Search Results for review

...William M. Chace Joyce James , The Little Review “Ulysses,” . ed. Gaipa Mark , Latham Sean , and Scholes Robert . ( New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2015 ), 455 pp. © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016...

...Wayne Andersen This review essay emphasizes the distinction between academic art history, based ultimately on the model of scientific research, and the sort that Roberto Calasso practices in his 2009 study Tiepolo in Pink . It is difficult to locate the book's genre, and the reviewer rejects...

...J. G. A. Pocock This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State (2014), which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004). According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its...

...J. G. A. Pocock In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (2013) and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” (2011 – 13). Sowerby opposes the “Whig interpretation...

...Christopher de Bellaigue This essay is a review of The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (2014), the last book that Patricia Crone wrote before she died, as well as an overview of her career and a tribute to her as a great historian of Islam. In Crone's...

...Jeffrey M. Perl This essay review is focused on Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart's book Peace-Making and the Imagination: Papua New Guinea Perspectives but also discusses in some detail other ethnographic and historical works. The reviewer finds that, in every case of peacemaking in Papua New...

...Jeffrey M. Perl In this essay review of Megan Quigley's Modern Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (2015), the editor of Common Knowledge comments on the explicit relationship between that book's arguments and those of the journal's six-part series “Fuzzy Studies: A Symposium...

...Philip Goodchild This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback shows how the book's accomplishment is to provide a Jungian analysis of the “shadow” of wealth: the primitive meanings attached to debt deriving from ancient cultural configurations of a proper balance in the order of things. Debt...

...Matthew Mutter Abstract J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of novels with Jesus in their titles, published between 2013 and 2019, has bewildered many reviewers. This essay review proposes that that bewilderment stems from a misconception of the novels’ allegorical dimension and of the possible meanings evoked...

...Matthew Mutter Abstract This review‐essay examines two books about the history of the modern humanities: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon and Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth‐Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler...

... to abolitionism and other pressing social causes. He reviews the scholarship on this issue, noting the recent tendency to look for mystical aspects to the social commitment of Quakers. Instead, however, he argues that the culture of Friends during this period became self-enclosed to a remarkable degree...

...Johan M. G. van der Dennen This monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” reviews and assesses the state of ethnographic and political scholarship concerning how nonstate, tribal societies deal with peacemaking and peacekeeping. A central argument...

...Chris Briggs What happens when a debtor does not pay back what he or she owes? As Margaret Atwood's chapter on “The Shadow Side” shows, the unpaid debt—in the broadest sense—is a recurring theme of history and literature. This review essay looks at the fourteenth-century village, a world which...

... of the region’s “most Byzantine” paintings (twelfth to fourteenth centuries). Yet a close examination of these frescoes reveals significant iconographic and stylistic differences from alleged Byzantine norms. A historiographic synopsis and review of problematic definitions of “Byzantine” art are followed...

...Sanford F. Schram James C. Scott’s book The Art of Not Being Governed is offered, in this essay review, as the latest evidence of the high value of Scott’s transdisciplinary research into how ordinary people resist state power. Scott’s critics have found his work methodologically deficient...

... repressive, whereas societies without a state are freer. This essay review asks whether the author shares with states, despite his criticism of them, a paucity of concern for the fates of individuals. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 Reviews AN ANARCHIST HISTORY...

...Mikhail Epstein; Jeffrey M. Perl This essay, coauthored by the editor and a member of the editorial board of Common Knowledge , introduces the fifth installment of the journal's symposium “Fuzzy Studies,” which is about the “consequence of blur.” Beginning with a review of Enlightenment ideas about...

...Bethany Moreton This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback centers on the observation that the book does not dwell on the unnatural face of interest and finance. In this era of financialization, debt has been thoroughly uncoupled from the concept of payback. The least valuable debt is the one...

...Colin Richmond To commemorate the five hundreth anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII to the English throne, this guest column reviews the inventories made, upon his death, of the king's possessions at Hampton Court, the Tower, and other locations. Focusing on extensive equipment for royal...

... of composition. In it, she reviews the stance of feminist literary criticism toward religion and finds it to be generally negative. She regrets that feminist critics see in religion mostly a means of subordinating women to men, given that most of the writers whose work they explicate were themselves fervently...