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Mario Vargas Llosa's intellectual transformations, from socialism to pragmatism, and liberalism, are reflected in his political and historical fiction. From Sartrean anti-authoritarianism in La ciudad y los perros to an increasingly liberal world view in Cinco esquinas, El héroe discreto, or Travesuras de la niña mala, this monograph documents the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner's philosophical and literary journey.

Spirit possession is more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament than it is with the Hebrew Bible. In Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, however, Reed Carlson argues that possession is also depicted in this earlier literature, though rarely according to the typical western paradigm. This new approach utilizes theoretical models developed by cultural anthropologists and ethnographers of contemporary possession-practicing communities in the global south and its diasporas. Carlson demonstrates how possession in the Bible is a corporate and cultivated practice that can function as social commentary and as a means to model the moral self.The author treats a variety of spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible, including spirit language in the Psalms and Job, spirit empowerment in Judges and Samuel, and communal possession in the prophets. Carlson also surveys apotropaic texts and spirit myths in early Jewish literature-including the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this volume, two recent scholarly trends in biblical studies converge: investigations into notions of evil and of the self. The result is a synthesizing project, useful to biblical scholars and those of early Judaism and Christianity alike.

Previous scholars have largely approached Wisdom and Torah in the Second Temple Period through a type of reception history, whereby the two concepts have been understood as signifiers of independent, earlier "biblical" streams of tradition that later came together in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, largely under the process of a so-called "torahization" of wisdom. Recent studies critiquing the nature of wisdom and wisdom literature as operative categories for understanding scribal cultures in early Judaism, as well as newer approaches to conceptualizing Torah and authorizing-compositional practices related to the Pentateuchal texts, however, have challenged the foundations on which the previous models of Wisdom and Torah rested. This volume, therefore, brings together several essays that aim to reexamine and rethink the ways we can describe the developments of texts categorized as "Wisdom" that proliferated during the Second Temple Period and whose contents point to an engagement with a "Torah" discourse. By asking anew the question of whether "Wisdom" was transformed by/into "Torah" during this period, this volume offers reformulations on the discursive space between Wisdom and Torah through analyzing new identifications, confluences, and transformations.

The alchemist Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Anṣārī al-Andalusī, known as Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs (fl. 6th/12th century) is the author of Shudhūr al-dhahab (The Splinters of Gold), one of the most famous poetry collections of Arabic alchemy, which has been the object of no less than thirteen commentaries. The numerous manuscripts of Shudhūr al-dhahab and its commentaries have been read and copied for more than 700 years in various parts of the Islamicate world, from Morocco to India. The very first commentary on Shudhūr al-dhahab was composed by the author Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs himself. It was transmitted by his disciple Abū l-Qāsim Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī under the title Kitāb Ḥall mushkilāt al-Shudhūr (The Unraveling of the Difficulties of 'The Splinters') and is extant in at least 31 manuscripts, of which 27 have been taken into account for this critical edition. This book provides the first edition of Kitāb Ḥall mushkilāt al-Shudhūr, along with an Arabic-English glossary of its alchemical terminology.

This volume sheds light on the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the Covid-19 crisis by looking at health and biopolitics from a philosophical and literary perspective. The biopolitical measures taken globally in response to the crisis have led to previously unheard-of restrictions in liberal societies, resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations both in social structures and interpersonal relationships. Many researchers have addressed the Covid-19 crisis as a political or epidemiological challenge, but few have paid sufficient attention to the culturally specific reactions and cultural representations of the human beings at the centre of events. Literary analyses capture this human component and give insights into different reactions to, and protests against, the health-political measures addressing the crisis. This book puts the notion of biopolitics, first extensively theorised in the 1970s, to work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and uses literary case studies as starting points for discussions of contemporary politics, media, and legal and surveillance regimes. It brings together eleven scholars from six countries with the shared aim of combining literary and philosophical expertise to create a better understanding of the changes in society and political attitudes induced by the ongoing pandemic.

