Title: Traveling in Mark Twain 
Author: Bridgman, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | American Literature
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Title: The feminine sublime: gender and excess in women's fiction 
Author: Freeman, Barbara Claire
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime.Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime."   [brief]
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Title: Before Taliban: genealogies of the Afghan jihad 
Author: Edwards, David B
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | South Asia
Publisher's Description: In this powerful book, David B. Edwards traces the lives of three recent Afghan leaders in Afghanistan's history--Nur Muhammad Taraki, Samiullah Safi, and Qazi Amin Waqad--to explain how the promise of progress and prosperity that animated Afghanistan in the 1960s crumbled and became the present tragedy of discord, destruction, and despair. Before Taliban builds on the foundation that Edwards laid in his previous book, Heroes of the Age, in which he examines the lives of three significant figures of the late nineteenth century--a tribal khan, a Muslim saint, and a prince who became king of the newly created state. In the mid twentieth century, Afghans believed their nation could be a model of economic and social development that would inspire the world. Instead, political conflict, foreign invasion, and civil war have left the country impoverished and politically dysfunctional. Each of the men Edwards profiles were engaged in the political struggles of the country's recent history. They hoped to see Afghanistan become a more just and democratic nation. But their visions for their country were radically different, and in the end, all three failed and were killed or exiled. Now, Afghanistan is associated with international terrorism, drug trafficking, and repression. Before Taliban tells these men's stories and provides a thorough analysis of why their dreams for a progressive nation lie in ruins while the Taliban has succeeded. In Edwards's able hands, this culturally informed biography provides a mesmerizing and revealing look into the social and cultural contexts of political change.   [brief]
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Title: The tireless traveler: twenty letters to the Liverpool Mercury 
Author: Trollope, Anthony 1815-1882
Published: University of California Press,  1978
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Letters
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Title: Shanghai on the Metro: spies, intrigue, and the French between the wars 
Author: Miller, Michael Barry 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Secret agents, gun runners, White Russians, adventurers, and con men - they all play a part in Michael Miller's strikingly original study of interwar France. Based on extensive research in security files and a mass of printed sources, this book shows how a distinctive milieu of spies and spy literature emerged between the two world wars, reflecting the atmosphere and concerns of these years.Miller argues that French fascination with intrigue between the wars reveals a far more assured and playful national mood than historians have hitherto discerned in the final decades of the Third Republic. But the larger history set in motion by World War I and the subsequent reading of French history into global history are the true subjects of this work. Reconstituting through his own narratives the histories of interwar travel and adventure and the willful turning of contemporary affairs into a source of romance, Miller recovers the ambiance and special qualities of the age that produced its intrigues and its tales of spies.   [brief]
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Title: Cultural encounters: the impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World 
Author: Perry, Mary Elizabeth 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Anthropology | European History | Religion | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: More than just an expression of religious authority or an instrument of social control, the Inquisition was an arena where cultures met and clashed on both shores of the Atlantic. This pioneering volume examines how cultural identities were maintained despite oppression.Persecuted groups were able to survive the Inquisition by means of diverse strategies - whether Christianized Jews in Spain preserving their experiences in literature, or native American folk healers practicing medical care. These investigations of social resistance and cultural persistence will reinforce the cultural significance of the Inquisition.   [brief]
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Title: Speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial Africa 
Author: White, Luise
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: African Studies | African History | African Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction. White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.   [brief]
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Title: Mass mediations: new approaches to popular culture in the Middle East and beyond 
Author: Armbrust, Walter
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Media Studies | Music | Cinema and Performance Arts
Publisher's Description: Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to Egyptians' reaction to a recent film on Gamal Abdel Nasser; from postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, the essays illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production. The unfolding of modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies has been little analyzed until now. In addressing transnational aspects of Middle Eastern societies, the contributors also challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West. The volume will have wide appeal both to Middle Eastern scholars and to readers interested in global and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: To have and have not: southeast Asian raw materials and the origins of the Pacific War 
Author: Marshall, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Public Policy | Asian History | Southeast Asia | Economics and Business | Politics
Publisher's Description: Jonathan Marshall makes a provocative statement: it was not ideological or national security considerations that led the United States into war with Japan in 1941. Instead, he argues, it was a struggle for access to Southeast Asia's vast storehouse of commodities - rubber, oil, and tin - that drew the U.S. into the conflict. Boldly departing from conventional wisdom, Marshall reexamines the political landscape of the time and recreates the mounting tension and fear that gripped U.S. officials in the months before the war.Unusual in its extensive use of previously ignored documents and studies, this work records the dilemmas of the Roosevelt administration: it initially hoped to avoid conflict with Japan and, after many diplomatic overtures, it came to see war as inevitable. Marshall also explores the ways that international conflicts often stem from rivalries over land, food, energy, and industry. His insights into "resource war," the competition for essential commodities, will shed new light on U.S. involvement in other conflicts - notably in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.   [brief]
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Title: Evolution of sickness and healing 
Author: Fabrega, Horacio
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Medicine | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Evolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine.To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework.   [brief]
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Title: Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism 
Author: Seyhan, Azade
