At turns heartbreaking and diabolically funny, Journey to Virginland is a tour de force, delivered by a master storyteller. The protagonist, a loutish and bercerebral antihero known simply as Dog, takes on the challenge to navigate the perilous paradigm shifts of our age, determined to find his proper place under the sun. Is he doomed to failure? Or will he pull it off by heeding his own irreducible voice, given the ebb of the old certainties? Dog pursues the answer unrelentingly through an impassioned quest for identity and meaning. He revisits his relationships with women, family, literature, and homeland, in the process illuminating his journey with commentaries on history, religion, politics, and culture that unravel our very fabric. Marked by biting satire and tappings into lushest scholarship, Dog's naked critique touches on some of the most pressing issues facing humanity: the arrogance of empire and organized religion; the persistence of bigotry, xenophobia, and social Darwinism; the double standards of sexual politics; the bankrupt rationale behind patriotism and state propaganda; and hypercapitalism and consumerism, among others. What emerges from the protagonist's odyssey is not only a cogent depiction of what makes us tick, but, as day follows night, a dazzling new vista for social and spiritual transformation. With its vibrant style, thematic breadth, and, ultimately, unfettered sense of humanity, Journey to Virginland establishes itself as a groundbreaking literary enterprise and a true original.

With the publication in English in 1930 of Civilization and its Discontents and its thesis that instinct – and, ultimately: nature – had been and must be forever subordinated in order that civilization might thrive and endure, Freud contributed what some contemporaries saw to the central debate of his era – a debate which had long preoccupied both official American pundits and the American populace at large. At the beginning of the new Millennium, evidence abounds that an American debate still rages over the meaning of “nature,” the rightful weight of instinct, and the status of civilization. The Millennium itself has appeared in popular and official discourses as an appropriate marker of an age in which nature is close to the edge of radical extinction and has also become more and more unreliable as a paradigm for representation and debate. At the same time, the contemporary tailoring of nature to postmodern needs and expectations inevitably reveals the conceptual difficulty of any possible, simple opposition between nature and culture as if they were clearly distinguishable domains. If nature, then, can clearly be seen as a discursive concept, it may also be a timeless concept insofar that it has been shaped, created, and used at all times. Every epoch, age and era had “its own nature,” with myth, history and ideology as its dominant shaping forces. From the Frontier to Cyberia, nature has been suffering the “agony of the real,” resurfacing in discursive strategies and demonstrating a powerful impact on American society, culture and self-definition. The essays in this collection “speak critically of the natural” and examine the American debate in the many guises it has assumed over the last century within the context of major critical approaches, psychoanalytical concepts, and postmodern theorizing.

In 1965 the Brazilian authorities began building a highway through the Mato Grosso, a remote, relatively unexplored region of Brazil. They invited several countries to send scientists to study the area. Between 1967 and 1969, dozens of scientists explored the area.

Adopting a historical conceptual approach, this book examines the gendering of citizenship. It argues that through successive historical periods, `becoming a citizen has involved a gradual extension of the status, to more and more persons and groups, in particular, women, which resulted in a more inclusive and egalitarian structure. But, the promise of equal membership in the politcal community masks the exclusionary framework that defines citizenship as found in caste hierarchies, gender differences, and divides between religious communities based on majority and minority status. Engaging with contemporary debates on citizenship that place themselves within the framework of multiculturalism and world citizenship this work asserts the need to redefine the notion of community by focussing on citizenship as a measure of activity and practice, and by exposing the subtleties of role definition of women implicit in community norms.

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."