The group volume distinguishes itself by its multidisciplinary, comparative approach and by the network of relationships it weaves between the various European languages and cultures. The study takes shape from its different viewpoints and in its diverse contexts, to chart a detailed historical-conceptual map of the basic role theater played in forging the modern European consciousness. The thematic core of 'theatermania' lay in the authentic theatrical passion that manifested itself in different ways from one country to another throughout the 18th century. While the aesthetic, social and political value of theater took a variety of forms, its central feature was the privileged place it gave to collective and individual social revolutions, phenomena that could be defined as upheavals of the collective imagination, which found in theater a source of nourishment, mediation or control. The volume offers not just a series of historical-theatrical studies, but a view of history that foregrounds the passions that were regularly sparked by theater. It adds an essential feature to the profile of the century that redefined the role and importance of theater, and that led to its full re-evaluation in the Romantic age.

What is there to see in invisible artworks, empty books, or blank screens? How do formal absences generate meaning? Constructing an argument by way of montage, this book is an annotated inventory of textual, visual, and conceptual figures of absence. Spanning different media, it reveals a creative tradition that uses absence not as a negative aesthetic category, but as a productive state of radical indeterminacy with its own politics and poetics. Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of 'radical absence' to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of dematerialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence requires more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks than have been available to date. This monograph proposes we think of it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also - and perhaps more productively - as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.

The Qur'an with Cross-References provides for nearly every verse in the Qur'an a selection of other verses which shed light upon, clarify, or explain the verse you are reading. The Qur'an in its printed edition has not yet been cross-referenced, despite the fact that　Qur'an commentators realized quite early on the central importance of　tafsīr al-Qur'ān bi'l-Qur'ān　(interpreting the Qur'an through the Qur'an itself). Even some modern Muslim exegetes claim to follow this method. However, the cross-references they provided are very limited. Perhaps, the most extensive treatment and pioneered work on　tafsīr al-Qur'ān bi'l-Qur'ān　is that composed by Rudi Paret entitled　Der Koran: Kommentar und Konkordanz.　Paret's work is certainly very rich, which includes - in addition to possible cross-references - interpretations of and alternate renderings for a given verse or passage. Furthermore, as the term "Konkordanz" may indicate, his　Der Koran　provides all identical or similar phraseology and usage in different places of the Qur'an, a model that will not be followed in this Qur'an cross-references project. Instead, The Qur'an with Cross-References is based on connection between words, phrases, themes, concepts, events, and characters. One word may occur several times in the Qur'an, but the cross references will be made only where there is connection in meaning between two or more verses or passages. In preparing this cross-references project, several models and methods used for the cross-references of the Bible are consulted. As is well-known, Bible cross-references have been a long-established tradition, while the Qur'an, at least in its printed edition, has not been cross-referenced. The Qur'an with Cross-References is the first of its kind. The field has needed something like this, because in the existing Qur'an there is nothing to indicate that certain passages can shed light upon, clarify, or explain other passages.

This volume is the result of a symposium organised in 2018 by Élodie Attia in Aix-en-Provence and offers a cross-sectional view of the production of typologically similar Latin, Greek and Hebrew Bibles during the course of the Middle Ages. It first explores the different ways in which complete Bibles, in one or more volumes from the same production (pandects), were produced in different places and at different times, with an emphasis on their structural complexity. Complete Bibles are rare in all the traditions considered but especially interesting given the technical challenges that their production posed for craftsmen. Partial Bibles represent a different way of transmitting the biblical text, whether they consist of a choice of parts of the Bible, assembled and reassembled in more or less original ways, or in the design of new types (such as the "Pentateuch-Megillot-Haftarot", produced in the Ashkenazi world before 1300). Bibles with commentaries are a very varied category, illustrated here by two examples: first, the pandects produced by Theodulf (+ 821), in which the marginal notes are akin to a critical apparatus; second, Hebrew manuscripts containing systematic exegetical commentaries in sophisticated layouts that also vary according to their areas of production. Finally, the presentation of new fragments of a very ancient scroll of Genesis and Exodus from the Cairo Genizah sheds new light on its insertion into the Masoretic tradition, and to document the existence of partial Bibles in the form of scrolls. This volume shows the value of a comparative approach to ancient Bibles and hopefully represents a further step towards a more comprehensive perception of a history of the Bible.

