Search Results

Jewish and Christian doctrines of creation, when interpreted as accounts of the moral and spiritual character of the world rather than simply its origin, hold the key to addressing a variety of contemporary environmental concerns. They do so by showing how our identities as creatures lead to vocations that promote the care, peace, and celebration of creation. This account is developed through a sustained conversation with contemporary ecological science and agrarian thought. This book develops why the idea of creation has fallen upon hard times in modernity, and how something like a culture of creation might be envisioned that would pair ecologically informed theology with a variety of cultural concerns like education, economics, work, food, design, and built environments. This new interpretation of creation offers the possibility for a culture of justice and peace for humans and non-humans alike.

This book focuses on travelogues by Iranians traveling to Europe in the nineteenth century. It argues for an interpretive framework that moves away from an overemphasis on the destinations of travel (particularly in cases where the destination, such as Europe, signifies larger meanings such as modernity) and that historicizes the travelogue itself as a rhetorical text in the service of its origin’s concerns and developments. Within this framework, this book demonstrates the ways in which travel writings from Iran to Europe were used to position Qajar Iran (1794–1925) within a global context—that is, narration of travel to Europe was also narrating the power of the Qajar court even when political events were tipped against it—and relatedly, how both travel to Europe and also translations of travel narratives into Persian should be included in our understanding of the importance of geography and mapping to the Qajars, especially during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this process, it also reexamines the notion that Iranian modernity was the chief outcome of Iranians traveling in and writing about Europe.

This book explores the ways in which Islam and European colonialism shaped modernity in the Indo-Malay world. Focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia, it looks at how European colonial and Islamic modernising powers operated in the common and parallel domains of organization, government and politics, law and education in the first half of the twentieth century. Through its critical approach to the interplay of Islamic religious rfrom and dynamics of both British and Dutch colonialisms, this work of comparative history illuminates perspective on the rather different shapes that Islam and Muslim societies have taken in the neighboring nation-states of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. It shows that colonialisation was able to co-exist with Islamisation, arguing that Islamic movements were not necessarily antithetical to modernisation, nor that Western modernity was always anathema to Islamic and local custom. Rather, in distinguishing religious from worldly affairs, they were able to adopt and adapt modern ideas and practices that were useful or relevant while maintaining the Islamic faith and ritual that they believed to be essential. Moving beyond binaries such as Orientalist versus Islamic and modernity versus Islam, it offers historical evidence and theoretical engagement with Islamic religious reform and European colonial modernisation in particular, and with religion, modernity, and tradition in general. In developing an understanding of the common ways in which Islam was defined and treated in Indonesia and Malaysia, we can gain a new insight to Muslim politics and culture in Southeast Asia.

Moral relativism is deeply troubling for those who believe that, without a set of moral absolutes, democratic societies will devolve into tyranny or totalitarianism. Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the roots of contemporary anti-relativist fears to the antimodern rhetoric of the Catholic Church and then rescues a form of philosophical relativism for modern, pluralist societies, arguing that this viewpoint provides the firmest foundation for an allegiance to democracy. In his analyses of the relationship between religious arguments and political authority and the implications of philosophical relativism for democratic theory, Accetti makes a far-ranging contribution to contemporary debates over the revival of religion in politics and the conceptual grounds for a commitment to democracy. He presents the first comprehensive genealogy of anti-relativist discourse and reclaims for English-speaking readers the overlooked work of Hans Kelsen on the connection between relativism and democracy. By engaging with contemporary attempts to replace the religious foundation of democratic values with a neo-Kantian conception of reason, Accetti also makes a powerful case for relativism as the best basis for a civic ethos that integrates different perspectives into democratic politics.

This reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative – the physical and civic – dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idealist, humanist, and universalist approaches that have informed our most cherished philosophical, psychoanalytical, and modern interpretations of Greek tragedy and, in so doing, asks us to renew our relation to these works and to our literary and philosophical inheritance. The book reassesses tragic form in relation to Athenian democracy and links it with a performative discourse that both excludes the feminine and relies on civic and private forms of mourning. At the same time, it explores the centrality of tragedy for thinkers of Modernity such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Brecht, and Benjamin. Through a persuasive analysis of both classical theorists – Plato and Aristotle – and modern theorists – Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, and Butler – the book significantly shifts the emphasis from a Sophoclean model of tragedy to a Euripidean one. Close readings of the performative aspects of Greek play texts help illuminate these ideas.

