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Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed f...

This book seeks to fill a double lacuna in Borges scholarship. For one, this scholarship has been largely developed through the lens of literary and cultural studies, and not by political theorists who bring a distinct disciplinary perspective into the reading of literary works. Secondly, mainstream interpreters have overlooked or have not analyzed enough Borges's political sympathies. This book does not evaluate if these sympathies are truthful to political and historical facts or philosophical...

From notions of art for art's sake to committed poetry, it may seem that poets cannot achieve reconciliation between the politics and poetry. However, among committed Communist poets of the 20th century of the Spanish-speaking world, three poets stand out as examples of a search to bring together their political and their poetic commitments: Rafael Alberti, Nicolas Guillen, and Pablo Neruda. Political Poetry in the Wake of the Second Spanish Republic analyzes the simultaneous development of poli...

This book investigates the construction of identity and the precarity of the self in the work of the Calvinist Fulke Greville (1554–1628) and the Jesuit Robert Southwell (1561–1595). For the first time, a collection of original essays unites them with the aim to explore their literary production. The essays collected here define these authors’ efforts to forge themselves as literary, religious, and political subjects amid a shifting politico-religious landscape. They highlight the authors’ criti...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared that "the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate." The central claim of "Why Moralize upon It?" is that it is not only statesmen who can help educate a democratic citizenry, but also novelists and filmmakers. This book's title is drawn from Melville's "Benito Cereno." Near the end of this novella, after he has put down a rebellion of enslaved Africans, the American captain Amasa Delano claims that "the past is passed," and thus there is no need to...

The instalments of Ezra Pound's life-project, The Cantos, composed during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War were to have served as a "Paradiso" for his epic. Beautiful and tormented, enigmatic and irascible by turns, they express the poet's struggle to reconcile his striving for justice with his extreme Right politics. In heavily coded language, Pound was writing activist political poetry. Through an in-depth reading of the "Washington Cantos" this book reveals the ways...

Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's most prolific and acclaimed writers. Roth's first novel, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), received the National Book Award, and he followed this stunning debut with more than thirty books -- earning another National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. Throughout his career, Roth delighted in controversy but often denied that he sought a role as a public intellectual....

The discussions on Kurds of Turkey mostly refer to them as if they are one homogeneous group, with different forms of being Kurdish mostly overlooked. Yet, Kurds have been scattered all across Turkey; they differ in terms of the language they speak; they have also been subject to different policies of the Turkish state in different periods. How can we take these factors into account when discussing Kurdishness in Turkey? That is, in which ways does a Kurd living in a small city in Southeast Turk...

Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial en...

Forged at the intersection of intense interest in the pertinence and uses of biopolitics and biopower, this volume analyzes theoretical and practical paradigms for understanding and challenging the socioeconomic determinations of life and death in contemporary capitalism. Its contributors offer a series of trenchant interdisciplinary critiques, each one taking on both the specific dimensions of biopolitics and the deeper genealogies of cultural logic and structure that crucially inform its impre...

A multidisciplinary collection of essays reflecting on Cold War cultural tropes in film, fiction, and contemporary art, and the models of knowledge that they imply.If the term “Cold World” describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World globalization, where our collective consciousness is o...

A generous and varied selection–the only hardcover edition available–of the literary and political writings of one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century.   Although best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell left an even more lastingly significant achievement in his voluminous essays, which dealt with all the great social, political, and literary questions of the day and exemplified an incisive prose style that is still universally admired. Inc...

First published in 1925. This book is a brief analysis of the historical relation of contemporary writers to their immediate predecessors. The author attempts to further a comprehensive summary of certain selected writers, with a criticism of their ideas, while in the last chapter an attempt is made at synthesis. Among those whose work is examined are Ramsay MacDonald, Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski, the Pauls, Hobhouse, Bryce, G. D. H. Cole, Norman Angell, etc. This title will be of great inter...

The Duty to Stand Aside tells the story of one of the most intriguing yet little-known literary-political feuds -- and friendships -- in 20th-century English literature. It examines the arguments that divided George Orwell, future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Alex Comfort, poet, biologist, anarchist-pacifist, and future author of the international bestseller The Joy of Sex -- during WWII. Orwell maintained that standing aside, or opposing Britain's war against fascism, was...