Eleven eBooks were added to the collection in the past week. Click on a title for more information. TWU login may be required.
LINGUSTICS
Language of the snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the language order of premodern India /Andrew Ollett. Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kāvya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring “language order” in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.
POLITICAL STUDIES
Outcasts of empire: Japan’s rule on Taiwan’s “savage border,” 1874–1945 /Paul D. Barclay. Outcasts of Empire unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of “long nineteenth century” global transformations. Superior firepower and large economic reserves ultimately enabled Japanese statesmen to discard mediators on the border and sideline a cohort of indigenous headmen who played both sides of the fence to maintain their chiefly status. Even with reluctant “allies” marginalized, however, the colonial state lacked sufficient resources to integrate Taiwan’s indigenes into its disciplinary apparatus. The colonial state therefore created the Indigenous Territory, which exists to this day as a legacy of Japanese imperialism, local initiatives, and the global commodification of culture.
Taiwan and China: fitful embrace /edited by Lowell Dittmer. Contributors to this volume focus on three aspects of the evolving quandary: nationalistic identity, social economy, and political strategy.
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
A church in the wilds [electronic resource]: the remarkable story of the establishment of the South American mission amongst the hitherto savage and intractable natives of the Paraguayan Chaco /Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb. This is a further account by Grubb of his missionary work among the native tribes of Paraguay.
The givenness of desire: concrete subjectivity and the natural desire to see God /Randall S. Rosenberg. Rosenberg examines the human desire for God through the lens of Lonergan’s “concrete subjectivity.” Rosenberg engages and integrates two major scholarly developments: the tension between Neo-Thomists and scholars of Henri de Lubac over our natural desire to see God and the theological appropriation of the mimetic theory of René Girard, with an emphasis on the saints as models of desire. With Lonergan as an integrating thread, the author engages a variety of thinkers, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean-Luc Marion, René Girard, James Alison, Lawrence Feingold, John Milbank, among others. The theme of concrete subjectivity helps to resist the tendency of equating too easily the natural desire for being with the natural desire for God without at the same time acknowledging the widespread distortion of desire found in the consumer culture that infects contemporary life. The Givenness of Desire investigates our paradoxical desire for God that is rooted in both the natural and supernatural.
The missionary genius of the Bible [electronic resource] /by Vernon F. Storr, M.A., canon of Westminster; examining chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury This book of missionary theology is an expanded version of a paper, The Missionary Message of the Gospels, originally presented at a Missionary conference at Hertfordshire in 1924.
SOCIAL STUDIES
Child’s play: multi-sensory histories of children and childhood in Japan /edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations–some from Japan’s early-modern past–are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters.
Citizen outsider: children of North African immigrants in France /Jean Beaman. Through fieldwork and interviews in Paris and its banlieues, Beaman examines middle-class and upwardly mobile children of Maghrébin, or North African immigrants. By showing how these individuals are denied cultural citizenship because of their North African origin, she puts to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding cultural difference, race, and ethnicity and further centers race and ethnicity as crucial for understanding marginalization in French society.
URBAN DESIGN
Building green: environmental architects and the struggle for sustainability in Mumbai /Anne Rademacher. Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth asymmetries, and ecological stresses. By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, Rademacher shows how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices and sought to make them meaningful through engaged architectural practice. The book’s focus on practitioners offers insights into the many roles that converge to produce this emergent, critically important form of urban expertise. At once activists, scientists, and designers, the environmental architects profiled act as key agents of urban change whose efforts in practice are shaped by a complex urban development economy, layered political power relations, and a calculus of when, and how, their expert skills might be operationalized in service of a global urban future.
Alloway Library is open till 11PM tonight and tomorrow, December 8 &9 – and next Friday night too!
