Convergences: Inventories of the Present

In this provocative study, Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures.

The complex status of Chopin in our culture--he was a native Pole and adopted Frenchman, and a male composer writing in "feminine" genres--is the subject of Jeffrey Kallberg’s absorbing book. Combining social history, literary theory, musicology, and feminist thought, this is the first book to situate Chopin’s music within the construct of his somewhat marginal sexual identity.

Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts—English and Irish alike—that reinvented Ireland after centuries of colonialism. Combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival, this book is a major literary history of modern Ireland.

Timothy Brennan’s passionate book is a bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism. Brennan traces his subject from George Orwell to Julia Kristeva, from "third world" writing to the Nobel Prize. A critical call to arms, At Home in the World strips the false and heedless from the new cosmopolitanism in order to revitalize the idea.

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? In exploring these questions, Ranajit Guha points out that the South Asian colonial state was a historical paradox. Britain may have ruled India as a colony, but it never achieved hegemony over most of the population, collaborating with the nationalist elite but never persuading the masses. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox—a dominance without hegemony. His work will be essential to an understanding of Indian history.

This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms that Edward Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time. Taken together, these essays-- from the famous to those that will surprise even Said’s most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation.

This work presents in English translation the largest collection ever assembled of the sayings and stories of Jesus in Arabic Islamic literature. The 300 sayings and stories, arranged in chronological order, show us how the image of this Jesus evolved throughout a millennium of Islamic history.

A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book—by one of Irish writing’s most eloquent readers—offers a rich survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English.

The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values—artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles—and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map.

Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.

In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements—a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary “melting pot,” Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts.