Is it possible to create art freely today and yet produce works that are more than merely decorative or commercial? asks Gabriel Josipovici in this wide-ranging book. The suspicion that art is both frivolous and deceptive has a relatively short history, he explains, and he turns to works created in "cultures of trust"-Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare-in order to understand Romantic suspicion.

Critically examines the history of rock and roll movies, from ABBA, to Zachariah--which feature rock musicians or portray aspects of the rock music world

Common wisdom has long held that the ascent of the modern nation coincided with the flowering of Enlightenment democracy and the decline of religion, ringing in an age of tolerant, inclusive, liberal states. Not so, demonstrates Anthony W. Marx in this landmark work of revisionist political history and analysis. In a startling departure from a historical consensus that has dominated views of nationalism for the past quarter century, Marx argues that European nationalism emerged two centuries earlier, in the early modern era, as a form of mass political engagement based on religious conflict, intolerance, and exclusion. Challenging the self-congratulatory geneaology of civic Western nationalism, Marx shows how state-builders attempted to create a sense of national solidarity to support their burgeoning authority. Key to this process was the transfer of power from local to central rulers; the most suitable vehicle for effecting this transfer was religion and fanatical passions. Religious intolerance--specifically the exclusion of religious minorities from the nascent state--provided the glue that bonded the remaining populations together. Out of this often violent religious intolerance grew popular nationalist sentiment. Only after a core and exclusive nationality was formed in England and France, and less successfully in Spain, did these countries move into the "enlightened" 19th century, all the while continuing to export intolerance and exclusion to overseas colonies. Providing an explicitly political theory of early nation-building, rather than an account emphasizing economic imperatives or literary imaginings, Marx reveals that liberal, secular Western political traditions were founded on the basis of illiberal, intolerant origins. His provocative account also suggests that present-day exclusive and violent nation-building, or efforts to form solidarity through cultural or religious antagonisms, are not fundamentally different from the West's own earlier experiences.

The Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and in the College Libraries of Oxford is a comprehensive reference book written by Adolf Neubauer. The book provides a detailed and systematic catalogue of all the Hebrew manuscripts that are held in the Bodleian Library and the College Libraries of Oxford. The author has meticulously researched and documented each manuscript, providing a brief historical background and detailed descriptions of their contents, including the language, script, and binding. The book is an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers interested in the study of Hebrew manuscripts, Jewish history, and culture. It is an essential reference work for anyone studying or researching the rich cultural heritage of the Jewish people.1886. Including MSS. in other languages, which are written with Hebrew characters, or relating to the Hebrew language or literature; and a few Samaritan MSS. With forty facsimiles. Partial Contents: Works Quoted; Concordances of the Old and New Numbers; Biblical MSS; Translation of the Bible; Midrash and its Commentaries; Commentaries and Super-Commentaries; Thalmud, Halakhah; Thalmud, Agadah; Liturgies and their Commentaries; Theology, Philosophy and Ethics; Masorah, Grammar and Lexicography; Kabbalah; Poetry and Rhymed Prose; Mathematics, Astronomy, Astrology, Magic and Cosmography; Medicine; Miscellaneous; Additional MSS and Omissions; College MSS; MSS written in Roman Characters in Connection with Hebrew Literature; Latest Acquisitions; and Additional Samaritan MSS. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

What is wit made out of in the comedies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Shirley and their contemporaries? What does it hide? What does it reveal? This book addresses these questions by turning to the relationship between comic form and local history. Explorations of familiar sites, including Windsor Forest, Smithfield, Covent Garden and Hyde Park, are matched with close readings of drama that focus on overlays between theatrical, spatial, narrative and social conventions. Dramatic comedy's definitive interest in cultural competency and incompetence, and wit and witlessness, is revealed through discussions of commerce, gambling, royal forests and new or newly public spaces in and around early modern London. Along with Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Ben Jonson's Epicene and Bartholomew Fair, special emphasis is placed on the neglected town comedies of the 1630s - the forerunners of the Restoration comedy of manners and satirical realism of our own day.

Abraham Mapu (1808-1867) was one of the first, & finest, of the novelists to write in Hebrew. Heavily influenced by a wide range of sources, the Bible, the Romantic Novelists, & renewed pride in ancient Jewish history, his works recall the finest works of writers such as Flaubert & other great romantic novelists.

Unlike the literary traditions of the United States, England, and France, the first century of Hebrew literature was lacking in women novelists; women tended to write poetry, while prose fiction was mainly the domain of male writers. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a virtual explosion of commercially successful Hebrew fiction by women that includes many traditionally male genres, such as the historical novel, fictional autobiography, and the mystery novel. No Room of Their Own is a comparative analysis of recent Israeli fiction by women and some of its Western models, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Marilyn French and Marie Cardinal. Feldman shows the richness and subtleties of Israeli women's fiction as she explores the themes of gender and nation, as well as the (non)representation of the "New Hebrew Woman" in five authors -- the "foremothers" of the contemporary boom in Israeli Women's fiction: Amalia Kahana-Carmon ( Up on Montifer, With Her on Her Way Home), Shulamith Hareven ( City of Many Days, Thirst, The Vocabulary of Peace), Netiva BenYehuda ( The Palmach Trilogy), Ruth Almog ( Women, The Story of a [Writer's] Block, Roots of Air), and Shulamit Lapid ( Gei Oni).

