GLOBAL RHETORICAL TRADITIONS is unique in design and scope. It presents, as accessibly as possible, translated primary sources on global rhetorical instruction and practices of Asia, Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, Polynesia, and precolonial Europe. Each of the book’s chapters represents a different rhetorical region and includes a prefatory introduction, critical commentary, translated primary sources, a glossary of rhetorical terms, and a comprehensive bibliography. The general i...

Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection Category, 2018With the election of our first black president, many Americans began to argue that we had finally ended racism, claiming that we now live in a postracial era. Yet near-daily news reports regularly invoke white as a demographic category and recount instances of racialized violence as well as an increased sensitivity to expressions of racial unrest. Clearly, American society isn’t as color-blind as pe...

Available in English for the first time, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women brings together twenty-five essays by seven critically acclaimed writers, whose fiction and poetry have become classics in modern Chinese literature. Poetic, metaphoric, and sometimes playful and satiric, the essays discuss the material reality wherein Chinese women live and function. Reflecting on their experiences under Mao and in post-Maoist China, these essays vividly ...

*SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*'There to fill the Sapiens-size hole in your life' ObserverIn this groundbreaking global overview of philosophy, Julian Baggini travels the world to provide a wide-ranging map of human thought.One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy flowered entirely separately in China, India and Ancient Greece at more or less the s...

A sweeping exploration of the ways in which emotions shaped the course of human history, and how our experience and understanding of emotions have evolved along with us. "Eye-opening and thought-provoking!” (Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain)We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with co...

“These essays, deftly blending the political and the personal, offer fresh, galvanizing, and passionate perspectives on literary translation.”—Jhumpa LahiriA manifesto in 22 essays, Violent Phenomena breaks stale rules about who can and should translate, envisioning a future more reflective of the beautiful polyphony of literature in all languages.?What would it take to unlearn centuries of colonial influence over the books we read...

Randall Collins traces the movement of philosophical thought in ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a social theory of intellectual change, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas are formed: the patterns...

Ritual and Belief: Readings in the Anthropology of Religion is a collection of 41 readings in religion, magic, and witchcraft. The choice of readings is eclectic: no single anthropological approach or theoretical perspective dominates the text. Theoretical significance, scholarly eminence of the author, and inherent interest provide the principal criteria, and each reading complements its companion chapters, which are pedagogically coherent rather than ad hoc assemblages. Included among th...

How the role of the philosopher has changed over time and across cultures—and what it reveals about philosophy todayWhat would the global history of philosophy look like if it were told not as a story of ideas but as a series of job descriptions—ones that might have been used to fill the position of philosopher at different times and places over the past 2,500 years? The Philosopher does just that, providing a new way of looking at the history of philosoph...

The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies is both informative and provocative, introducing readers to key debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggesting future research possibilities. A group of distinguished scholars takes up some of the most pressing theoretical questions in the field. What is a 'religious tradition'? How are religious texts read? What takes place when a religious practitioner stands before a representation of gods or goddesses, ghosts, ancestors, saints...

A critical exploration of the life's work of one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers and poets, Kahlil GibranThrough his fiction, essays, poems, and art, Kahlil Gibran inspired a devoted international following and transformed modern Arabic literature. In this book, Joseph P. Ghougassian brings together the philosophical elements present across Gibran's diverse writings, including his bestselling work The Prophet, as well as other signifi...

Polytheisms may well be the world’s most undervalued cultural resource. From the dawn of history until quite recently, the default religious orientation on the planet was to recognize an open-ended plurality of unique divinities that manifest in every realm of natural and social life. By hosting a plurality of Gods, polytheistic civilizations exhibit maximum diversity in maximum solidarity each one is a multiverse. Polytheism has been at the heart of the most ancient and resilient civiliza...