LITMIR.BIZ

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In Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France , Tracy Adams offers a reevaluation of Christine de Pizan’s literary engagement with contemporary politics. Adams locates Christine’s works within a detailed narrative of the complex history of the dispute between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, the two largest political factions in fifteenth-century France. Contrary to what many scholars have long believed, Christine consistently supported the Armagnac faction throughout her literary career and maintained strong ties to Louis of Orleans and Isabeau of Bavaria. By focusing on the historical context of the Armagnac-Burgundian feud at different moments and offering close readings of Christine’s poetry and prose, Adams shows the ways in which the writer was closely engaged with and influenced the volatile politics of her time.

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In Chaos and Cosmos , Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

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Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) is remembered today as a surrealist artist, writer, and occultist. Although her paintings hang in a number of public collections and her gothic novel Goose of Hermogenes (1961) remains in print, critical responses to her work have been severely constrained by the limited availability of her art and writings. The publication of her second novel, I Saw Water —presented here for the first time, together with a selection of her other writings and images, many also previously unpublished—marks a significant step in expanding our knowledge of Colquhoun’s work. Composed almost entirely of material assembled from the author’s dreams, I Saw Water challenges such fundamental distinctions as those between sleeping and waking, the two separated genders, and life and death. It is set in a convent on the Island of the Dead, but its spiritual context derives from sources as varied as Roman Catholicism, the teachings of the Theosophical Society, Goddess spirituality, Druidism, the mystical Qabalah, and Neoplatonism. The editors have provided both an introduction and explanatory notes. The introductory essay places the novel in the context of Colquhoun’s other works and the cultural and spiritual environment in which she lived. The extensive notes will help the reader with any concepts that may be unfamiliar.

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Though the work of Irish writers has been paramount in conventional accounts of literary modernism, Ireland itself only rarely occupies a meaningful position in accounts of modernism’s historical trajectory. With an itinerary moving not simply among Dublin, Belfast, and London but also Paris, New York, Addis Ababa, Rome, Berlin, Geneva, and the world’s radio receivers, Ireland and the Problem of Information examines the pivotal mediations through which social knowledge was produced in the mid-twentieth century. Organized as a series of cross-fading case studies, the book argues that an expanded sphere of Irish cultural production should be read as much for what it indicates about practices of intermedial circulation and their consequences as for what it reveals about Irish writing around the time of the Second World War. In this way, it positions the “problem of information” as, first and foremost, an international predicament, but one with particular national implications for the Irish field.

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Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered today outside of France, and his contributions to political thought are little studied anywhere. In Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy , Geoffrey Kurtz introduces Jaurès to an American audience. The parliamentary and philosophical leader of French socialism from the 1890s until his assassination in 1914, Jaurès was the only major socialist leader of his generation who was educated as a political philosopher. As he championed the reformist method that would come to be called social democracy, he sought to understand the inner life of a political tradition that accepts its own imperfection. Jaurès's call to sustain the tension between the ideal and the real resonates today. In addition to recovering the questions asked by the first generation of social democrats, Kurtz’s aim in this book is to reconstruct Jaurès’s political thought in light of current theoretical and political debates. To achieve this, he gives readings of several of Jaurès’s major writings and speeches, spanning work from his early adulthood to the final years of his life, paying attention to not just what Jaurès is saying, but how he says it.

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“[Martí] added a social agenda to the historic program of national liberation and instantly converted a movement devoted to the establishment of a new nation into a force dedicated to shaping a new society. Martí transformed rebellion into revolution. . . . Like a master weaver, Martí pulled together all the separate threads of Cuban discontent—social, economic, political, racial, historical—and wove them into a radical movement of enormous force.”—Louis A. Pérez Jr, author of José Martí in the United States “Oh Cuba! . . . the blood of Martí was not yours alone; it belonged to an entire race, to an entire continent; it belonged to the powerful youth who have lost probably the best of teachers; he belonged to the future!”—Rubén Darío This new edition of an elegant anthology features bilingual poetry, a revised translation, and several new pieces. It presents the full breadth of José Martí’s work: his political essays and writings on culture, his letters, and his poetry. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on troubled US-Latin America relations. 

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Competitively priced, this book is the perfect companion to the more than thirty travel guides on Cuba available today. Beginning with the pre-Hispanic period, moving on to Cuba's struggle to maintain the revolution in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and finally ending with Fidel Castro's decision to step down in 2008, this slim volume provides the reader with an overview of the history of the tiny Caribbean island that so often has been at the center of world politics. Including a bibliography for further reading, this is a most useful introduction to Cuba's history for students, teachers, and others, as well as those visiting the island. This book is published to coincide with the expected lifting of the US government's ban on its citizens' travel to Cuba and will be actively marketed through travel agencies, in-flight magazines, and more. Available in both English (978-0-9804292-4-4) and Spanish (978-1-921438-60-8). Sergio Guerra-Vilaboy, a professor at the University of Havana, obtained a doctorate in history at the University of Leipzig. He is the author of numerous books on Latin American history and is currently the executive secretary of the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians. Oscar Loyola-Vega is a professor of history at the University of Havana.

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Посвящается детям войны. Нет ничего страшнее, чем словосочетание «дети и война». Но наши предки пережили это. Как они смогли выжить? Что спасало их в те страшные времена? О чём думали? Что делали? О чём мечтали? Книга об этом. О мальчишках и девчонках, на долю которых выпало самое страшное – война.

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