We are honored to present this timeless collection, African Proverbs by Charlotte Leslau-an extraordinary work that preserves and uplifts the enduring brilliance of African oral tradition. These proverbs are more than words; they are echoes of Ancestors, distilled wisdom, and cultural affirmations carried through generations. In a world often quick to overlook or erase African contributions, this book stands as a powerful reminder of the intellect, wit, and deep philosophy embedded in everyday African speech. These proverbs offer guidance, laughter, clarity, and community-if only we stop and listen. STILL. WE. RISE. Through rhythm, metaphor, and truth-telling, the voices of the past reach out to shape the present. Let this work remind us that our stories, our languages, and our lessons are sacred. We are committed to sharing with all who are ready to receive them.

New forms of Jewish philosophic inquiry in response to the Holocaust, the American Jewish experience, and the establishment of the State of Israel, present a necessity for a clear and comprehensive framework in which contemporary Jewish thought may be studied. This is what William E. Kaufman has done in "Contemporary Jewish Philosophies". Examining the present parameters of Jewish thought – Existentialism, naturalism, supernaturalism, and transnaturalism – he formulates the criteria for dealing with modern Jewish thinking. He traces the effects of this new philosophic vocabulary through the writings of such established luminaries as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, and Mordecai Kaplan as well as seeking the sources of the thought of such contemporary figures as Emil Fackenheim, Jacob Agus, Arthur Cohen, Eugene Borowitz, Richard Rubenstein, and Abraham Joshua Heschel in the traditional roots of covenant, salvation, and transcendence. Dr. Kaufman deals in depth with the age-old questions: What conception of God can I accept? What is the relation of God to the universe? How shall we concieve the relation of man to God? But he goes further still. What is salvation in light of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel? Can we find an analogue in the past to the situation of Jews today? Probing these questions, along with the primary concerns of Jewish philosophy, he illumines and enlivens the complex dialogues which from the basis of Jewish philosophic thought. Each philosopher is analyzed and critiqued, utilizing a a uniform criteria which focuses the key concerns and commentaries of each in relation to the entire realm of Jewish thought today. "Contemporary Jewish Philosophies" in essential not only to the student of philosophy but to the reader who is seriously concerned with confronting today's problems with today's sensibility. --

This volume brings together 144 examples of lyric poetry, notable in quality and representative of their times. Besides an introduction to the nature of the lyric, there are commentaries at the head of each poem, textual and explanatory footnotes, a general bibliography, and a comprehensive glossary keyed to the text.

"I try to believe that everything I have read has contributed some small ingredient to the melting pot of my mind." In On the Ivory Stages , Theodore Dalrymple continues the genre he established with These Spindrift Pages by capturing the thoughts inspired by his recent reading. These passages serve as small essays that are part literary criticism, historical analysis and philosophical musings, sometimes all at once. The breadth of writers and subjects he addresses are both cause and effect of an expansive and curious mind. Readers will benefit, as Dalrymple has, from the volume and quality of his reading and from the wisdom it inspires. Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who has written many books, including Life at the Bottom, Admirable Evasions and These Spindrift Pages.

Available in English for the first time, this is a collection of Adorno's essays on such writers as Mann, Bloch, Holderlin, Kare Kraust, Sigfried Kracauer, Goethe, Benjamin and Stefan George. Also included are Adorno's reflections on a variety of subjects: literary titles, the physical qualities of books, political commitment in literature, the light-hearted and the serious in art, and the use of foreign words in writing, to name a few.

The essays included in this volume are based on papers delivered at the International Symposium on Varieties of Marxism, held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation on June 16-19,1974, and dedicated to the memory of George Lichtheim. When the idea of such a symposium was first raised, the organizers planned to have George Lichtheim as one of the main speakers at the event. In our last and brief meeting in London, I suggested this to him and Lichtheim gave his consent to attend the symposium, though at that time no date was yet fixed. His tragic death a few months later left a gap not only in the program of the symposium but in Marxist studies generally; it was felt that per haps one way of paying tribute to his contribution to the study of a subject so near to his mind would be to name the symposium in his memory and devote an introductory paper to an attempt at an intel lectual portrait of George Lichtheim as an historian of ideas. The volume as published includes all papers delivered at the sym posium, with the excep,tion of the papers of J. L. Talmon (Jerusalem) on 'Marxism and Nationalism' and Gajo Petrovic (Zagreb) on 'Yugo slav Marxism'. Appended is also a short obituary written by me on Lichtheim for the journal Political Science published by the American Political Science Association.

"In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017"--

"In 1966, at the ripe age of 22, Richard Goldstein approached The Village Voice with a novel idea. "I want to be a rock critic," he said. "What's that?" the editor replied. It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about the music that changed our lives. He believed deeply in the power of rock, and, long before it was acceptable, he championed the idea that this music was a serious art form. From his unique position in journalism, he saw the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s--and participated in them, too. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, and dropped acid with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. He was present for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the student uprising at Columbia, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer, and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends--Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two--and their early deaths came as a wrenching shock, fueling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite to a vast industry--and the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away. Another Little Piece of My Heart is the intimate memoir of the writer as a young man with profound ambition. It is also a sweeping personal account of a decade that no one else could provide--a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America"--