Global Identities in Transit: The Ethics and Politics of Representation in World Literatures and Cultures explores the myriad aspects of identity formation and identity representation in an increasingly globalized world. Covering a variety of cultural and historical experiences in addition to several texts of world literatures, the contributors discuss the configurations of transnationality and transculturality in our postcolonial and globalized world. Acknowledging that nationality, ethni...

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by hum...

Christmas falls on 25 December with faithful inevitability. Indeed, our entire Western system of time is based upon it. It may seem as though it has always been this way, but like many facts of the holiday’s history, the date of Christ’s birth contains a complex story wrapped in controversy. Despite the deep traditions that bind a culture to its version of Christmas – the pageantry, food and folklore – its longevity has always depended on its ability to evolve.Christmas: The Sa...

Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century aims to bring together detailed analyses of the cultural myths, or fictions, of consumption that have shaped discourses on consumer practices from the eighteenth century onwards. Individual essays provide an excitingly diverse range of perspectives, including musicology, philosophy, history, and art history, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as the study of literature in English, French, and German. The broad scope of this c...

Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers unveils the history you were never taught at school. With a breath-taking sweep spanning Rome to the modern day, popular historian and author Dominic Selwood challenges the traditional version of some of the best-known events of the past. From ancient Christianity to the voyages of Columbus, and from the medieval Crusades to ISIS and the modern Middle East, this book debunks dozens of historical myths.You will learn that:– Magna Carta was an inf...

In Is It True?, Max Cryer explores the truth or otherwise of facts and beliefs we may have always been told are true, but which on closer examination may not be. In a wide-ranging book encompassing social history, language, music, politics, the natural world and much more, we discover the truth behind some of our most cherished beliefs. Always fresh and amusing, Max Cryer will take you on a journey through your acquired knowledge, testing whether it is really up to scratch.

For two thousand years, Christianity has had a varying but immense influence on world history. Accomplished historian Geoffrey Blainey leads us through the history of this world-changing religion.A Short History of Christianity vividly describes many of the significant players in the religion’s rise and fall through the ages, from Jesus himself to Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, Francis Xavier, John Wesley, and even the Beatles, who claimed to be “more popular than Jesus.” Blaine...

The trivia gurus behind the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series plumb the depths of history in this compendium of easily digestible diversions.Whether you're a history buff, or you just like reading great stories, you'll see the past in a whole new light after reading Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History. Uncle John uncovers the truth behind some of history's most persistent myths and flushes out information you were never taught in school.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap?Shedding new light on novels by Thack...

A career-spanning collection of thought-provoking analyses from the renowned literary critic.Sir Frank Kermode has been writing peerless literary criticism for more than a half-century. Pieces of My Mind includes his own choice of his major essays since 1958, beginning with his extraordinary study of "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev" and ending with a marvelous consideration of Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi-Boito's Otello. Important es...

In the second volume of this magnificently illustrated cultural history, the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews, Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish people from 1492 through the end of nineteenth century.A sweeping work of narrative history, volume two of this epic incorporates the stories of many who seldom figure in Jewish histories: not just the rabbis and the philosophers but a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Ge...

In the Victorian period, the British novel reached a wide readership and played a major role in the shaping of national and individual identity. As we come to understand the ways the novel contributed to public opinion on religion, gender, sexuality and race, we continue to be entertained and enlightened by the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and many others. This second edition of the Companion to the Victorian Novel has been updated fully, taking account of new resear...