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Boston's Massacre
by Eric HinderakerAn in-depth history of the pivotal event in Colonial America, as well as its causes, competing narratives, and evolving memories.On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre is one of the most familiar incidents in American history, yet one of the least understood. Eric Hinderaker revisits this dramatic episode, examining in forensic detail the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions at the time, and the long campaign afterward to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity.When Parliament stationed two thousand British troops in Boston beginning in 1768, resentment spread rapidly among the populace. Steeped in traditions of self-government and famous for their Yankee independence, Bostonians were primed to resist the imposition. Living up to their reputation as Britain’s most intransigent North American community, they refused compromise and increasingly interpreted their conflict with Britain as a matter of principle. Relations between Britain and the North American colonies deteriorated precipitously after the shooting at the Custom House, and it soon became the catalyzing incident that placed Boston in the vanguard of the Patriot movement.Fundamental uncertainties about the night’s events cannot be resolved. But the larger significance of the Boston Massacre extends from the era of the American Revolution to our own time, when the use of violence in policing crowd behavior has once again become a pressing public issue.Praise for Boston’s MassacreGeorge Washington Prize FinalistWinner of the Society of the Cincinnati Prize“Fascinating . . . Hinderaker’s meticulous research shows that the Boston Massacre was contested from the beginning . . . [Its] meanings have plenty to tell us about America’s identity, past and present.” —Wall Street Journal“Hinderaker brilliantly unpacks the creation of competing narratives around a traumatic and confusing episode of violence. With deft insight, careful research, and lucid writing, he shows how the bloodshed in one Boston street became pivotal to making and remembering a revolution that created a nation.” —Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions“Seldom does a book appear that compels its readers to rethink a signal event in American history. It’s even rarer . . . to accomplish so formidable a feat in prose of sparkling clarity and grace. Boston’s Massacre is a gem.” —Fred Anderson, author of Crucible of War
Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell
by Paul Tankard Allan Ingram Nigel Aston James J. Caudle Jennifer Preston Wilson Donald J. Newman Terry Seymour Celia BarnesBoswell and the Press is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writings—his journalism, pamphlets, and broadsides—which, taken together, prove worthy of critical study. These new essays enhance our comprehension of Boswell’s interests and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. Contributors further illuminate a print culture in the throes of transformation, providing useful fodder for historians of journalism and publishing in eighteenth- century Britain, while offering up rich new material for seasoned Boswell scholars.
Boswell's Enlightenment
by Robert ZaretskyThroughout his life James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Few periods better crystallize this turmoil than 1763-1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky's thrilling intellectual adventure.
Bot-mimicry in Digital Literary Culture: Imitating Imitative Software (Elements in Publishing and Book Culture)
by Malthe Stavning ErslevThis Element traverses the concept and practice of bot mimicry, defined as the imitation of imitative software, specifically the practice of writing in the style of social bots. Working as both an inquiry into and an extended definition of the concept, the Element argues that bot mimicry engenders a new mode of knowing about and relating to imitative software – as well as a distinctly literary approach to rendering and negotiating artificial intelligence imaginaries. The Element presents a software-oriented mode of understanding Internet culture, a novel reading of Alan Turing's imitation game, and the first substantial integration of Walter Benjamin's theory of the mimetic faculty into the study of digital culture, thus offering multiple unique lines of inquiry. Ultimately, the Element illuminates the value of mimicry – to the understanding of an emerging practice of digital literary culture, to practices of research, and to our very conceptions of artificial intelligence.
Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare's England
by Bonnie Lander JohnsonThe Shakespearean stage offered London playgoers a glimpse of the illiterate and rural plant cultures rapidly disappearing from their increasingly urban and sophisticated lives. The same cultures also circulated in popular texts offstage: bawdy tree ballads, botanical tales, almanacs and accounts of kitchen physic. Here Bonnie Lander Johnson argues that, while Shakespeare's plants offered audiences a nostalgic vision of childhood, domestic education and rural pastimes, this was in fact done with an ironic gesture that claimed for illiterate culture an intellectual relevance ignored by the learned and largely Protestant realm of print. Addressing a long-standing imbalance in early modern scholarship, she reveals how Shakespeare's plays – and the popular, low botanical beliefs they represent – engaged with questions usually deemed high, literate and elite: theological and liturgical controversies, the politics of state, England's role in Elizabethan naval conflict and the increasingly learned realm of medical authority.
Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England
by Anna K. SagalTo this day, women face barriers in entering scientific professions, and in earlier eras the challenges were greater still. But in Botanical Entanglements, Anna Sagal reveals how women’s active participation in scientific discourses of the eighteenth century was enabled by the manipulation of social and cultural conventions that have typically been understood as limiting factors. By taking advantage of the intersections between domesticity, femininity, and nature, the writers and artists studied here laid claim to a specific authority on naturalist subjects, ranging from botany to entomology to natural history more broadly.Botanical Entanglements pairs studies of well-known authors—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith—with authors and artists who receive less attention in this context—Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Henrietta Maria Moriarty, and Mary Delany—to offer a nuanced portrait of the diverse strategies women employed to engage in scientific labor. Using socially acceptable forms of textual production, including popular periodicals, didactic texts, novels, illustrated works, craftwork, and poetry, these women advocated for more substantive and meaningful engagement with the natural world. In parallel, the book also illuminates the emotional and physical intimacies between women, plants, and insects to reveal an early precursor to twenty-first-century theorizing of plant intelligence and human-plant relationships. Recognizing such literary and artistic "entanglement" facilitates a more profound understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and the natural world in eighteenth-century England.
Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (The Environments of East Asia)
by Jon L. PittBotanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.
Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print
by Jessica RosenbergDuring the middle years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the number of books published with titles that described themselves as flowers, gardens, or forests more than tripled. During those same years, English printers turned out scores of instructional manuals on gardening and husbandry, retailing useful knowledge to a growing class of literate landowners and pleasure gardeners. Both trends, Jessica Rosenberg shows, reflected a distinctive style of early modern plant-thinking, one that understood both plants and poems as composites of small pieces—slips or seeds to be recirculated by readers and planters.Botanical Poetics brings together studies of ecology, science, literary form, and the material text to explore how these developments transformed early modern conceptions of nature, poetic language, and the printed book. Drawing on little-studied titles in horticulture and popular print alongside poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, and others, Rosenberg reveals how early modern print used a botanical idiom to anticipate histories of its own reading and reception, whether through replanting, uprooting, or fantasies of common property and proliferation. While our conventional narratives of English literary culture in this period see reading as an increasingly private practice, and literary production as more and more of an authorial domain, Botanical Poetics uncovers an alternate tradition: of commonplaces and common ground, of slips of herbs and poetry circulated, shared, and multiplied.
Both Art and Craft: Teaching Ideas that Spark Learning
by Leila Christenbury Diana MitchellThis lively, readable text offers countless practical ideas for student activities in the areas of literature, reading, writing, and thematic units. From the exploration of ghostly themes, to the writing of resumes for heroes, to devising yearbook entries or Web pages for famous literary characters, _Both Art and Craft_ provides the middle school or secondary school classroom teacher a wealth of creative activities and strategies for the day, the week, or the semester. An annotated list of teaching resources offers readers further alternatives.
Botsang Lebitla: UBC Contracted (Sesotho Ser.)
by K.P.D. MaphallaThe death of his family in tragic circumstances leaves a tiny baby bereft. Raised in a hostile, loveless household by his aunt and uncle, the protagonist grows up to be bitter, hard and distrustful. His dogged, almost obsessive pursuit of his roots is fruitless, and he realises that only his family's graves can reveal the truth. But a grave is always silent. Further horrifying events provoke his vengeful fury ... Bold and passionate, this is a gripping tale of suspense and revenge.
