Publications

Spenser and the Human, a special issue of Spenser Studies (Volume XXX)
Ayesha Ramachandran
Publication Year: 2016
Description:

co-edited with Melissa Sanchez

forthcoming.

Exemplary Novels Miguel de Cervantes; Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman; Edited by Roberto González Echevarría
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2016
Description:
The twelve novellas gathered together in Exemplary Novels reveal the extraordinary breadth of Cervantes’s imagination: his nearly limitless ability to create characters, invent plots, and entertain readers across continents and centuries. Cervantes published his book in Spain in 1613. The assemblage of unique characters (eloquent witches, talking dogs, Gypsy orphans, and an array of others), the twisting plots, and the moral heart at the core of each tale proved irresistible to his enthusiastic audience. Then as now, Cervantes’s readers find pure entertainment in his pages, but also a subtle artistry that invites deeper investigation.
A Maiden of Mauritius

Publication Year: 2016
Description:

Edited by: Shawkat Toorawa, Judy Allen, Jean Ayler, Marina Carter

Sir John Gorrie (1829-1892) began colonial life on Mauritius in 1869, where he was posted as Substitute Procureur-General, and subsequently appointed third then second Puisne (Junior) Judge. He was called to Fiji as Chief Justice in 1876; became Chief Judicial Commissioner of the Western Pacific High Commission in 1878; was knighted in 1881; was Chief Justice successively of the Leeward Islands (1882) Trinidad (1888), and of the united Trinidad and Tobago until 1892. His unpublished novel was discovered almost a century after his death.

To Inherit the Land, to Conquer the Space: The Beginning of Hebrew Literature in Eretz-Israel
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

This book follows key moments in the rise of Hebrew poetry in Eretz-Israel. The book clarifies the literary and political meaning of the “beginning” of literature as it is constituted by the great narratives of Hebrew literature: Zionism, and the settlement of the Land of Israel. The Zionist encounter of with the space of Eretz-Israel is revealed to be a violent one; Hebrew poetry written about it not only represents it but actually takes an active role in its creation. This poetry is understood here as a mechanism for “aesthetic conquest” of space manifested through the poetics and the language of the poetry developing in Eretz-Israel.

The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe
Ayesha Ramachandran
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

The Worldmakers reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for granted: the world, imagined as a whole. Once a new, exciting, and frightening concept, “the world” was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how could one envision something that no one had ever seen in its totality? Moving beyond histories of globalization, this book explores how “the world” itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents.

The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam
Shawkat Toorawa
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

Every year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world converge on Mecca and its precincts to perform the rituals associated with the Hajj and have been doing so since the seventh century. In this volume, scholars from a range of fields – including history, religion, anthropology, and literature – together tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. By outlining the parameters of the Hajj from its beginnings to the present day, the contributors have produced a global study that takes in the vast geographies of belief in the world of Islam.

Sebald’s Vision
Carol Jacobs
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

In Sebald’s Vision, Carol Jacobs examines the author’s prose, novels, and poems, illuminating the ethical and aesthetic questions that shaped his remarkable oeuvre. Through the trope of “vision,” she explores aspects of Sebald’s writing and the way the author’s indirect depiction of events highlights the ethical imperative of representing history while at the same time calling into question the possibility of such representation.

Ibn al-Sa‘i, Consorts of the Caliphs
Shawkat Toorawa
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by the prolific Baghdadi scholar Ibn al-Sa’i, who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city in the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656/1258.

Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2015
Description:

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes’ novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso.

The Invention of Influence
Peter Cole
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

Peter Cole has been called “an inspired writer” (The Nation) and “one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation” (Harold Bloom). In this, his fourth book of poems, he presents a ramifying vision of human linkage. At the heart of the collection stands the stunning title poem, which brings us into the world of Victor Tausk, a maverick and tragic early disciple of Freud who wrote about one of his patients’ mental inventions — an “influence machine” that controlled his thoughts. In Cole’s symphonic poem, this machine becomes a haunting image for the ways in which tradition and the language of others shape so much of what we think and say.

Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s
Jing Tsu
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

The first of its kind, this collection of critical essays opens up new venues in the comparative study of science and culture by focusing on the formative decades of modern China in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It provides a wide-ranging examination of the cultural and intellectual history of science and technology in modern China.From anti-imperialism to the technology of Chinese writing, the commodification of novelties to the rise of the modern professional scientist, new lexica and appropriations of the past, the contributors map out a transregional and global circuitry of modern knowledge and practical know-how, nationalism and the amalgamation of new social practices.

Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2014
Description:

The issue of nativism forms the base of any national culture, including Hebrew culture and literature. This book discusses the political and literary aspects of this phenomenon as it examines the work of three Hebrew poets: Esther Raab, Haim Gouri and Moshe Dor. Even though they differ in their poetics, they are similar by way of the debate they have with the territory of the land of Israel. Their common identity is what Israeli culture calls “Sabra” – the cactus fruit, prickly on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside – which is a metaphor of the Jewish settlers in the land of Israel, being tough and connected to the land.