Ireland possesses an early and exceptionally rich medieval vernacular tradition in which memory plays a key role. What attitudes to remembering and forgetting are expressed in secular early Irish texts? How do the texts conceptualise the past and what does this conceptualisation tell us about the present and future? Who mediates and validates different versions of the past and how is future remembrance guaranteed? This study approaches such questions through close readings of individual texts. It centres on three major aspects of medieval Irish memory culture: places and landscapes, the provision of information about the past by miraculously old eye-witnesses, and the personal, social and cultural impact of forgetting. The discussions shed light on the relationship between memory and forgetting and explore the connections between the past, present and future. This shows the fascinating spatio-temporal identity constructions in medieval Ireland and links the Irish texts to the broader European world. The monograph makes this rich literary sources available to an interdisciplinary audience and is of interest to both a general medievalist audience and those working in Cultural Memory Studies.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.

Der zweisprachige, deutsch-italienische Band geht der Frage nach, inwiefern Rezensionen in Zeitschriften zwischen 1700 und 1850 zu einem Begriff der 'Weltliteratur' beitrugen, wobei 'Weltliteratur' als Diskursanker rekonstruiert wird, der von Beginn an durchaus widersprüchlich eingesetzt und verstanden wurde. Bisher ausgeblendet geblieben ist die Frage nach den kommunikativen Bedingungen, die einer transnationalen Verständigung über Literatur zugrundelagen. Die Beiträge kehren zu den fundierenden Konstellationen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts zurück, um einen Aspekt in den Blick zu nehmen, der bisher erstaunlich vernachlässigt wurde: jenen der medialen Voraussetzungen des Weltliteratur-Diskurses. Dies ist umso erstaunlicher, als Goethe den Begriff der 'Weltliteratur' nicht von ungefähr mit Blick auf die neuen Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten prägte, die das schnellste Massenmedium seiner Zeit, die periodische Presse, bereithielt. Mit Blick auf eine breite Palette von europäischen Zeitschriften wird die Rezension in ihrer kommunikationssteuernden Bedeutung für die frühe Aushandlung von 'Weltliteratur' sichtbar gemacht. Die Beiträge des Bandes zeigen, wie Rezensionen die frühe internationale Debatte allererst ermöglichten und nachhaltig prägten.

This volume builds on the work of Ilse Laude-Cirtautas (1926¿2019), a pioneering Turkologist who introduced the field of comparative Turkic studies to the US in the 1960s. It presents an ongoing dialogue whereby scholars from central and inner Asia and the West engage on issues of Turkic heritage, identity, language and literature. The discussions enrich scholarship in Central and Inner Asian Studies and explore the question "Who are the Turks?"

For about one thousand years, the Distichs of Cato were the first Latin text of every student across Europe and latterly the New World. Chaucer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare assumed their audiences knew them well--and they almost certainly did. Yet most Classicists today have either never heard of them or mistakenly attribute them to Cato the Elder. The Distichs are a collection of approximately 150 two-line maxims in hexameters that offer instructions about or reflections on topics such as friendship, money, reputation, justice, and self-control. Wisdom from Rome argues that Classicists (and others) should read the Distichs: they provide important insights into the ancient Roman literate masses' conceptions of society and their views of relationships between the individual, family, community, and state. Newly dated to the first century CE, they are an important addition and often corrective to more familiar contemporary texts that treat the same topics. Moreover, as the field of Classics increasingly acknowledges the intellectual importance of exploring the reception of Classical texts, an introduction to one of the most widely read ancient texts for many centuries is timely and important.

En 2021, cinco de las siete repúblicas centroamericanas celebraron el bicentenario de su independencia de la Corona española ocurrida en 1821. ¿Cómo se ha desarrollado Centroamérica durante los últimos dos siglos? ¿Qué lecciones se pueden aprender de la historia de Centroamérica? El libro ofrece una revisión profunda e interdisciplinaria de esta región entre el siglo XIX y XIX. Los artículos se basan en fuentes nuevas provenientes de diferentes archivos, y de una pluralidad de métodos de investigación que hacen posible una reflexión crítica de la historiografía tradicional. Esto significa incluir visiones, motivaciones y perspectivas centroamericanas frente a aquellos cambios que trascienden sus efectos en las sociedades actuales de la región. Las contribuciones de autores de América Latina y la región euroatlántica ponen el énfasis en la perspectiva de procesos transnacionales que representan el cambio epistemológico para una mayor compresión de Centroamérica.

