Explore the vast range of titles available.

Speculations on the human quest for freedom and the necessity of flinging open the floodgates of oppositional discourse have long been privileged themes in art and literature. Among Arab sculptors, no artist has taken up more seriously than Sami Mohammad the mission to perturb people with his reflections on these issues, and no artist has centered his aesthetics more resolutely on the task of thematizing them in order to unmask the dystopic conditions engendered by a floundering modernity. As a comparative study it postulates that aesthetically, Mohammad's concept of art, like that of Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound and Percey Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, is a dramatic envisioning of the nature of existence; that, like them, this vision is guided by a heightened political consciousness, the symbolic readings of the archetypal character of Prometheus, and an ethical ardor for humanistic values. Ali explores the semiosis and literary acculturations of four of Mohammad's major bronze figures in the round: Paralysis and Resistance (1980), The Challenge (1983), The Tied Man (1989), and The Earthquake (1990).

This study focuses on the aristocratic heroine of Meredith's The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper. It analyzes Meredith's dissonant conceptualization of a liberalized (i.e., a quasi-liberal) womanhood and its sociopolitical paternalistic agency. While Meredith draws on Mill's progressive views on the role of the clerisy (i.e., the learned elite), the art of management, and positive paternalism, he hails a conservatism that is androcentric and colonial. The importance of liberalized womanhood resides in its ability to reform the egoism of male citizens bent on perilous leisure, to qualify human capital through astute socio-managerial acts, and to outsource itself to the British Empire.

The argument and conclusions of this study do not contradict the positions that have been taken with regard to Scott's Toryism and its endorsement of Britishization. The study, however, takes issue with critical approaches that sidestep the implicit connections of Scott's pro-Britishization and his approach to the problem of the Scottish antisyzygy to key framing theoretical notions. Focusing on the underreserached The Highland Widow, the study explores two framing notions- chora and the political uncanny- that illuminate Scott's discourse on Britishization in a post-Culloden era. The study posits that the novella considers the immediate post-Culloden experiences of the Gael subject in terms of a dialectical interrelationship among the nationalizing tale, the uncanny (which should be rejected), and chora (which should be endorsed and trusted). To put succinctly this interrelationship, the nationalizing tale envisions an ideal egalitarian political structure. While the cultural taming of the political uncanny provides the Gael male subject with a focused rational mind that helps him acknowledge the demands for sociopolitical sobriety and the proper channeling of cultural values to fulfill lucrative pursuits, chora, a receptacle-like space that works affectively to install in the Gael a desire for assimilating into a newly emerging national collectivity, provides a structured space in which he reconstitutes himself within the abstract identity of Britishness. The novella emphasizes three processes that mark the future national state: the hegemony of Anglicization is bridled, Celticism is reformed, and Britishization configures as a guiding secular logos.

On this point, the study argues that the works discussed in it, above all, contest three media aspects: the rapid tempo of the televisual image sequence when the documentary footage is broadcast, the monofocality of the photojournalistic picture, and the auxiliary status of both. [...] the study maintains that in order to effect a layering of perception, which the accelerated tempo of the televisual and the monofocality of the photojournalistic dissipate, the texts, on the one hand, harbor a propensity for generic transference and, on the other, a predilection for decelerated tempos of image sequencing - Mohammad's sculpture incorporates narrative elements, and since it is of a single fettered figure, and since space and form are the most important of its plastic elements, the sculpted climactic moment is tantamount to frozen time.

Although scholars often praise Hardy's “The Fiddler of the Reels” as a work with “considerable power” (The Cambridge Companion 46), the theme of the workings of the market culture in the story has gone uninvestigated. Set against the backdrop of urban transformations that were enacted by the Great Exhibition and the new mass transportation system, the text dramatizes how male impulses fit into larger questions of acquisitive power and how a narrow preoccupation with dominance creates a messy reality. This study argues that exhibitions (in the material, commercial sense of the term) and exhibitionistic celebrity behavior are aligned in “The Fiddler,” and claims that certain Darwinian and Dionysian elements in the story underwrite this theme. To substantiate this argument, my analysis is attentive to two notions: a general notion of economy and a literary notion of the trickster as expounded by C. G. Jung and Mikhail Bakhtin. Before taking my argument further, I will summarize the plot of “The Fiddler.”

This article constructs Poe's implicit conceptualizations of a dynamic epistemology and superior epistemic competencies and their relationship to three attitudinal imperatives: a devaluation of a racism founded on biological determinism, the cultivation of a historical consciousness attuned to acculturation, and bricolage as a new measure that intimates ingenuity. Poe employs bricolage to delineate a spectrum of epistemic competence and to deny the existence of epistemic equivalence between the cultured mind of the aristocratic Egyptian mummy and the parochial minds of the sham Yankee scientists. Given these philosophical registers in “Some Words with a Mummy,” the study postulates that Poe seems to find in ancient Levantine scientific culture the inspiration and a model for a dynamic epistemology and superior epistemic competencies, both of which depend on the de-idealization of positivistic logic and espousal of a heuristics that is mindful of likely relationalities among diverse objects and elements and is practiced by an imaginative savant-bricoleur.