Suchergebnisse

Jenny Jochens captures in fascinating detail the lives of women in pagan and early Christian Iceland and Norway - their work, sexual behavior, marriage customs, reproductive practices, familial relations, leisure activities, religious practices, and legal constraints and protections. Much of this information also applies to everyday life in the entire Germanic world. Conveying the experiences not only of aristocrats but also of ordinary farmers, the author draws from her extensive knowledge of the oldest and fullest record of the Germanic tribes. Women in Old Norse Society places particular emphasis on changing sexual mores and the impact of the imposition of Christianity by the clergy and the Norwegian kings. It also demonstrates the vital role women played in economic production: homespun was used for every conceivable domestic purpose; the lengths of cloth became the standard of measurement for local commercial exchange and were used to obtain commodities abroad. Jochens's masterly command of the Old Norse narratives and legal texts enables her to provide a rich social history that includes the fullest analysis to date of pagan and Christian marriage and the first comprehensive study of infanticide in the North

A discussion of the relationship between agrarian change & industrialization in the USSR in the final years of the 1920s. It is argued that Joseph Stalin's rapid industrialization was unplanned, the natural outcome of militarization & agrarian policies that forced the peasants into the cities, & not the kind of industrialization appropriate for building a socialist society. Historiographic retrieval methods & critical evaluation are employed to assess the events leading up to the situation existing when Stalin assumed control, & the subsequent collectivization & industrialization processes are traced. It is concluded that Soviet industrialization was a tragedy in every sense, with the defeat of the Nazis the only laudable result. F. Rasmussen

In recent decades, civil resistance, also known as nonviolent action, has become more widely used among social movements and recognised by researchers. Alexei Anisin has usefully offered a critique of civil resistance theory and practice. His ideas are used as a basis for reflection and deeper understanding of both strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Inspired by Anisin's questioning of the dataset used to compare nonviolent and violent anti-regime campaigns, we point to multiple neglected factors. Anisin contrasts quantitative nonviolence research unfavourably with medical and scientific research. Although Anisin's image of science is idealised, it does point to the value of recognising the role of values in civil resistance research and in critiques of it.

Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies. It contends that globalization, far from starting in recent decades, has a long and complex history, not unlike the history of literature itself, meaning that when we speak of globalization and literature, we in effect invoke the entire history of literature. Essays examine literary genres in relation to broader historical processes, connecting the present state of globalization to such key world-historic events as the early modern geographical and scientific explorations, the Enlightenment, the expansions of modernity in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postmodernity and postcoloniality, and contemporary counter-hegemonic movements.

Medieval Christian use of Hebrew and postbiblical Jewish texts -- Nicholas of Lyra, O.F.M.: mediating Hebrew traditions for a Christian audience -- The challenge of unbelief: knowing Christian truth through Jewish scripture -- Wrestling with Rashi: Nicholas of Lyra's quodlibetal questions and anti-Jewish polemic -- Christian ownership of Jewish text: Nicholas of Lyra as an alternative Jewish authority

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Sounds of Silence -- Gothic Ornament and Sartorial Peasants -- English America: Worth Dying For? -- Bede's Blush: Postcards from Bali, Bombay, Palo Alto -- Works of Mourning -- The Devil's Anal Eye: Inquisitorial Optics and Ethnographic Authority -- Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible -- Virtual Loops -- Humanist History and the Haunting of Virtual Technologies: Problems of Memory and Rememoration -- Stranded Histories: Allegories of Artificial Life -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index