Few would deny that comparative literature is rapidly moving from the periphery toward the center of literary studies in North America, but many are still unsure just what it is. The Comparative Perspective on Literature shows by means of twenty-two exemplary essays by many of the most distinguished scholars in the field how comparative literature as a discipline is conceived of and practiced in the 1980s. Nearly all of them published here for the first time, the essays discuss and themselves reflect significant changes at the core of the field as well as evolving notions as to what comparative literature is and should be. The volume editors, Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, have included essays that address the scope and concerns of comparative literature today, historical and international contexts of the field, and the relationship of literary criticism to other disciplines, as well as affording comparative perspectives on current critical issues.

The book is the third and concluding part of the investigation on Submerged literature in ancient Greece and beyond. The book expands the inquiry to a comparative perspective, in order to test the validity and usefulness of the hermeneutical approach in other fields and cultures. The comparative case studies deal with gnostic text, Qumran texts, the Hebrew Bible, Early Christianity, Cuneiform Texts, Arabic-Islamic literature, ancient Rome, Medieval China, and contemporary southern Italy. The volume tackles themes and questions relating to author and authorship, cultural translation and transmission, the interaction between orality and literacy, myth and folktale. A particular emphasis is given to anthropological themes and methods. In this vein, the book further explores dynamics of emergence and submersion in ancient Greece, including cultural trends promoted respectively by Sparta and Athens. The volume provides the reader with a wide range of tools and methodological suggestions to reconstruct literary phenomena and cultural processes in a given historical epoch and context, as well as offering new insights for both classical and comparative studies.

Comparative Criticism, first published in 2000, addresses itself to the questions of literary theory and criticism, to comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and to interdisciplinary perspectives. Articles include: Afloat on the Sea of Stories: World tales, English Literature, and geopolitical aesthetics; Classics and the comparison of adjacent literatures: some Pakistani perspectives; Performance Literature: the traditional Japanese theatre as model; 'Am I in that name?' Women's writing as cultural translation in early modern China; stabat mater: reflections on a theme in German-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab poetry. The winning entries in the 1999 BCLA/BCLT translation competition are also published.

Continuing in the standard of excellence set by previous editions, this sixth edition assesses the bureaucracies and development of governments around the world-providing helpful and revealing analyses of the relationships between bureaucracies and political regimes. With over 1000 literature references, tables, and drawings, the book has been updated to reflect changes in the political systems of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the developing world. The editor clearly articulates recent developments in the shifting global political landscape and discusses how conditions in development administration and comparative public policy affect nation-states.

This volume foregrounds biblical interpretation within the African history of colonial contact, from North Atlantic slavery to the current era of globalization. It reads of the prolonged struggle for justice and of hybrid identities from multifaceted contexts, where the Bible co-exists with African Indigenous Religions, Islam, and other religions. Showcasing the dynamic and creative approaches of an emerging and thriving community of biblical scholarship from the African continent and African diaspora, the volume critically examines the interaction of biblical texts with African people and their cultures within a postcolonial framework. While employing feminist/womanist, postcolonial, Afrocentric, social engagement, creative writing, reconstruction, and HIV/AIDS perspectives, the authors all engage with empire in their own ways: in specific times, forms, and geography. This volume is an important addition to postcolonial and empires studies in biblical scholarship. The contributors are David Tuesday Adamo, Lynn Darden, H. J. M. (Hans) van Deventer, Musa W. Dube, John D. K. Ekem, Ernest M. Ezeogu, Elelwani B. Farisani, Sylvester A. Johnson, Emmanuel Katongole, Malebogo Kgalemang, Temba L. J. Mafico, Madipoane Masenya (ngwan’a Mphahlele), Andrew M. Mbuvi, Sarojini Nadar, Elivered Nasambu-Mulongo, Jeremy Punt, Gerrie Snyman, Lovemore Togarasei, Sam Tshehla, Robert Wafawanaka, Robert Wafula, Gerald West, Alice Y. Yafeh-Deigh, and Gosnell L. Yorke.

