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This book situates Ralph Waldo Emerson in the tradition of philosophy as "spiritual exercise", arguing that the defining feature of his literary philosophy is the conviction that there is an inherent link between moral persuasion and literary excellence. Hosseini persuasively argues that the Emersonian project can be viewed as an extension of Socrates' call for a return to the beginning of philosophy, to search for a way of revolutionizing our ways of seeing from within. Examining Emerson's prov...

Dalya Cohen-Mor examines the evolution of the concept of fate in the Arab world through readings of religious texts, poetry, fiction, and folklore. She contends that belief in fate has retained its vitality and continues to play a pivotal role in the Arabs' outlook on life and their social psychology. Interwoven with the chapters are 16 modern short stories that further illuminate this fascinating topic.

In Between God and Beast, Avraham Balaban argues that Oz's fiction has, from the outset, followed Jung's psychological theory. The major psychic processes that are depicted throughout Oz's prose are typically Jungian. For example, the treasure hunt, which is the deep structure of many of Oz's stories and novels, reflects the search for the "self" in which all the vying forces of one's psyche coexist peacefully. Oz uses many of the symbols of the treasure as well as of the self as they are presen...

The Context of Scripture illuminatingly presents the multi-faceted world of ancient writing that forms the colorful background to the literature of the Hebrew Bible. Designed as a thorough and durable reference work for all engaged in the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East, and involving 63 of the world's outstanding scholars in the field, it provides reliable access to a broad, balanced and representative collection of Ancient Near Eastern texts that have some bearing on the interpret...

Josh Malihabadi (1895-1982) was hailed as a master of both poetry and prose, both of which he imbued with a rich and unique diction. After Iqbal's death, and because of espousing the cause of freedom, Josh came to dominate the Urdu literary scene. In all the types of poetry Josh composed, whether reflective, revolutionary or romantic, he was hailed as a consummate stylist. After his migration to Pakistan in 1956 Josh continued his struggle for political emancipation. Accused of being a skeptic-J...

A Treasury from Tabriz is a massive manuscript from 14th century Persia. It is almost perfectly preserved, and contains 209 works on a wide range of subjects, in Persian and Arabic. This collection of essays contains fourteen articles, each dealing with one aspect of this manuscript, explaining its importance in the cultural and literary milieu of the fourteenth century Islamic world.

The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life,...

Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalization in Israeli and Palestinian literature from 1945 to the present. By tracking literature's move from making worlds to reading signs, Dr. Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read theorize our global contemporary. Dr. Kfir Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statehood and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds...

A renowned poet, philosopher and traveller of the 11th century, Nasir-i Khusraw was also a major Ismaili thinker and author of the Iranian lands. His Ismaili writings, exclusively in Persian, have been preserved through the centuries by the Ismaili communities of the upper Oxus and Badakhshan, now situated in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. This is a study of Nasir-i Khusraw's life and aspects of his theological and philosophical thought in the context of his times. The author has devoted more than...

Women Write Iran is the first full-length study on life narratives by Iranian women in the diaspora. Nima Naghibi investigates auto/biographical narratives across genres—including memoirs, documentary films, prison testimonials, and graphic novels—and finds that they are tied together by the experience of the 1979 Iranian revolution as a traumatic event and by a powerful nostalgia for an idealized past. Naghibi is particularly interested in writing as both an expression of memory and an asserti...

Combines the styles of memoir, history, anthropology, and theory to develop an innovative reflection on the materiality of culture. Through its style and content, the text challenges the Orientalist bifurcation between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, revealing instead tradition's own dynamism and its coexistence alongside modernity.

The Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala'ika was one of the most important Arab poets of the twentieth century. A pioneer of free verse poetry, over four decades, she transformed the landscape of modern Arabic literature and culture. Revolt Against the Sun presents a selection of Nazik alMala'ika's poetry in English for the first time. Bringing together poems from each of her published collections, it traces al-Mala'ika's transformation from a lyrical Romantic poet in the 1940s to a fervently committed Arab...

Over the past two decades, profound changes in Israel opened its society to powerful outside forces and the dominance of global capitalism. As a result, the centrality of Zionism as an organizing ideology waned, prompting expressions of anxiety in Israel about the coming of a post-Zionist age. The fears about the end of Zionism were quelled, however, by the Palestinian uprising in 2000, which spurred at least a partial return to more traditional perceptions of homeland. Looking at Israeli litera...

Mahmoud Darwish's work has long been considered seminal in shaping modern Arabic poetry. He has received wide international recognition and is a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. Often deemed the 'Poet of the Resistance', no substantial critical study exists that addresses the complexity of Darwish's poetry in rewriting the homeland and articulating exile.This volume examines the complex connections between poetry, myth, lyric, prose, and history in Darwish's poetry, plus a number of scholar...

Offering a study of travellers in Egypt, the contributions to this book encompass early travellers, those with a serious scientific or archaeological interest, those whose primary interest was artistic and literary, and those - including Flaubert - who wrote classic works of European literature based on their experiences. A whole section is devoted to E.W. Lane, not only for the importance of his writings, but also because of the criticism which he has received in the "orientalism" debate and wh...