Most histories of the American South describe the conflict between evangelical religion and honor culture as one of the defining features of southern life before the Civil War. The Sacred Mirror is a comprehensive reinterpretation of that relationship that examines how the success of evangelicalism during this period actually depended on its ability to address and draw on this vital part of the traditional culture of the South. Evangelical churches embraced the same understanding of communal authority that nourished a culture of honor in the South, serving as a kind of cultural bridge between old and new ways of understanding the self, and ushering in a southern modernity. Previous accounts of the rise of evangelicalism in the South have told the tale as a tragedy in which evangelicals initially opposed but eventually capitulated to many of the central tenets of southern society in order to win souls and garner influence. But through an examination of evangelical language and practices, The Sacred Mirror shows that evangelicals always shared honor’s most basic assumptions about how to shape individual identity, making it clear that evangelical beginnings and eventualities in the South were more closely linked than we have understood.

This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.

How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? By treating modernity as a ubiquitous category in which ideas of progress and decadence are far from being mutually exclusive, this book explores how different groups of intellectuals, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, drew from European sociological and medical theories to produce a series of cultural representations based on notions of degeneration. Through a comparative analysis of three country case studies − Argentina, Uruguay and Chile − the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the century: race and the nation, the search for the autochthonous, education, and aesthetic values. It takes a transnational approach to show how civilisational constructs were adopted and adapted in a postcolonial context where cultural modernism foreshadowed economic modernisation. In doing this, this work sheds new light on the complex discursive negotiations through which the idea of ‘Latin America’ became gradually established in the region.

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.

In this book, Steven Smith examines modernity as the site of a unique type of human being entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that is called the bourgeois. The characteristics and qualities attributed to this new kind of individual by writers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Franklin, and Kant included the desire for autonomy, to live independently of custom, habit, and tradition, and to be the ultimate locus of moral responsibility. This kind of bourgeois culture that has become most fully associated with America and the American way of life was accompanied by doubts and fears. Bourgeois society was rejected by some of its leading critics as domineering and tyrannical (Marx), as tepid and cowardly (Nietzsche), and as lacking in taste and culture (Flaubert). The concept of the bourgeois slowly became the locus of scorn and as the cause of our manifold discontents. How did modernity that was once considered the locus of the free and responsible individual become associated with low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism? This provocative book explores some of reasons for these anxieties in the works of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Flaubert, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, and Saul Bellow. The work offers a novel perspective of what it means to be modern by showing what is most characteristic of modernity are the self-criticisms and doubts that have accompanied political progress and why some of these discontents have produced movements of radical rejection.

Exploring London's literary identity during the 1930s Anna Cottrell shows how vital writing was to the capital’s booming leisure scene on the eve of the Second World War. The book explores London and Londoners, with a focus on the way in which London's lower-middle-class citizens became inseparable from central London’s leisure scene in the period’s imagination. In contrast with Modernism’s flâneurs and flâneuses, the key figures of 1930s London literature were shop girls, clerks, dance hostesses, and financially insecure journalists whose leisure hours were spent in London’s cinemas, bars, and glittering teashops. Writing about this type of Londoner and her milieus was at the heart of the decade’s experiments in revitalising the British novel, which to many of the period’s writers and intellectuals appeared to lack energy and authenticity. Meticulous description was central to this project of re-energising British writing, and it is in passages describing London milieus such as the teashop and the Soho nightclub that this book locates the decade’s most original and astute meditations on modernity, mass culture, and the value of ordinary lives.

Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely “impressionistic” about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.

This volume covers modern and contemporary forms of humour in China's public and private spheres, including comic films and novels, cartooning, pop songs, internet jokes, and advertising and educational humour. The second of two multidisciplinary volumes on humour in Chinese life and letters, this text also explores the relationship between the political control and popular expression of humour, such as China and Japan's exchange of comic stereotypes. It advances the methodology of cross-cultural and psychological studies of humour and underlines the economic and personal significance of humour in modern times.

Gender and the Rhetoric of Modernity in Spanish America, 1850–1910, proposes that in the nineteenth century, discourses of modernity shaped ideas about gender and especially about the status of women in private and public life at the same time as those concepts of the modern were themselves formed in the Spanish American context by both received and newly-emerging notions of gender roles held by Spanish American intellectuals. Men and women took advantage of the rhetoric of modernity in order to attach their own agendas to those discourses about modernity. The book asserts that the rhetorical nature itself of modernity in Spanish America allowed intellectuals to connect these differing, even contradictory, interpretations to it. Writers used the rhetoric of modernity as they advanced their own agendas and shaped the rhetoric of modernity as a utopian projection of the national future, further allowing them to imagine a nation that included women at all levels of social and even political life. In so doing, they established discursive modalities that competed with other nation-building discourses and that placed gender as a central, ongoing concern at all levels of society. The book looks at public and private space; domesticity; education; and technology and work in nineteenth-century Spanish America and conveys a full understanding of the ways that gender roles were conjoined with the processes of modernization and national consolidation and includes texts by men and women that range from novels and essays to newspaper articles and advertisements, selected from multiple countries, and placed into their socio-cultural contexts.