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The fruitfulness of imaginative literature as source material for the student of politics has been a subject for much debate over recent years, though the impact of literature on the teaching of politics remains limited. This paper addresses by means of an example (that of the relationship between means and ends) some of the fundamental problems involved in the relationship and some of the advantages which imaginative literature might bring to our understanding of political issue and concepts. Following introductory comments about the relationship between politics and literature in general we consider the treatment of means and ends in political theory, especially Machiavelli's claim that when the 'act accuses, the result excuses'. Finally and substantively we consider the treatment of the means/end theme in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Gladiators and conclude with some general comments about the relationship between the study of politics and imaginative literature.

The first historically broad and in-depth study of the Canadian Western, its relationship to the American genre, and its shifting place within Canada's national and regional literary traditions. The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary phenomenon. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an ...

A history of Maltese culture may be said to reflect in various ways the history of the whole community. Since, much more than in the case of larger countries, Malta could never do without foreign contacts, necessarily causative of a complex process of influences, adaptations and reactions (and consequently only through a study of a set of assimilations can the scholar arrive at a true definition of a Maltese identity), such a history, be it political, social or cultural, is bound to assume a comparative character. This may be all the more so owing to the fact that what one may euphemistically call foreign contacts were nothing less than foreign occupations. The conditions which characterize and modify the process of, say, a political history of subordination may boil down to be the inalienable causes of analogous conditions in the cultural field. ; peer-reviewed

Mit Blick auf die Konstruktion nationaler Identitäten multilingualer Gemeinschaften kommt dem Großherzogtum Luxemburg durch seine spezifische Lage an der Nahtstelle zwischen germanischen und romanischen Kulturraum eine besondere Rolle zu. Isabell Baumann rekonstruiert seinen Emanzipationsprozess von der Staatsgründung über die beiden Weltkriege bis zum Jahr 1984. Vermittels exemplarischer Analysen literarischer Beispiele, konsequent eingebettet in historische Kontextualisierungen, untersucht sie in einem interdisziplinären Ansatz, wie Figurationen von Identität im Horizont der je spezifischen Diskurslage in der Literatur inszeniert und konstruiert werden

Poetry of life in literature and through literature, and the vast territory in between - as vast as human life itself - where they interact and influence each other, is the nerve of human existence. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are profoundly dissatisfied with the stark reality of life's swift progress onward, and the enigmatic and irretrievable meaning of the past. And so we dramatise our existence, probing deeply for a lyrical and heartfelt yet universally valid sense of our experience. It is in great works of literature that we seek those hidden springs that so move us. It is in honour of this search that this collection focuses on the creative imagination at work in literature and aesthetics

What are the possibilities of connection between politics and literature? How have those possibilities been developed? Why should students of politics turn to literature as a source of political understanding? Connections have traditionally been made in terms of literature as illustration or example for politics or as a form of moral education. Other possibilities are a 'political sociology of literature' or literature as a primary source for political studies. Work in the United States suggests further extensions. The case for 'politics and literature' is also strengthened by recent developments in political theory such as the interest in 'identity' or 'narrative'.