Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, and studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the 19th-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the 20th-century fiction of geopolitics.
By placing Joseph Conrad's fiction at the center of an examination of the term "the West", this study reconceives the major contours of Conrad's work to show how the contemporary commonplace idea of the West emerged around the turn of the century from the combined and related phenomena of European imperial expansion and a crisis of democratic politics. The author argues that twentieth-century ideas of the West can be traced to the convergence of two distinct discursive contexts: the "new imperialism" of the 1890's that gave wider currency to oppositions between East and West, and the influence of nineteenth-century Russian debates on Western European ideas of Europe. The work of Conrad is shown to be uniquely suited to studying the relation between these two cultural and political contexts, since they provided Conrad with his two great themes - colonialism and revolution.
Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, and studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the 19th-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the 20th-century fiction of geopolitics.
This volume examines the poetics of bird mimicry: the way birds mimic humans, and the way humans mimic birds. Drawing from 18th-century studies, romantic studies, American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies, the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture.
Through a set of comparative studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Passage of Literature explains the interrelation between English, Creole, and Indonesian formations of literary modernism, arguing that each passage of literature is the site of contest between competing genealogies of culture.
In recent years culture has become the primary currency of politics – from the identity politics that characterized the 2016 American election to the pushback against Western universalism in much of the non-Western world. Much less noticed is the rise of a new political entity, the civilizational state. In this pioneering book, the renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker looks in depth at two countries that now claim this title: Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He also discusses the Islamic caliphate, a virtual and aspirational civilizational state that is unlikely to fade despite the recent setbacks suffered by ISIS. The civilizational state, he contends, is an idea whose time has come. For, while civilizations themselves may not clash, civilizational states appear to be set on challenging the rules of the international order that the West takes for granted. China seems anxious to revise them, Russia to break them, while Islamists would like to throw away the rule book altogether. Coker argues that, when seen in the round, these challenges could be enough to give birth to a new post-liberal international order.
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