Despite the relevance of astrology in Graeco-Roman mentality, our information about the early period of Hellenistic astrology is marred by the scarcity of original sources. Personal astrology did not take off until the late Hellenistic period, due to the more substantial Hellenization of Mesopotamia facilitating the import of Babylonian theories. The most relevant doctrines, mostly surviving as references and partial paraphrases in later authors and astrological miscellanies, are attached to the pseudepigraphical names of Nechepsos and Petosiris, which have been traced back to the Egyptian Demotic tradition. Critodemus, who is classified as a later author even if Firmicus Maternus invokes him as a founding authority, appears as a parallel to these Egyptian transmitters, in that he presented astrology, like them, in the form of a didactic poem, but employing an Orphic frame instead of Egyptian. By collecting, contextualizing, and analyzing all the evidence on this author, this book establishes a relatively early chronology for Critodemus and aims both at distinguishing his original contributions and at explaining the various forms in which his text was used and modified in the later tradition.

How have humans sought to prevent viable assumptions about themselves and their world from being in force, how does this propensity manifest itself, and in what terms has it been theorized and criticized throughout the ages? Through a diversity of discrete case-studies spanning a vast time-scale (including topics such as paleolithic personal ornaments, pre-ancient ritual economy, ancient philosophy, and modern artful science), this study explores the means by which humans voluntarily suspend habitual patterns of judgement and disbelief in order to perceive the world differently. In recognizing how such modes of suspension can be variously traced back to religious comportments and institutions, a new sense of religious participation is identified beyond the credulous subjunction to artifice and its critical dismissal. The relevant outcome of this long-term comparative approach is that sincere devotion to a (practical or theoretical, scientific or spiritual) cause and the temporary affirmation of artifice are not mutually exclusive comportments, but rather genealogically akin to the discretely sacred (alchemical, ataraxic, epistemological, spectacular, thaumaturgic, etc.) concerns of a pre-modern world.

This book is for engineers and students of aerospace, materials and mechanical engineering. It covers the transition from aluminum to composite materials for aerospace structures and includes advanced analyses used in industries. New in the 2nd Edition is material on morphing structures, large deflection plates, nondestructive methods, vibration correlation technique for shear loaded plates, vibrations to measure physical properties, and more.

The updated edition of the third of three vollumes on Medical Physics presents modern physical methods for medical therapy with a focus on tumor treatment. It provides background information on radiation biology, radiation response of tissues, and linear energy transfer through radiation. Therapies with external radiation sources (x-rays, protons, neutrons) as well as internal radiation sources (brachytherapy) are discussed in detail. Other chapters deal with the use of lasers and nanoparticles in modern medicine. This volume closes with a short chapter on medical statistics. NEW: highlighted boxes emphasize specifi c topics; math boxes explain more advanced mathematical issues; each chapter concludes with a summary of the key concepts, questions, exercises, and a self-assessment of the acquired competence. The appendix provides answers to questions and solutions to exercises.

The volume brings together contributions on 15th and 16th century translation throughout Europe (in particular Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and England).Whilst studies of the reception of ancient Greek drama in this period have generally focused on one national tradition, this book widens the geographical and linguistic scope so as to approach it as a European phenomenon. Latin translations are particularly emblematic of this broader scope: translators from all over Europe latinised Greek drama and, as they did so, developed networks of translators and practices of translation that could transcend national borders. The chapters collected here demonstrate that translation theory and practice did not develop in national isolation, but were part of a larger European phenomenon, nourished by common references to Biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities, and honed by common religious and scholarly controversies. In addition to situating these texts in the wider context of the reception of Greek drama in the early modern period, this volume opens avenues for theoretical debate about translation practices and discourses on translation, and on how they map on to twenty-first-century terminology.

The disparagement of multilingualism is a European development of the 18th and 19th centuries in which one national language and national literature were advocated, established and institutionalised. Multilingual writers made use of the creative potential of several languages even then. However, they often adapted to an increasingly monolingual book market, which made their individual multilingualism invisible.This is evident in literary historiography which established a monolingual national canon.Researching hidden multilingualism is often difficult: since multilingual texts by multilingual writers were often not published or were published in a monolingual version, sources are scarce. Literary histories of the time often do not mention multilingualism. Furthermore, many multilingual writers were members of minority groups (women, Jewish, Non-European) and thus often neglected.The volume offers methods and theories to systematically approach this hidden material, as well as case studies on authors and national literatures in a multilingual context. It thus contributes to the restructuring of a multilingual transnational literary history that is applicable to different philologies.