Botsang Lebitla: UBC Uncontracted (Sesotho Ser.)
by K.P.D. MaphallaThe death of his family in tragic circumstances leaves a tiny baby bereft. Raised in a hostile, loveless household by his aunt and uncle, the protagonist grows up to be bitter, hard and distrustful. His dogged, almost obsessive pursuit of his roots is fruitless, and he realises that only his family's graves can reveal the truth. But a grave is always silent. Further horrifying events provoke his vengeful fury ... Bold and passionate, this is a gripping tale of suspense and revenge.
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
by Kerry HowleyA NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR&“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.&” – The New York TimesA wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of ThrownWho are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.Following Winner&’s unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley&’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.
Bottoms Up: Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance (Sexual Cultures)
by Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-GomezProposes a queer way to be in the world and with othersInvoking queer aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Bottoms Up explores a sexual way to be with others while living with loss. Xiomara Cervantes-Gómez demonstrates how aesthetic representations of sex—namely, bottoming—function as allegorical paradigms, revealing the assemblages of violence that have constituted the social, cultural, and political shifts of Mexico and US Latinx culture from 1950 to the present.With playful, theoretically nuanced prose, Cervantes-Gómez builds upon queer of color theory and continental philosophy to present the “bottom” as a form of relational performance, which she terms “pasivo ethics.” The argument develops through a series of compelling case studies, including a series of novels by Octavio Paz and Luis Zapata that trace the position of the bottom in Mexican nationalist literature; the forms of exposure, risk, and proximity in the performance work of artist Lechedevirgen Trimegisto; a reading of violence and the erotic in the work of artist Bruno Ramri; and reading artists such as Yosimar Reyes, Yanina Orellana, and Carlos Martiel as they build a framework of sexual inheritance that carries the traumas of Mexicanness into the diaspora.Through a broad archive rooted in hemispheric Latinx performance, Bottoms Up considers how sexual and political power are bound up with each other in the shaping of Mexicanness. Placing particular emphasis on questions of queer and trans Mexican embodiment, the book explains how Mexicanness is constituted through discourses of exposure.
Boudica's Odyssey in Early Modern England
by Samantha Frénée-HutchinsThis diachronic study of Boudica serves as a sourcebook of references to Boudica in the early modern period and gives an overview of the ways in which her story was processed and exploited by the different players of the times who wanted to give credence and support to their own belief systems. The author examines the different apparatus of state ideology which processed the social, religious and political representations of Boudica for public absorption and helped form the popular myth we have of Boudica today. By exploring images of the Briton warrior queen across two reigns which witnessed an act of political union and a move from English female rule (under Elizabeth I) to British/Scottish masculine rule (under James VI & I) the author conducts a critical cartography of the ways in which gender, colonialism and nationalism crystallised around this crucial historical figure. Concentrating on the original transmission and reception of the ancient texts the author analyses the historical works of Hector Boece, Raphael Holinshed and William Camden as well as the canonical literary figures of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She also looks at aspects of other primary sources not covered in previous scholarship, such as Humphrey Llwyd’s Breuiary of Britayne (1573), Petruccio Ubaldini’s Le Vite delle donne illustri, del regno d’Inghilterra, e del regno di Scotia (1588) and Edmund Bolton’s Nero Caesar (1624). Furthermore, she incorporates archaeological research relating to Boudica.
Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans
by Matt MillerOver the course of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Orleans helped define the genres of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a dance-oriented style called "bounce." Hip-hop has been the latest conduit for a "New Orleans sound" that lies at the heart of many of the city's best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city's rich musical and cultural traditions. In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans's hip-hop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music. Like other forms of grassroots expressive culture in the city, New Orleans rap is a site of intense aesthetic and economic competition that reflects the creativity and resilience of the city's poor and working-class African Americans.
Bouncy Mouse: Vowel Combinations Oi, Ou (Let's Read Together ®)
by Barbara deRubertisLet&’s Read Together books merge rhyme and vowel sounds in delightfully zany stories kids will want to read again and again. Each of the 15 books in this classic series by award-winning author/educator Barbara deRubertis will give your child a jumpstart on reading success."Story lines are silly and inventive, and recall Dr. Seuss&’s Cat in the Hat for the building of rhythm and rhyming words." —School Library JournalBouncy Mouse bothers his Dad, until his noisy musical antics lead to stardom! (This easy-to-read story features the "oi" and "ou" vowel combinations.)
