Author: Israel Gershoni File Type: pdf Confronting Fascism in Egypt offers a new reading of the political and intellectual culture of Egypt during the interwar era. Though scholarship has commonly emphasized Arab political and military support of Axis powers, this work reveals that the shapers of Egyptian public opinion were largely unreceptive to fascism, openly rejecting totalitarian ideas and practices, Nazi racism, and Italys and Germanys expansionist and imperialist agendas. The majority (although not all) of Egyptian voices supported liberal democracy against the fascist challenge, and most Egyptians sought to improve and reform, rather than to replace and destroy, the existing constitutional and parliamentary system. The authors place Egyptian public discourse in the broader context of the complex public sphere within which debate unfoldedin Egypts large and vibrant network of daily newspapers, as well as the weekly or monthly opinion journalsemphasizing the open, diverse, and pluralistic nature of the interwar political and cultural arena. In examining Muslim views of fascism at the moment when classical fascism was at its peak, this enlightening book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and Islamo-Fascism. **

Author: Heidi C. M. Scott File Type: pdf In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This studys interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology. **Review Heidi Scotts book belongs to the new wave of ecocriticismscientifically literate and fully engaged with the urgent issues of environmental deterioration, global warming, and sustainability. She connects the new scientific zeitgeist of complexity and chaos with the poetics of ecology, showing how, intriguingly, the poets got there first. More importantly, the sciences and humanities share a single vision here, as they must if the planet is to be saved. Gillen DArcy Wood, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This expansive, well-written, and provocative study employs key ecological tropes to generate important new insights into the environmental valence of Romantic and Victorian literature. Heidi Scotts close examination of narratives of apocalypse and toxicity is especially powerful, as is her connection of an emergent nineteenth-century ecology to current ecological paradigms, including chaotic change, disturbance ecology, and natural systems theory. Profoundly interdisciplinary in bridging the natural sciences, the humanities, and the cultural discourses of ecology, Chaos and Cosmos is a genuinely significant contribution to current scholarship in ecocriticism. Michael P. Branch, University of Nevada, Reno Heidi Scotts book deserves to be an instant classic of ecocritical analysis. Written in clear, often memorably vivid prose, Chaos and Cosmos is at once uniquely informed by scientific ecology and deeply satisfying as a work of literary criticism. Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia Scott offers a deeply compelling illustration of what a genuinely interdisciplinary critical attempt can look like, and she does so with boldness, warmth, and a profound knowledge of both cultures she addresses. Arden Hegele, Studies in Romanticism The range of the book is wide and ambitious. A reader interested in the long nineteenth century as well as contemporary ecological matters should read this book. Ann C. Colley, Victorian Studies A thoughtful addition to an ecocritical idiom characterized by shuttling between current concerns and past resources. Daniel Williams, Victorian Literature and Culture About the Author Heidi C. M. Scott is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University.

Author: Terrell Carver File Type: pdf Marx was a highly original and polymathic thinker, unhampered by disciplinary boundaries, whose intellectual influence has been enormous. Yet in the wake of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe the question arises as to how important his work really is for us now. An important dimension of this volume is to place Marxs writings in their historical context and to separate what he actually said from what others (in particular, Engels) interpreted him as saying. Informed by current debates and new perspectives, the volume provides a comprehensive coverage of all the major areas to which Marx made significant contributions.

Author: Donica Belisle File Type: pdf The experience of walking down a store aisle -- replete with displays, advertisements, salespeople, consumer goods, and infinite choice -- is now so common that we often forget retail stores barely existed a century ago. Retail Nation traces Canadas transformation into a modern consumer nation back to an era when Eatons, Simpsons, and the Hudsons Bay Company fostered and came to rule the countrys shopping scene. Between 1890 and 1940, department stores revolutionized selling and shopping by parlaying cheap raw materials, business-friendly government policies, and growing demand for low-priced goods into retail empires that promised to meet citizens needs and strengthen the nation. Some Canadians found happiness and fulfillment in their aisles others experienced nothing more than a cold shoulder and a closed door. The stores advertising and public relations campaigns often disguised a darker, more complicated reality that included strikes, union drives, customer complaints, government inquiries, and public criticism. This vivid account of Canadian department stores in their heyday showcases department stores as powerful agents of nationalism and modernization. But the nation that their catalogues and shopping experience helped to define -- white, consumerist, middle-class -- was more limited than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.