Judaic cultures have a commitment to language that is exceptional. Language in many form - texts, books and scrolls; learning, interpretation, material practices that generate material practices - are central to Judaic conduct, experience, and spirituality. In this Judaic traditions differ from philosophical and theological ones that make language secondary. Traditional metaphysics has privileged the immaterial and unchanging, as unchanging truth that language can at best convey and at worst distort. Such traditional metaphysics has come under critique since Nietzsche in ways that the author explores. Shira Wolosky argues that Judaic traditions converge with contemporary metaphysical critique rather than being its target. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, Scholem and others, the author examines traditions of Judaic interpretation against backgrounds of biblical exegesis; sign-theory as it recasts language meaning in ways that concord with Judaic textuality; negative theology as it differs in Judaic tradition from those which negate language itself; and lastly outline a discourse ethics that draws on Judaic language theory. This study is directed to students and scholars of: Judaic thought, religious studies and theology; theory of interpretation; Levinas and other modern Jewish philosophical writers, placing them in broader contexts of philosophy, theology, and language theory. It is shown how Jewish discourses on language address urgent problems of value and norms in the contemporary world that has challenged traditional anchors of truth and meaning.

Nel rigoglioso revival di commenti al Bellum Civile di Lucano degli ultimi due decenni il libro VIII non aveva ancora ricevuto un interesse proporzionato alla sua decisiva importanza nella struttura generale del poema: fino a ora gli unici strumenti esegetici completi a disposizione degli studiosi restavano quelli di J. P. Postgate (1917) e R. Mayer (1981), ormai inevitabilmente datati. Questo nuovo commento, corredato da un'ampia introduzione, da un testo criticamente riveduto e da una traduzione 'di servizio' concepita come un primo approccio interpretativo, si propone di colmare questo vuoto non soltanto tenendo in debito conto il rinnovato dibattito scientifico su numerosi aspetti del poema di Lucano, ma facendo dell'analisi minuta del testo l'occasione per riconsiderare sotto una luce nuova alcuni temi tradizionali della bibliografia lucanea, dal rapporto con le fonti storiche a quello con la pratica della declamazione, dalle posizioni politiche del poeta alle sue competenze tecnico-scientifiche. Per queste ragioni il volume si configura come un'opportunità di confronto e di approfondimento non soltanto per chi si occupa di epica latina o di letteratura di età neroniana, ma anche per gli storici e gli studiosi di retorica.

Jamaica Kincaid's works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday lives. Throughout her novels, short fiction, and non-fictional essays, Kincaid's texts engage with history through its medial representations, which are starkly determined by colonial perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the media text, image, and the human body, the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaid's "poetics of impermanence" counter colonial representations of history with strategies of ambiguity, repetition, and redirection. Kincaid's texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial history - a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.

Il volume contiene le lettere scritte da Scipio Slataper (1888-1915) alle tre amiche triestine, Anna Pulitzer, Elody Oblath e Gigetta (Luisa) Carniel, tra l'estate del 1909 e il 3 dicembre 1915, quando egli cadde in combattimento sul Podgora, in vista del tanto amato Carso triestino. In queste lettere, che fungono anche da pagine di diario poiché in Scipio sovente la lettera è un "di sé a sé stesso", si rispecchia un'incandescente vicenda esistenziale ed intellettuale: di amicizia, di amore, di dolore, di ricerca del senso della vita, di impegno culturale e civile, di creazione artistica; mentre le ultime, a Gigetta, testimoniano i pochi mesi di vita al fronte. La cognizione del dolore, e quindi della vita, che gli venne dalla tragica morte di Anna, con cui visse una brevissima storia d'amore, fece riconoscere a Scipio il senso e il valore, e quindi il compito, da dare alla propria esistenza: amare gli uomini e operare per il loro bene. Una nozione più ampia e inclusiva dell'amore, che trascende quello a due, dall'estate del 1911, ricambiato, per Gigetta, ch'egli sposò nel settembre del 1913, mentre a Elody continuò a legarlo un'amicizia vera e profonda, provata su tutti i frangenti.