admire the ambition of the project, and the generosity of many of the lines."--Robert Fagles
Edward McCrorie is Professor of English, Providence College. His poetry and translations of Latin verse have been widely published.

The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the “Turkish Renaissance” manifested itself, to some degree, as an “age of beloveds,” in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.

The authors show that the “age of beloveds” was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different.

Recognizing that a work of art is the product of a particular time and place as much as it is the creation of an individual, Duby provides a sweeping survey of the changing mentalities of the Middle Ages as reflected in the art and architecture of the period.

"If Age of the Cathedrals has a fault, it is that Professor Duby knows too much, has too many new ideas and takes such a delight in setting them out. . . insights whiz to and fro like meteorites."—John Russell, New York Times Book Review

Interprets thirteenth-century crusades in terms of the development of Europe, especially France

Georges-Louis Buffon, an eighteenth-century French scientist, was the first to promote the widespread idea that nature in the New World was deficient; in America, which he had never visited, dogs don't bark, birds don't sing, and—by extension—humans are weaker, less intelligent, and less potent. Thomas Jefferson, infuriated by these claims, brought a seven-foot-tall carcass of a moose from America to the entry hall of his Parisian hotel, but the five-foot-tall Buffon remained unimpressed and refused to change his views on America's inferiority.

Buffon, as Philippe Roger demonstrates here, was just one of the first in a long line of Frenchmen who have built a history of anti-Americanism in that country, a progressive history that is alternately ludicrous and trenchant. The American Enemy is Roger's bestselling and widely acclaimed history of French anti-Americanism, presented here in English translation for the first time.

With elegance and good humor, Roger goes back 200 years to unearth the deep roots of this anti-Americanism and trace its changing nature, from the belittling, as Buffon did, of the "savage American" to France's resigned dependency on America for goods and commerce and finally to the fear of America's global domination in light of France's thwarted imperial ambitions. Roger sees French anti-Americanism as barely acquainted with actual fact; rather, anti-Americanism is a cultural pillar for the French, America an idea that the country and its culture have long defined themselves against.

Sharon Bowman's fine translation of this magisterial work brings French anti-Americanism into the broad light of day, offering fascinating reading for Americans who care about our image abroad and how it came about.

The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer

Originally published in German in 1988, The Apocalypse in Germany is now available for the first time in English. A fitting subject for the dawn of the new millennium, the apocalypse has intrigued humanity for the last two thousand years, serving as both a fascinating vision of redemption and a profound threat.

A cross-disciplinary study, The Apocalypse in Germany analyzes fundamental aspects of the apocalypse as a religious, political, and aesthetic phenomenon. Author Klaus Vondung draws from religious, philosophical, and political texts, as well as works of art and literature. Using classic Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts as symbolic and historical paradigms, Vondung determines the structural characteristics and the typical images of the apocalyptic worldview. He clarifies the relationship between apocalyptic visions and utopian speculations and explores the question of whether modern apocalypses can be viewed as secularizations of the Judeo-Christian models.

Examining sources from the eighteenth century to the present, Vondung considers the origins of German nationalism, World War I, National Socialism, and the apocalyptic tendencies in Marxism as well as German literature—from the fin de siècle to postmodernism. His analysis of the existential dimension of the apocalypse explores the circumstances under which particular individuals become apocalyptic visionaries and explains why the apocalyptic tradition is so prevalent in Germany.

The Apocalypse in Germany offers an interdisciplinary perspective that will appeal to a broad audience. This book will also be of value to readers with an interest in German studies, as it clarifies the riddles of Germany's turbulent history and examines the profile of German culture, particularly in the past century.