{"title":"Comparative Cultural Studies","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the diverse tapestry of human experience with the Comparative Cultural Studies series. Delve into insightful analyses of societies, traditions, and global interconnectedness. Start your journey of discovery today!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"imagining-afghanistan-book-alla-ivanchikova-9781557538468","title":"Imagining Afghanistan","description":"Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistanhas been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the9\/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelledAfghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis offiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates thatwriting and screening \"Afghanistan\" has become a conduit for understanding ourshared post-9\/11 condition. \"Afghanistan\" serves as a lens through whichcontemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of twenty-first-centuryhumanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of theU.S. in the rise of transnational terror, and grapple with the long-term impactof war on both human and nonhuman ecologies.  Post-9\/11 global Afghanistan literary productionremains largely NATO-centric insofar as it is marked by an uncriticalinvestment in humanitarianism as an approach to Third World suffering and inanti-communism as an unquestioned premise. The book's first half exposes how persistinganti-socialist biases—including anti-statist bias—not only shaped recent literaryand visual texts on Afghanistan, resulting in a distorted portrayal of itstragic history, but also informed these texts' reception by critics. In thebook's second half, the author examines cultural texts that challenge thislimited horizon and forge alternative ways of representing traumatic histories.Captured by the author through the concepts of deep time, nonhuman witness, andwar as a multispecies ecology, these new aesthetics bring readers asophisticated portrait of Afghanistan as a rich multispecies habitat affectedin dramatic ways by decades of war but not annihilated.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735037583633,"sku":"NGR9781557538468","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1557538468.jpg?v=1761389008"},{"product_id":"kundera-and-modernity-book-liisa-steinby-9781557536372","title":"Kundera and Modernity","description":"While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion, his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a sociohistorical and a cultural concept. Steinby's book fills this vacuum by analysing Kundera's novels from the viewpoint of his understanding of the existential problems in the culture of modernity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49745066950929,"sku":"NGR9781557536372","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1557536376.jpg?v=1761388290"},{"product_id":"faust-adaptations-from-marlowe-to-aboudoma-and-markland-book-lorna-fitzsimmons-9781557537584","title":"Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland","description":"Faust Adaptations, edited and introduced by Lorna Fitzsimmons, takes a comparative cultural studies approach to the ubiquitous legend of Faust and his infernal dealings. Including readings of English, German, Dutch, and Egyptian adaptations ranging from the early modern period to the contemporary moment, this collection emphasizes the interdisciplinary and transcultural tenets of comparative cultural studies. Authors variously analyze the Faustian theme in contexts such as subjectivity, genre, politics, and identity. Chapters focus on the work of Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adelbert von Chamisso, Lord Byron, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, D. J. Enright, Konrad Boehmer, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Bridge Markland, Andreas G ssling, and Uschi Flacke. Contributors include Frederick Burwick, Christa Knellwolf King, Ehrhard Bahr, Konrad Boehmer, and David G. John. Faust Adaptations demonstrates the enduring meaningfulness of the Faust concept across borders, genres, languages, nations, cultures, and eras. This collection presents innovative approaches to understanding the mediated, translated, and adapted figure of Faust through both culturally specific inquiry and timeless questions.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49881379045649,"sku":"CIN1557537585G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1557537585.jpg?v=1761388538"},{"product_id":"writing-gender-in-early-modern-chinese-women-s-tanci-fiction-book-li-guo-9781612496412","title":"Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction","description":"Women's tanci, or \"\"plucking rhymes,\"\" are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women's representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.  Women tanci authors' redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of \"\"womanly becoming,\"\" female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures. The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women's appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization.    Validations of women's political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women's tanci marks early modern writers' endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women's tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine's voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50630816727313,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50630820561169,"sku":"NGR9781612496412","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1612496415.jpg?v=1761389461"},{"product_id":"jesuit-garden-in-beijing-and-early-modern-chinese-culture-book-hui-zou-9781557535832","title":"A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture","description":"In this volume, Hui Zou analyzes historical, architectural, visual, literary, and philosophical perspectives on the Western-styled garden that formed part of the great Yuanming Yuan complex in Beijing, constructed during the Qing dynasty. Designed and built in the late eighteenth century by Italian and French Jesuits, the garden described in this book was a wonderland of multistoried buildings, fountains, labyrinths, and geometrical hills. It even included an open-air theater. Through detailed examination of historical literature and representations, Zou analyzes the ways in which the Jesuits accommodated their design within the Chinese cultural context. He shows how an especially important element of their approach was the application of a linear perspective to create the jing, the Chinese concept of the bounded bright view of a garden scene. Hui Zou's book demonstrates how Jesuit metaphysics fused with Chinese cosmology and broadens our understanding of cultural and religious encounters in early Chinese modernity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50697539092753,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697541189905,"sku":"NGR9781557535832","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1557535833.jpg?v=1761386283"},{"product_id":"history-and-poetics-of-intertexuality-book-marko-juvan-9781557535030","title":"History and Poetics of Intertexuality","description":"Marko Juvan's History and Poetics of Intertextuality is a revised and updated translation of his 2000 book \"Intertekstualnost\" (Intertextuality). In his book, Juvan argues that while intertextuality is constitutive of all textuality it may be foregrounded in certain literary works, genres, or styles (e.g., parody or allusion as forms of citationality). He surveys the field in order to ground the poetics of intertextuality in the history of its idea from Kristeva to New Historicism and citationality from Genette's late structuralism to text theory. In humanities scholarship literary studies have transformed the notion of intertextuality from its transgressive content into a detailed descriptive methodology. However, by bringing citationality into focus, they also stressed that literature is an autopoetic system, living on cultural memory, and interacting with other social discourses. The poetics of intertextuality proposed here, based mainly on semiotics, elucidates factors determining the socio-historically elusive border between general intertextuality and citationality (encyclopaedic literary competence, paratext, etc.) and explores modes of intertextual representation, stressing that pre-texts evoked or re-written in post-texts figure as interpretants of the latter and vice versa. Intertextual derivations and references, which have become common in literary culture, are finally explained as intertextual figures and genres.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51257109676305,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51257111937297,"sku":"NGR9781557535030","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1557535035.jpg?v=1761386455"},{"product_id":"quest-for-redemption-book-rares-piloiu-9781557538307","title":"The Quest for Redemption","description":"The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth's major works of fiction for the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth's challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological encounters with the real is an expression of Roth's belief that, since the self and the world are in a continuing state of crisis, issuing from their separation in modernity, a restoration of their unity is necessary to redeem the historical existence of individuals and communities alike. Piloiu notes, however, that Roth's enterprise in this is not unique to his work, but rather is shared by an entire generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals. This generation, disillusioned by modernity's excessive secularism, rationalism, and nationalism, sought a radical solution in the revival of mystical religious traditions—above all, in the Judaic idea of messianic redemption. Their use of the Chasidic notion of redemption was highly original in that it stripped the notion of its original theological meaning and applied it to the secular experience of reality. 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