'Fascinating and important' Natalie Haynes, author of Stone Blind 'Monumental and vividly imagined' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Wonderfully entertaining' SUNDAY TIMESA SUNDAY TIMES AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAROn a sparsely populated Egyptian coastline, Alexander the Great sketched his vision of a metropolis into the sand. Situated on the cusp of three co...

Milton Across Borders and Media is an unprecedented collaboration that demonstrates the breadth of John Milton's international reception across diverse media from the seventeenth century through today. This volume presents new essays on the adaptation of Milton's works into various languages and media around the world. Part I poses questions about how we can effectively situate and engage with Milton's works within the multimedia networks of the present day. Part II 'Interlingual ...

Shakespeare and Terrorism delves into how extremists have responded to Shakespeare – whether they’ve attacked him or been inspired by him – and investigates what the playwright and his works can tell us about the nature, psychology, and consequences of terror.Literary critic and historian Islam Issa takes readers on a journey from Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon and London to a variety of locations: from Western Europe to the Balkans to the US, from North Africa to the P...

Global Milton and Visual Art showcases the aesthetic appropriation and reinterpretation of the works and legend of the early modern English poet and politician John Milton in diverse eras, regions, and media: book illustrations, cinema, digital reworkings, monuments, painting, sculpture, shieldry, and stained glass. It innovates an inclusive approach to Milton’s literary art, especially his masterpiece Paradise Lost, in global contemporary aesthetics via intertextual and interdisciplinary ...

The first full-length study of the reception of John Milton’s (1608-74) writings in the Arab-Muslim world, this book examines the responses of Arab-Muslim readers to Milton’s works, and in particular, to his epic poem: Paradise Lost. It contributes to knowledge of the history, development, and ways in which early modern writings are read and understood by Muslims. By mapping the literary and more broadly cultural consequences of the censure, translation and abridgement of Milton’s works in...

Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton’s geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapte...

An original, authoritative and lively cultural history of the first modern city, from pre-Homeric times to the present day.My dad had always told me about our city's magnificence, and as I looked at the new library in Alexandria it finally hit home. This is no ordinary library, I reflected. And this is no ordinary city.Combining rigorous research with myth and folklore, Alexandria is an au...

“A civil but honest dialogue…As illuminating as it is fascinating.”—Ayaan Hirsi AliIs Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem to be drawn to extremism? And what do words like jihadism and fundamentalism really mean? In a world riven by misunderstanding and violence, Sam Harris—a famous atheist—and Maajid Nawaz—a former radical—demonstrate how two people with very different religious views can ...

Fourteen centuries of Islamic thought have produced a legacy of interpretive readings of the Qu'ran written almost entirely by men. Now, with Qu'ran and Woman, Amina Wadud provides a first interpretive reading by a woman, a reading which validates the female voice in the Qu'ran and brings it out of the shadows. Muslim progressives have long argued that it is not the religion but patriarchal interpretation and implementation of the Qu'ran that have kept women oppressed. For many, t...

The Koran has constituted a remarkably strong core of identity and continuity for a religious tradition that is now in its fifteenth century. This Very Short Introduction explores the significance of the Koran both in the modern world and in traditional Muslim culture. Michael Cook provides a lucid and direct account of the Koran as codex, as scripture, as liturgy, and as the embodiment of truth, and examines its means of formation and dissemination. He also discusses issues of interpretat...

Islam features widely in the news, often in its most militant versions, but few people in the non-Muslim world really understand the nature of Islam.Malise Ruthven's Very Short Introduction contains essential insights into issues such as why Islam has such major divisions between movements such as the Shi'ites, the Sunnis, and the Wahhabis, and the central importance of the Shar'ia (Islamic law) in Islamic life. It also offers fresh perspectives on contemporary questions: Why is the greatest ...

The book you must read to understand the Islamist crisis—and the threat to us allRobert R. Reilly’s eye-opening book masterfully explains the frightening behavior coming out of the Islamic world. Terrorism, he shows, is only one manifestation of the spiritual pathology of Islamism.Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side...