This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the present. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven recuperates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of ...

Pearls of Meaning offers a collection of essays by J.T.P. (Hans) de Bruijn, a leading scholar in the field of Persian Studies, in which essential domains of Persian culture such as poetry and Sufism are analyzed in an exemplary fashion. While poetry plays a pivotal position in these essays, the reception of the Persian literary tradition in Europe is another focus of the volume. De Bruijn evaluates the works of a generation of scholars such as A. Reland (1676-1718), C.H. Ethé (1844-1917), J....

Este trabajo es un estudio decolonial de los manuscritos pictóricos del Ñuu Savi (Pueblo de la Lluvia), México, y busca el entendimiento de sus valores culturales a través del estudio holístico y diacrónico de su herencia viva y patrimonio histórico-cultural, teniendo como base la reintegración de la memoria cultural con fundamento en la continuidad cultural, vinculando el pasado y el presente a través de la lengua de la lluvia (Sahan Savi) y desde la perspectiva del propio Ñuu Savi...

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research offers a captivating new analysis of political culture, power relations, and dynastic developments.

In great detail, this monograph provides both new facts and fresh insights that contest exi...

At the end of WWI, millions of military and civilians were displaced across Europe, the South Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean. While many made their way home, genocide, revolution, and post-war instabilities complicated the repatriation of prisoners of war from Russia and the Central Powers and pushed Russian and Armenian refugees into exile. In response, an array of international organizations intervene: three of them, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Natio...

For a long time, silk, tea, sinocentrism, and eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau joss-stick makers, Hong Kong locals, a...

The proclamation of Jihad by the Sultan-Caliph in Constantinople, after the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I, made the headlines. This book investigates the background and nature of the Ottoman Jihad proclamation in addition to its effects in the wider Middle East - both among the Arabs and the Turks, and among Sunni Muslims as well as Shi'ites. It brings to light the German hopes for and British fears of a worldwide uprising of Muslims in the colonial empires at that time. Moreover, i...

Herencias e Interacciones Socioculturales en Mesoamérica y Occidente

The existence of communities and peoples develops over time, in a diachronic line of heritage and cultural memory as well as in a synchronous coexistence with the cosmos, marked by cyclically returning rituals. Under the pressure of "clock time" ("time is money") these organic "other times" of identity are eroding rapidly. In these respects, modernity has come to be characterized by a deep, dramatic and often violent conflic...

Tulou are traditional fortified multifamily dwellings prevalent in southern Fujian. In this 34st volume of the ASLU series Renyu Wang discusses three aspects of Chinese tulou heritage management. He first examines the tulou interpretation prevailing in southern Fujian. Based on building studies, oral history, genealogies and interviews, Wang tries to reconstruct a relatively complete landscape biography to describe the essential episodes of built environment evolution in the Hekeng River Vall...

The Eighty Years War explores the military puzzle of the Dutch Republic. When a revolt broke out in the Low Countries against the rule of the King of Spain, no one could foresee that it would ultimately lead to the partition of the provinces.

Only the northern provinces succeeded in holding their own militarily. They formed an independent republic that was increasingly able to withstand the might of Spain. How did they do it? To answer that question this study examines the operations of the in...