Here is a sample of the 14 items added to the collection in the past week. Click on a title for more information. TWU login may be required.
LITERATURE
Chinese poetry in times of mind, mayhem and money /by Maghiel van Crevel. Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking study covering a range of contemporary authors and issues, from Haizi to Yin Lichuan and from poetic rhythm to exile-bashing. Its rigorous scholarship, literary sensitivity and lively style make it eminently fit for classroom use.
The faith of William Shakespeare /Graham Holderness. In this authoritative new study, Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare’s life, the times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and languages which Shakespeare was himself steeped in–the language of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. Considering selected plays Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare’s psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.
George MacDonald: divine carelessness and fairytale levity /Daniel Gabelman. Nineteenth century photographs of MacDonald present a forbidding visage, embodying Victorian-era solemnity. Yet behind the facade, as Gabelman writes, lived a whimsical and fantastical muse. Indeed, MacDonald imbued theological weight through childlike lightheartedness. Gabelman ably reveals in MacDonald’s writings a bridge between playfulness and seriousness in the modern imagination. George MacDonald delivers a balanced reading of its subject that ultimately lends a new theological and literary weight to whimsy.
The great Gatsby /Warner Bros. Pictures in association with Village Roadshow Pictures in association with A&E Television a Bazmark/Red Wagon Entertainment production; produced by Baz Luhrmann A would-be writer, Nick Carraway leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz, bootleg kings, and skyrocketing stocks. Chasing his own American dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby. It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves, and deceits.
A literary mirror: Balinese reflections on modernity and identity in the twentieth century /I Nyoman Darma Putra. A literary mirror is the first English-language work to comprehensively analyse Indonesian-language literature from Bali from a literary and cultural viewpoint. It covers the period from 1920 to 2000. This is an extremely rich field for research into the ways Balinese view their culture and how they respond to external cultural forces. This work complements the large number of existing studies of Bali and its history, anthropology, traditional literature, and the performing arts. A literary mirror is an invaluable resource for those researching twentieth-century Balinese authors who wrote in Indonesian. Until now, such writers have received very little attention in the existing literature.
POLITICAL STUDIES
Rebellion under the banner of Islam: the Darul Islam in Indonesia / C. van Dijk. The Darul Islam rebellion, striving for the establishment of an Islamic State of Indonesia, broke out in several areas since 1949. The author describes each of these Darul Islam rebellions and identifies some of the factors which may help to explain their outbreak and persistence.
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Christianity and the Asian revolution [electronic resource] /edited by Rajah B. Manikam. This is a collection of articles about the “Asian Revolution”, that is, the political, economic, social and ideological changes that took place in East Asia in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
All we leave behind: a reporter’s journey into the lives of others /Carol Off. Tells the gripping story of a family’s desperate attempts to escape Afghan warlords, Taliban oppression, and the persecutions of refugee life, in hopes that both their sons and their daughters could dare to dream of peace and opportunity. In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became key to their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one particular warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. Their only chance for a peaceful life was to emigrate–yet year after year of agonizing limbo would ensue as they were thwarted by a Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper’s government. Off’s powerful account traces not only one family’s journey and fraught attempts to immigrate to a safe place, it also illustrates what happens when a journalist becomes deeply involved with the people in her story and is unable to leave them behind.
Cleanliness and culture: Indonesian histories /edited by Kees van Dijk and Jean Gelman Taylor. In Cleanliness and culture attention shifts to Indonesia, in colonial times as well as in the present. Subjects range from the use of soap and the washing of clothes as a pretext to claim superiority of race and class to how references to being clean played a role in a campaign against European homosexuals in the Netherlands Indies at the end of the 1930s. Other topics are eerie skin diseases and the sanitary measures to eliminate them, and how misconceptions about lack of hygiene as the cause of illness hampered the finding of a cure. Attention is also drawn to differences in attitude towards performing personal body functions outdoors and retreating to the privacy of the bathroom, to traditional bathing ritual and to the modern tropical Spa culture as a manifestation of a New Asian lifestyle.
The end of development: a global history of poverty and prosperity /Andrew Brooks In The End of Development, Brooks makes a provocative argument that inequality is rooted in the very nature of our approach to development itself. Tracing the long arc of human history, Brooks rejects popular environmental explanations for the divergence of nations, showing that the prosperity of the West and poverty of “the rest” stems not from environmental factors but from the dynamics of capitalism and colonialism, which enriched the powers of the global North at the expense of the South. Rather than address the root causes of this inequality, international development strategies have so far only served to exacerbate them, by imposing crippling debts and destructive policies on developing nations. Brooks suggests that this disastrous form of development is now coming to an end, as the emerging economies of Asia and Africa begin to assert themselves on the world stage. In The End of Development he urges that we must seize this opportunity to transform attitudes towards inequality and to develop radical new approaches to addressing global poverty.
Gender, ritual and social formation in West Papua: a configurational analysis comparing Kamoro and Asmat /Jan Pouwer. This study, based on a lifelong involvement with New Guinea, compares the culture of the Kamoro (18,000 people) with that of their eastern neighbours, the Asmat (40,000), both living on the south coast of West Papua, Indonesia. The comparison, showing substantial differences as well as striking similarities, contributes to a deeper understanding of both cultures. The comparison includes a cross-cultural, structural analysis of relevant myths.
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