In Travel Narratives, Travel Fictions, Daniel Cooper Alarcon argues that travel literature performs important social and cultural criticism often overlooked in studies of the genre. By examining non-fiction and fiction novels and short stories that purposefully examine different types of travel in relationship to each other, Cooper Alarcon ......
A witty satire of the medical profession The Doctors' Dinner Party is an eleventh-century satire in the form of a novella, set in a medical milieu. A young doctor from out of town is invited to dinner with a group of older medical men, whose conversation reveals their incompetence. Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Bu?lan, the work ......
Each chapter in this collection offers a practical approach for using literature to engage and empower students to confront aspects of climate crises. Educators from different backgrounds and parts of the world share their experience using novels, short stories, drama, poetry, and nonfiction to help students understand the causes and consequences ......
"What interests me in poetry is the interplay of language, the page, and silence. Heaven falls out of words because possibility is in the page, another kind of heaven; I wonder if that's the only heaven we are given to know in life." -- Edward Dickinson (Ted) Blodgett E.D. Blodgett's final volume of poems, Walking Into God, is the culmination of ......
E. B. White (1899-1985) is best known for his children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. Columnist for The New Yorker for over half a century and co-author of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, White hit his stride as an American literary icon when he began publishing his "One Man's Meat" columns from his ......
A Mystical Theology of the Names of God in the Qur'an
A Sufi scholar's philosophical interpretation of the names of God The Divine Names is a philosophically sophisticated commentary on the names of God. Penned by the seventh-/thirteenth-century North African scholar and Sufi poet 'Afif al-Din al-Tilimsani, The Divine Names expounds upon the one hundred and forty-six names of God that appear in ......
Critical Animal Concepts for American Environmental Literature
Animal Texts examines key works of American environmental literature for how they portray, discuss, and represent animals. The author establishes critical animal concepts that expand the understanding and knowledge of animal lives to promote conservation and meaningful reflection on current human-animal relationships.
A groundbreaking exposition of Islamic mysticism The Essence of Reality was written over the course of just three days in 514/1120, by a scholar who was just twenty-four. The text, like its author 'Ayn al-Qudat, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which that it is in all likelihood the earliest philosophical exposition of mysticism in ......
Literally translated as "ocean of the sea of stories, " the Kathasaritasagara is a collection of stories of the ancient Hindu world. It was written by Somadeva in the 11th century. Unlike those more familiar classics, this work contains no hidden moral lessons. Instead, it is an uninhibited and beautiful celebration of earthly life.