The purpose of this study is to find out how and why the "poetics of fiction" arose, its sources, and the materials from which it was created. A series of cultural choices made in archaic and classical Greece produced a clash between the traditional "poetics of truth", which derived poetry from divine inspiration and in the last analysis did not construe the poem as a work of art at all, and the new "poetics of fiction", which derived poetry from art. The eventual succession of the latter, culminating with the Poetics of Aristotle, amounted to an aesthetic revolution because, as a result of it, literary fiction, which since then has become a necessary framework for both the theory and practice of literature in Western tradition, was for the first time separated from non-fiction and given a status of its own.

Ammiel Alcalay's groundbreaking work, After Jews and Arabs, published in 1993, redrew the geographic, political, cultural, and emotional map of relations between Jews and Arabs in the Levantine/Mediterranean world over a thousand-year period. Based on over a decade of research and fieldwork in many disciplines-including history and historiography; anthropology, ethnography, and ethnomusicology; political economy and geography; linguistics; philosophy; and the history of science and technology-the book presented a radically different perspective than that presented by received opinion. Given the radical and iconoclastic nature of Alcalay's perspective, After Jews and Arabs met great resistance in attempts to publish it. Though completed and already circulating in 1989, it didn't appear until 1993. In addition, when the book was published, there wasn't enough space to include its original bibliography, a foundational part of the project. A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs presents the original bibliography, as completed in 1992, without changes, as a glimpse into the historical record of a unique scholarly, political, poetic, and cultural journey. The bibliography itself had roots in research begun in the late 1970s and demonstrates a very wide arc. In addition to the bibliography, we include three accompanying texts here. In "Behind the Scenes: Before After Jews and Arabs, " Alcalay takes us behind the closed doors of the academic process, reprinting the original reader reports and his detailed rebuttals, and in "A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs A Brief Introduction," Alcalay contextualizes his own path to the work he undertook, in methodological, historical, and political terms. Also included is "A Poetics of Bibliography." Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include After Jews and Arabs, Keys to the Garden, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from then. A 10th-anniversary edition of from the warring factions, a book-length poem dedicated to Srebrenica, and a book of essays, a little history, came out in 2013. a little history also came out in a Portuguese translation with Editor Lumme, São Paolo in 2019. During the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, he was the primary translator of texts from Bosnia, and translations include Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, as well as works by journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic, and many others. Alcalay is the General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest-edited archival texts emerging from New American Poetry, and he was the recipient of a 2017 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for this work.

Most Americans are ill-prepared to engage thoughtfully in the increasingly serious debate about Israel, its place in the Middle East, and its relations with the United States. Essential Israel examines a wide variety of complex issues and current concerns in historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with an intimate sense of the dynamic society and culture that is Israel today. The expert contributors to this volume address the Arab-Israeli conflict, the state of diplomatic efforts to bring about peace, Zionism and the impact of the Holocaust, the status of the Jewish state and Israeli democracy, foreign relations, immigration and Israeli identity, as well as literature, film, and the other arts. This unique and innovative volume provides solid grounding to understandings of Israel's history, politics, culture, and possibilities for the future.

Using pagan prose fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, Bowersock investigates the complex relationship among perceived and presented 'historical' and 'fictional' truths. Bowersock's superb lecturing style is successfully transferred into writing with force and eloquence, as he weaves accounts from a wide range of sources into his text, illuminating social attitudes of the period and persuasively arguing that fiction of the period was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives. In the second half of the first century emerges a new kind of fiction including outlandish tales of travel, romance and comic novels. Bowersock concentrates on secular literature, illuminating not only its literary motifs, but also reconstructing the societal context as one engrossed in fabrications and all kinds of revisions or rewriting. Using these less familiar materials as his points of reference, he reads into familiar Christian material, making linkages and casting new light on familiar subjects, as well as providing some provocative interpretations of familiar Christian texts. Bowersock uses close historical and literary analyses of specific passages of works, and pays attention to larger and more general issues and questions around the relationship between fiction and history and how we read them. This book will be of basic intellectual concern to all raised in the environment of Christian belief.

Two creative centres of Jewish life rose to prominence in the twentieth century, one in Israel and the other in the United States. Although Israeli and American Jews share kinship and history drawn from their Eastern European roots, they have developed divergent cultures from their common origins, often seeming more like distant cousins than close relatives. This book explores why this is so, examining how two communities that constitute eighty percent of the world's Jewish population have created separate identities and cultures. Using examples from literature, art, history, and politics, leading Israeli and American scholars focus on the political, social, and memory cultures of their two communities, considering in particular the American-Jewish challenge to diaspora consciousness and the Israeli struggle to forge a secular, national Jewish identity. At the same time, they seek to understand how a sense of mutual responsibility and fate animates American and Israeli Jews who reside in distant places, speak different languages, and live within different political and social worlds.

This open university reader is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection of material from primary sources, illustrating the relationship between cultural change and religious belief in sixteenth-century Europe. It contains more than eighty extracts drawn from a variety of genres including political, religious, philosophical and legal writing, diaries, letters, plays, poems and fiction. Some have never previously been published, others have not been reprinted since their original appearance in the sixteenth century, and a number are translated into modern English for the first time. `Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600' includes writing from such renowned thinkers as Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, and Sir Thomas More, besides that of lesser-known authors. Works of literature also feature extensively, and writings from Cervantes, Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney amongst many others are all to be found here. A general introduction describes the anthology's central aim - to explore aspects of the interrelationship between the politics, religion and writing of the period. The book is divided into eight thematic sections. Spelling in the extracts has been sensitively modernized throughout, and the editors provide a headnote and appropriate explanatory annotation for each item.

Central Europe, the venue of all these essays, is seen here as a region with blurred edges, comprising mainly Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia - a region notorious for its national conflicts, but where reluctantly acknowledged family likenesses may one day prevail. The essays, most of them written over the last 25 years and revised, concentrate (though not exclusively) on the era since 1900. They represent a mixed bag of episodes from the literature, politics and philosophy of the region. Some were written to remind the reader that the heart of Europe has also been, and could once again become, the heart of darkness. Some are devoted to heroes of the resistance, others to philosophical fellow-travellers of one kind and another; some show how the revolutions of 1989 in the wake of defunct ideologies followed the same agenda in all the countries concerned; others again examine the relationship between literature, ideology and politics in the writings of Robert Musil, Jaroslav Hasek, Vaclav Havel and others. Since the author has tried to let each topic determine its own approach, the theory behind these essays is that there is here no theory - either "Marxist" or "Aryan", "critical" or "Postmodern", or any other. Throughout, the author has kept a close look at the language of his texts and its functions in different contexts, but that is, or should be, too obvious a procedure to merit the name of theory.

With Jerusalem as its epicentre, The Maltese Dreambook extends Gabriel Levin’s quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples serve as a backdrop to the title poem, this collection abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal and the real, the modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary. Gabriel Levin was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has been living in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published two collections of poetry, Sleepers of Beulah (1992) and Ostraca (1999) and several translations from the Hebrew, French and Arabic, including a selection of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry, Poems from the Diwan (Anvil, 2002). He is one of the founding editors of Ibis Editions, a small press established in Jerusalem in 1997 and dedicated to the publication, in English, of literature from the Levant.

This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.--