What does it mean to be starting an academic career in the twenty first century? What challenges and prospects are new academics facing and how are they dealing with these? This book provides answers to these questions through an investigation of the experiences of early career academics in New Zealand universities. Filling a gap in the international literature on the academic profession by providing a comprehensive overview of the experiences of New Zealand academics, the book includes research findings from a national survey covering all eight New Zealand universities. This research is also compared with various findings from the 2007 Changing Academic Profession survey in 19 other countries. The book encourages readers to think about the early career academic experience in New Zealand in relation to their own experiences of the academic profession internationally. Key areas of focus in the nine chapters include: the teaching, research, and service preferences and activities of early career academics; work-life balance; satisfaction; the experiences of Māori academics; and professional development and support for all early career academics. Underpinning the book is the issue of the socialisation of early career academics into the academic profession in the twenty first century, and how structure and agency interact to affect that socialisation. Suggestions are made, and links to freely available online resources are provided, for improving socialisation at the individual, departmental, institutional, and national levels.

In a progressive and systematic approach to communication, and always through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, this first volume presents culture as an intricate grid of sensible and intelligible sign systems in space and time, identifying the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication according to verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. The author lays out fascinating complexity of our direct and synesthesial sensory perception of people and artifactual and environmental elements; and its audible and visual manifestations through our speaking face , to then acknowledge the triple reality of discourse as verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics , which is applied through two realistic models: (a)for a verbal-nonverbal comprehensive transcription of interactive speech, and (b)for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching. The author presents his exhaustive model of nonverbal categories for a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestation; and, based on all the previous material, his equally exhaustive structural model for the study of conversational encounters, which suggests many applications in different fields, such as the intercultural and multisystem communication situation developed in simultaneous or consecutive interpretating. 956 literary quotations from 103 authors and 194 works illustrate all the points discussed.

This book compares the performance of various evolutionary computation (EC) techniques when they are faced with complex optimization problems extracted from different engineering domains. Particularly focusing on recently developed algorithms, it is designed so that each chapter can be read independently. Several comparisons among EC techniques have been reported in the literature, however, they all suffer from one limitation: their conclusions are based on the performance of popular evolutionary approaches over a set of synthetic functions with exact solutions and well-known behaviors, without considering the application context or including recent developments. In each chapter, a complex engineering optimization problem is posed, and then a particular EC technique is presented as the best choice, according to its search characteristics. Lastly, a set of experiments is conducted in order to compare its performance to other popular EC methods.

This book pulls literature together to examine the quality of climate governance based in the experience of Global South regions—Africa, Latin America, and Caribbean. While these regions are resilient, the IPCC 2022 Report indicates that the effects of climate change are crippling their thinly structured governance systems and limited capacities. For example, in addition to environmental devastation, loss of life, and livelihoods, these regions have endured most of the “loss and damage” due to climate change impacts. How are they responding? What are the outcomes? And where do they go from here? Given this background, the book’s goal is to question assumptions about climate governance patterns, systems, institutions, and processes in these regions, using comparative analytical techniques while distilling information about policy outcomes that other approaches do not provide. It argues that these regions and individual countries within them have a lot to learn from and about each other rather than look to the Global North and wealthy countries for economic, political, and administrative models that hardly match their lived experience and ontological outlooks. In doing so, it aspires to promote a fruitful South-South policy-related dialogue via scholarly exchanges and also contribute to advance the study and practice of international and comparative public administration. From this perspective, scholars, researchers, educators, public managers, and practitioners will find the book relevant to and useful for their respective endeavors.

Thanks to its historical, theoretical, and methodological dimensions, this book is unique, both in Europe and in the USA. It brings together researchers from across Europe to explain how comparative literature works, both on an institutional and a technical level, in the country in which they teach. The contributions also define the characteristics of European comparative literature on a continental level. From Austria to Ukraine, by way of Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and Switzerland, this book offers an expansive panorama, placing great emphasis on usually “invisible” countries. Moreover, it relates both to the postcolonial and post-Soviet present and to the future of comparative literature: it is a handbook, but also a laboratory.