Glimpsing Modernity is a collection of papers presented at the US Army Medical Museum-sponsored conference on medical aspects of the First World War held in San Antonio, Texas, in February 2012. It captures the metamorphosis of military medicine during the war in a series of inter-related vignettes. Some of these stories provide new and insightful interpretations of known military medical themes, while others depart from these to examine less well-known, but truly important medical topics.

It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.

For many people, Pakistan is a rogue state, but for those who think of it as Pakistani citizens do, it is the place where they are confronted with dangers and issues to which they answer with incredible courage and dignity. This volume, a reflection on Pakistan’s history from a compassionate insider’s perspective, pays homage to the many Pakistanis who face with a generous and open heart the problems created by a complex geopolitical context, many ethnic and religious contradictions, a tormented path towards self-definition, independence, democracy, and freedom.

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity is the first book to explore the persistent theme of the city in Chesterton's writing. Situating him in relation to both Victorian and Modernist literary paradigms, the book explores a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to address the way his imaginative investments and political interventions conceive urban modernity and the central figure of London. While Chesterton's work has often been valued for its wit and whimsy, this book argues that he is also a distinctive urban commentator, whose sophistication has been underappreciated in comparison to more canonical contemporaries. With chapters written by leading scholars in the field of 20th-century literature, the book also provides fresh readings and suggests new contexts for central texts such as The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and the Father Brown stories. It also discusses lesser-known works, such as Manalive and The Club of Queer Trades, drawing out their significance for scholars interested in urban representation and practice in the first three decades of the 20th century.

The history of Baghdad in the 18th and 19th centuries had predominantly been written by two groups. The first group is Baghdadi scholars, and the second group is travellers. These two resources complement each other; while the literature of Baghdadi scholars provides insights from inside, travelogues provide observations from outside. By implementing this interlocking method of investigation, we can reach a comprehensive understanding of the history of Baghdad. Having investigated some sources from inside in my previous book; Baghdad: an urban history through the lens of literature, the focus of this book is on travel literature. The history of travelogues throughout different periods of Baghdad’s history is highlighted, with a particular focus on 18th and 19th century travelogues. This period was a critical epoch of change, not just in Baghdad, but across the world. Nevertheless, this book does not intend to provide a documentary of the travellers who visited Baghdad. It is rather an analytical study of the colonial literature in relation to the historiography of Baghdad.

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

In contrast to the popular notion that the doctrine of the Trinity hinders Christians from engaging with the reality of religious diversity, this book argues that the doctrine is the best way of constructing contemporary theology of religions. An Imaginative Glimpse reexamines three prominent Trinitarian theologians of religions (Raimundo Panikkar, Gavin D'Costa, and S. Mark Heim) and proposes a fresh and creative model by bringing the classical idea of perichoresis to its present-day multifaith situation. Opening a new alternative in both Trinitarian theology and theology of religions, Adiprasetya's approach adds a distinctive contribution to the ongoing and challenging discussion in both fields. By using perichoresis imaginatively as a multidimensional category for multiple religious participations within the Trinity, Adiprasetya argues that the model is able to respect all religions on their own terms, while at the same time being faithful to the Christian standpoint.

A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association Baroque style—with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle—might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the baroque as a modern philosophical idea. The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderón de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way, Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first century. Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance, art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.

An aesthetic perspective on the short fiction of Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, and Carver Taking a distinctively aesthetic approach to the genre of realist short fiction, Kerry McSweeney clusters the work of five masters--Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver--to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars. At the center of this argument is the notion that the realist short story is a glimpse--powerful and tightly focused--into a world that the writer must precisely craft and in which the reader must fully invest. Selecting writers from different generational, national, and cultural backgrounds, McSweeney chooses writers based on their commitment to the realist representation of experience and their shared belief in the importance and efficacy of the short story form. By considering their efforts in tandem, he develops a means to assess the strategies and claims of realist short fiction. McSweeney demonstrates that when the comments these writers have made about their work are assembled and critically scrutinized, the result is an aesthetic critical model--as opposed to more interpretative models that focus attention on the determination (or indetermination) of meanings. He suggests that a fully adequate reading of a realist short story involves the integration of three components: the enjoyment and contemplation of the story in and of itself; affective receptivity, or a response to the story's emotional content; and cognitive activity, or the reflective consideration of the story's conceptual implications. In individual chapters on Chekov, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, and Carver, this presentational model is applied to widely known and often anthologized readings from each writer. McSweeney brings into sharp focus the distinctive features of each piece, makes qualitative discriminations, and assesses the profitability of other critical models. He concludes with an invitation to test the mettle of his approach in reading other realist short story writers.