Ancient Egypt. Pharaoh Akhenaten carries out an unheard-of reform, replacing all gods with one and only one – the sun god, but who is behind his decision? Taor, returning from the war, notices a winged creature bending over the throne of the ruler and imposing his will on him. It is evil incarnate, but it is impossible to resist its charm.
In The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought, Dennitza Gabrakova discusses how the island imagery in the works by Imafuku Ryūta, Ukai Satoshi, Ōba Minako, Ariyoshi Sawako, Hino Keizō, Ikezawa Natsuki, Shimada Masahiko and Tawada Yōko shapes a critical understanding of Japan on multiple intersections of trauma and sovereignty. The book attempts an engagement with the vocabulary of postcolonial critique, while attending to the complexity of its translation into Japanese.
Wrapping Culture examines problems of intercultural communication and the possibilities for misinterpretation of the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Starting with an examination of Japanese gift-wrapping, Joy Hendry demonstrates how our expectations are often influenced by cultural factors which may blind us to an appreciation of underlying intent. She extends this approach to the study of polite language as the wrapping of thoughts and intentions, garments as body wrappings, constructions and gardens as wrapping of space. Hendry shows how this extends even to the ways in which people may be wrapped in seating arrangements, or meetings and drinking customs may be constrained by temporal versions of wrapping. Throughout the book, Hendry considers ways in which groups of people use such symbolic forms to impress and manipulate one another, and points out a Western tendency to underestimate such nonverbal communication, or reject it as mere decoration. She presents ideas that should be valid in any intercultural encounter and demonstrates that Japanese culture, so often thought of as a special case, can supply a model through which we can formulate general theories about human behavior.
This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the live most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War period: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Puller, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. These poets participated in elite poetic culture at the highest level, writing elegies, panegyrics and epics; they were politically engaged; and their female authorship strategies were nuanced but clear, as they took diverse approaches to publication in manuscript and print. Their poetry is at the centre of discussion and debate about early modern women's poetry, but until now, substantial edited selections of their work have not been available in one place. The anthology brings together the most innovative, complex poems of each writer, revealing the diversity of women's poetry in the mid-seventeenth century, as it traversed political affiliations and material forms. This anthology presents poems in modern-spelling, clear-text versions for classroom use, and for ready comparison to mainstream editions of male poets' work. Notes on the poems and an introduction explain the contexts of the Civil War, religious conflict, and scientific and literary development, and will serve students' and academics' needs alike. Women poets of the English Civil War is ideal for use alongside mainstream anthologies of early modern poetry, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of seventeenth-century women's poetic culture, in its own right, and in relation to prominent male poets such as Marvell, Milton and Dryden.
In this major intervention into the “Asian Century,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak challenges the reader to re-think Asia, in its political and cultural complexity, in the global South and in the metropole. Among the chapters in this volume are: “Foucault and Najibullah,” in which she looks at Afghanistan in its own historical and gendered narrative “Moving Devi,” in which she addresses the authority of autobiography and writes as a diasporic “Responsibility,” in which she examines the limits of “theory” upon the floodplains of Bangladesh “Megacity,” where she reads cyberliteracy in Bangalore. Other chapters focus on, among other things, Human Rights, and the turbulent “present” of the Caucasus.
Created to accompany an international traveling exhibition, Another Book about Promotion and Sales Material explores the work of one of the world's most famous graphic designers--Stefan Sagmeister. Divided into four sections, and including commissioned work from ten years of graphic design, this book explores how Sagmeister creates greater awareness for corpora-tions, his friends, his own work, and cultural events and products. Showcasing a wide range of work, from a Talking Heads boxed set, to print ads for Levi's, to a wedding invitation for close friends, this book includes exclusive images from the studio archive as well as Sagmeister's commentary on his work, which contains his characteristic wit and insight. The result is a funny, revealing, and intimate look at the cutting-edge work of a graphic design master.
The Ruby Tear Catcher is the heartwarming story of an Iranian woman whose life is uprooted during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s and '80s. While jailed in Tehran's most-feared prison, where she's held for her father's anti-regime sentiments, Leila tells her story in flashback. She describes her childhood days in Tehran and shares her experiences as a college student in the U.S., where she falls in love with Jack, only to see their relationship torn asunder by the strong influence of their disparate religions. Ultimately, hope triumphs in the face of fanaticism and intolerance.