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Observations in Lower California 
Author: Baegert, Jacob 1717-1772
Published: University of California Press,  1979
Subjects: History | United States History | California and the West | Californian and Western History
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Title: Socialization as cultural communication: development of a theme in the work of Margaret Mead 
Author: Schwartz, Theodore
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
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Title: Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 
Author: Kayalı, Hasan
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Arabs and Young Turks provides a detailed study of Arab politics in the late Ottoman Empire as viewed from the imperial capital in Istanbul. In an analytical narrative of the Young Turk period (1908-1918) historian Hasan Kayali discusses Arab concerns on the one hand and the policies of the Ottoman government toward the Arabs on the other. Kayali's novel use of documents from the Ottoman archives, as well as Arabic sources and Western and Central European documents, enables him to reassess conventional wisdom on this complex subject and to present an original appraisal of proto-nationalist ideologies as the longest-living Middle Eastern dynasty headed for collapse. He demonstrates the persistence and resilience of the supranational ideology of Islamism which overshadowed Arab and Turkish ethnic nationalism in this crucial transition period. Kayali's study reaches back to the nineteenth century and highlights both continuity and change in Arab-Turkish relations from the reign of Abdulhamid II to the constitutional period ushered in by the revolution of 1908. Arabs and Young Turks is essential for an understanding of contemporary issues such as Islamist politics and the continuing crises of nationalism in the Middle East.   [brief]
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Title: Marriage and inequality in Chinese society 
Author: Watson, Rubie S. (Rubie Sharon) 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | China | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, poli . . . [more]
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Title: Secure from rash assault: sustaining the Victorian environment 
Author: Winter, James H 1925-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Victorian History | Ecology | Geography | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Nineteenth-century Britain led the world in technological innovation and urbanization, and unprecedented population growth contributed as well to the "rash assault," to quote Wordsworth, on Victorian countrysides. Yet James Winter finds that the British environment was generally spared widespread ecological damage.Drawing from a remarkable variety of sources and disciplines, Winter focuses on human intervention as it not only destroyed but also preserved the physical environment. Industrial blight could be contained, he says, because of Britain's capacity to import resources from elsewhere, the conservative effect of the estate system, and certain intrinsic limitations of steam engines. The rash assault was further blunted by traditional agricultural practices, preservation of forests, and a growing recreation industry that favored beloved landscapes. Winter's illumination of Victorian attitudes toward the exploitation of natural resources offers a valuable preamble to ongoing discussions of human intervention in the environment.   [brief]
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Title: Interpreting the self: autobiography in the Arabic literary tradition 
Author: Reynolds, Dwight Fletcher 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Literature in Translation | Comparative Literature | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Autobiography is a literary genre which Western scholarship has ascribed mostly to Europe and the West. Countering this assessment and presenting many little-known texts, this comprehensive work demonstrates the existence of a flourishing tradition in Arabic autobiography. Interpreting the Self discusses nearly one hundred Arabic autobiographical texts and presents thirteen selections in translation. The authors of these autobiographies represent an astonishing variety of geographical areas, occupations, and religious affiliations. This pioneering study explores the origins, historical development, and distinctive characteristics of autobiography in the Arabic tradition, drawing from texts written between the ninth and nineteenth centuries c.e. This volume consists of two parts: a general study rethinking the place of autobiography in the Arabic tradition, and the translated texts. Part one demonstrates that there are far more Arabic autobiographical texts than previously recognized by modern scholars and shows that these texts represent an established and - especially in the Middle Ages - well-known category of literary production. The thirteen translated texts in part two are drawn from the full one-thousand-year period covered by this survey and represent a variety of styles. Each text is preceded by a brief introduction guiding the reader to specific features in the text and providing general background information about the author. The volume also contains an annotated bibliography of 130 premodern Arabic autobiographical texts.In addition to presenting much little-known material, this volume revisits current understandings of autobiographical writing and helps create an important cross-cultural comparative framework for studying the genre.   [brief]
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Title: Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the Jews: legitimizing the Jewish diaspora 
Author: Bar-Kochva, Bezalel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | History | Ancient History | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Debate over the authenticity of "On the Jews" has persisted for nearly 1,900 years. Bezalel Bar-Kochva attempts to overcome this stalemate in his finely detailed and convincingly argued study that proves the forgery of the book and suggests not only a source for the text, but also a social, political, and cultural setting that explains its conception.Bar-Kochva argues that the author of this treatise belonged to the moderate conservative Jews of Alexandria, whose practices were contrary to the contemporary trends of Hellenistic Judaism. They rejected the application of Greek philosophy and allegorical interpretations of the Holy scriptures and advocated the use of Pentateuch Hebrew as the language for educating and for religious services. They showed a keen interest in Judea and identified themselves with the Jews of the Holy Land. "On the Jews," then, was the manifesto of this group and was written at the peak period of the Hasmonean kingdom. Its main purpose was to legitimize Jewish residence in Egypt, despite being explicitly prohibited in the Pentateuch, and to justify the continued residence of Jews there in a time of prosperity and expansion of the Jewish independent state.   [brief]
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Title: Essays in population history: Mexico and the Caribbean 
Author: Cook, Sherburne Friend 1896-1974
Published: University of California Press,  1979
Subjects: Latin American Studies
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Title: Chinese history in economic perspective 
Author: Rawski, Thomas G 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The essays assembled here represent a turning point in the study of Chinese economic history. Previous work has emphasized the institutional and social bases of economic change. These studies break new ground, bringing Western economic theory to the study of China's economy since the seventeenth cen . . . [more]
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