Bound to Differ: The Dynamics of Theological Discourses (G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects)
by Wesley A. KortIn this analysis of theological conflict, Wesley Kort treats theologies as discourses that generate power and significance by their relations to and differences from one another. He identifies the traditional or putative claims of theological power and meaning—sources, referents, and patterns or structures—as distractions from or even concealments of the discursive situation in which theologies arise.Kort first describes the dynamics of difference and conflicts constituted by theologies and the importance of power for opposing theologies. He provides a model that demonstrates why differences and conflicts, rather than occasional or peripheral effects of theology, are required as central causes. He then applies the analysis and model in the task of reading theologies of more than a dozen modern and contemporary figures.In his conclusion, Kort returns to the cultural situation he sketched at the beginning, one that creates the conditions for the study and that is often called "postmodern." Kort calls it "a culture of scripture and belief," and he discusses prospects for theology in a culture not characterized by the fact and certainty. "The culture of scripture and belief" calls for theologies that are both forceful and vulnerable to critique.
Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Material Texts)
by Jeffrey Todd KnightConcealed in rows of carefully restored volumes in rare book libraries is a history of the patterns of book collecting and compilation that shaped the literature of the English Renaissance. In this early period of print, before the introduction of commercial binding, most published literary texts did not stand on shelves in discrete, standardized units. They were issued in loose sheets or temporarily stitched—leaving it to the purchaser or retailer to collect, configure, and bind them. In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.Through a combination of archival research and literary criticism, Knight shows how Renaissance conceptions of imaginative writing were inextricable from the material assembly of texts. While scholars have long identified an early modern tendency to borrow and redeploy texts, Bound to Read reveals that these strategies of imitation and appropriation were rooted in concrete ways of engaging with books. Knight uncovers surprising juxtapositions such as handwritten sonnets collected with established poetry in print and literary masterpieces bound with liturgical texts and pamphlets. By examining works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, and others, he dispels the notion of literary texts as static or closed, and instead demonstrates how the unsettled conventions of early print culture fostered an idea of books as interactive and malleable.Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.
Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory #94)
by Marcel Den Dikken Huba Bartos Zoltán Bánréti Tamás VáradiThis volume offers a selection of interface studies in generative linguistics, a valuable “one-stop shopping” opportunity for readers interested in the ways in which the various modules of linguistic analysis intersect and interact. The boundaries between the lexicon and morphophonology, between morphology and syntax, between morphosyntax and meaning, and between morphosyntax and phonology are all being crossed in this volume. Though its focus is on theoretical approaches, experimental studies are also included. The empirical focus of many of the contributions is on Hungarian, and several chapters respond to work published by István Kenesei, to whom the volume is dedicated.
Boundaries of Violence in Early Modern England (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Matthew Carter Samantha DresselThis book explores the possibilities and limitations of violence on the Early Modern stage and in the Early Modern world. This collection is divided into three sections: History-cal Violence, (Un)Comic Violence, and Revenge Violence. This division allows scholars to easily find intertextual materials; comic violence may function similarly across multiple comedies but is vastly different from most tragic violence. While the source texts move beyond Shakespeare, this book follows the classic division of Shakespeare’s plays into history, comedy, and tragedy. Each section of the book contains one chapter engaging with modern dramatic practice along with several that take textual or historical approaches. This wide-ranging approach means that the book will be appropriate both for specialists in Early Modern violence who are looking across multiple perspectives, and for students or scholars researching texts or approaches.
Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine
by Colleen DerkatchDuring the 1990s, an unprecedented number of Americans turned to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), an umbrella term encompassing chiropractic, energy healing, herbal medicine, homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine. By 1997, nearly half the US population was seeking CAM, spending at least $27 billion out of pocket. Bounding Biomedicine centers on this boundary-changing era, looking at how consumer demand shook the health care hierarchy. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric and science and technology studies, the book examines how the medical profession scrambled to maintain its position of privilege and prestige, even as its foothold appeared to be crumbling. Colleen Derkatch analyzes CAM-themed medical journals and related discourse to illustrate how members of the medical establishment applied Western standards of evaluation and peer review to test health practices that did not fit easily (or at all) within standard frameworks of medical research. And she shows that, despite many practitioners’ efforts to eliminate the boundaries between “regular” and “alternative,” this research on CAM and the forms of communication that surrounded it ultimately ended up creating an even greater division between what counts as safe, effective health care and what does not. At a time when debates over treatment choices have flared up again, Bounding Biomedicine gives us a possible blueprint for understanding how the medical establishment will react to this new era of therapeutic change.
Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China
by Sixiang WangFor more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order.Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn’s rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and sophisticated strategy of diplomatic and cultural negotiation. He shows how Korea’s rulers and diplomats inserted Chosŏn into the Ming Empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Boundless Winds of Empire recasts a critical period of Sino-Korean relations through the Korean perspective, emphasizing Korean agency in the making of East Asian international relations.
Bourdieu and Literature
by John R.W. SpellerBourdieu and Literature is a wide-ranging, rigorous and accessible introduction to the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's work and literary studies. It provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of his contributions to literary theory and his thinking about authors and literary works. <p><p> One of the foremost French intellectuals of the post-war era, Bourdieu has become a standard point of reference in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, art history, cultural studies, politics, and sociology, but his longstanding interest in literature has often been overlooked. This study explores the impact of literature on Bourdieu's intellectual itinerary, and how his literary understanding intersected with his sociological theory and thinking about cultural policy. <p> This is the first full-length study of Bourdieu's work on literature in English, and it provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary studies, cultural theory and sociology.
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Education
by Pamela Burnard Ylva Hofvander TrulssonPierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over four decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of musical study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical preferences reflect and reproduce inequalities between social classes, ethnic groups, and men and women. Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Education draws together a group of international researchers, academics and artist-practitioners who offer a critical introduction and exploration of Pierre Bourdieu’s rich generative conceptual tools for advancing sociological views of music education. By employing perspectives from Bourdieu’s work on distinction and judgement and his conceptualisation of fields, habitus and capitals in relation to music education, contributing authors explore the ways in which Bourdieu’s work can be applied to music education as a means of linking school (institutional habitus) and learning, and curriculum and family (class habitus). The volume includes research perspectives and studies of how Bourdieu’s tools have been applied in industry and educational contexts, including the primary, secondary and higher music education sectors. The volume begins with an introduction to Bourdieu’s contribution to theory and methodology and then goes on to deal in detail with illustrative substantive studies. The concluding chapter is an extended essay that reflects on, and critiques, the application of Bourdieu’s work and examines the ways in which the studies contained in the volume advance understanding. The book contributes new perspectives to our understanding of Bourdieu’s tools across diverse settings and practices of music education.
Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies)
by Sameh HannaThis book explores the implications of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production for the study of translation as a socio-cultural activity. Bourdieu’s work has continued to inspire research on translation in the last few years, though without a detailed, large-scale investigation that tests the viability of his conceptual tools and methodological assumptions. With focus on the Arabic translations of Shakespeare’s tragedies in Egypt, this book offers a detailed analysis of the theory of ‘fields of cultural production’ with the purpose of providing a fresh perspective on the genesis and development of drama translation in Arabic. The different cases of the Arabic translations of Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello lend themselves to sociological analysis, due to the complex socio-cultural dynamics that conditioned the translation decisions made by translators, theatre directors, actors/actresses and publishers. In challenging the mainstream history of Shakespeare translation into Arabic, which is mainly premised on the linguistic proximity between source and target texts, this book attempts a ‘social history’ of the ‘Arabic Shakespeare’ which takes as its foundational assumption the fact that translation is a socially-situated phenomenon that is only fully appreciated in its socio-cultural milieu. Through a detailed discussion of the production, dissemination and consumption of the Arabic translations of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Bourdieu in Translation Studies marks a significant contribution to both sociology of translation and the cultural history of modern Egypt.