Download or read book Fictions of State written by Patrick Brantlinger and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present. He draws on literary texts ranging from Augustan satire such as Gulliver's Travels to postmodern satire such as Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note. All critique the misrecognition of public credit as wealth. The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money. Brantlinger traces the emergence of modern, imperial Great Britain from those foundations. He analyzes the process whereby nationalism, both the cause and the result of wars and imperial expansion, multiplied national debt and produced crises of public credit resolved only through more nationalism and war. During the first half of the eighteenth century, conservatives attacked public credit as fetishistic and characterized national debt as alchemical. From the 1850s, the stabilizing theories of public credit authored by David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Thornton, and others, helped initiate the first "social science" economics. In the nineteenth century, literary criticism both paralleled and questioned early capitalist discourse on public credit and nationalism, while the Victorian novel refigured debt as the individual, private credit and debt. During the era of high modernism and Keynesian economics, the notion of high culture as genuine value recast the debate over money and national indebtedness. Brantlinger relates this cultural-historical trajectory to Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories about the decline of the European empires after World War II, the global debt crisis, and the weakening of western nation-states in the postmodern era.

Download or read book Imperial Fictions written by Todd Kontje and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinks German literature by challenging the notion that national literature is the narrative of a spiritually united people

Download or read book The Scholar and the State written by Liangyan Ge and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but changing social and political circumstances in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods forced many to seek alternative careers. Politically engaged but excluded from their traditional bureaucratic roles, creative writers authored critiques of state power in the form of fiction written in the vernacular language. In this study, Liangyan Ge examines the novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Scholars, Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as Story of the Stone), and a number of erotic pieces, showing that as the literati class grappled with its own increasing marginalization, its fiction reassessed the assumption that intellectuals' proper role was to serve state interests and began to imagine possibilities for a new political order. The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

Download or read book The State We re In written by Adele Parks and published by Headline Review. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the odds that the stranger sitting next to you on a plane is destined to change your life? Especially when they appear to be your opposite in every way... The perfect read for fans of Ruth Jones, Jane Green and Sheila O'Flanagan, from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Just My Luck. Don't miss Adele's gripping new novel, the Sunday Times bestseller Both of You, out now! Acclaim for Adele's compelling, twisty and acutely observed novels: 'Tightly plotted, brilliantly conceived and totally gripping' Lisa Jewell 'Twisty, unputdownable and utterly engrossing' Jenny Colgan 'Brilliant storyline, great characters, very clever, loved it!' B A Paris 'Addictive and perceptive' Lucy Atkins Jo is a hopeless romantic. Worried she let her soulmate slip away, she's chasing her past all the way to Chicago to break up her ex-fiancé's wedding. Dean is a resolute cynic. After a brief (but not brief enough) trip to London, he's returning to Chicago, where he moved to escape his dysfunctional past. In the time it takes to fly from London to Chicago, each finds something in the other that they didn't even realise they needed. But it's only when they get off the plane that their true journey begins... What readers are saying about The State We're In: 'This book is full of surprises and twists that keep you guessing until the end. It is one of those books that I was absolutely devastated to have finished' 'You will laugh, you may cry, but on the whole it is an extremely heart-warming tale that delivers a generous dose of optimism' More praise for Adele Parks: Dark, funny and observant' Cosmopolitan 'Guaranteed to keep you hooked until the end' She magazine 'Deliciously down to earth' The Times 'Wonderfully absorbing' Stylist 'Will captivate you from the first page' Closer

Download or read book The State of Sovereignty written by Peter Gratton and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2012-06-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the problems of sovereignty through the work of Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida.

Download or read book Enemy of the State written by Vince Flynn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In the world of black-op thrillers, Mitch Rapp continues to be among the best of the best” (Booklist, starred review), and he returns in the #1 New York Times bestselling series alone and targeted by a country that is supposed to be one of America’s closest allies. After 9/11, the United States made one of the most secretive and dangerous deals in its history—the evidence against the powerful Saudis who coordinated the attack would be buried and in return, King Faisal would promise to keep the oil flowing and deal with the conspirators in his midst. But when the king’s own nephew is discovered funding ISIS, the furious President gives Rapp his next mission: he must find out more about the high-level Saudis involved in the scheme and kill them. The catch? Rapp will get no support from the United States. Forced to make a decision that will change his life forever, Rapp quits the CIA and assembles a group of independent contractors to help him complete the mission. They’ve barely begun unraveling the connections between the Saudi government and ISIS when the brilliant new head of the intelligence directorate discovers their efforts. With Rapp getting too close, he threatens to go public with the details of the post-9/11 agreement between the two countries. Facing an international incident that could end his political career, the President orders America’s intelligence agencies to join the Saudis’ effort to hunt the former CIA man down. Rapp, supported only by a team of mercenaries with dubious allegiances, finds himself at the center of the most elaborate manhunt in history. With white-knuckled twists and turns leading to “an explosive climax” (Publishers Weekly), Enemy of the State is an unputdownable thrill ride that will keep you guessing until the final page.

Download or read book States Firms and Their Legal Fictions written by Melissa J. Durkee and published by . This book was released on 2024-02-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a new point of entry into questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like "personhood" that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution, the volume considers an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Durkee highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change.

Download or read book Migrating Fictions written by Abigail G. H. Manzella and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multiethnic study of how race, gender, and citizenship affected major twentieth-century internal migrations in U.S. history and narrative.

Download or read book Western Fictions Black Realities written by Isabel Soto and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal and complex, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays in Western Fictions address the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Eurocentric and mainstream American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from a wide range of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies of a range of subjects to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa.

Download or read book The Covert Sphere written by Timothy Melley and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation’s foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, and many others.

Download or read book State of Terror written by Louise Penny and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER​ Named one of the most anticipated novels of the season by People, Associated Press, Time, Los Angeles Times, Parade, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more. From the #1 bestselling authors Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny comes a novel of unsurpassed thrills and incomparable insider expertise—State of Terror. After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state. There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. But it’s a canny move on the part of the president. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate. As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source. Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning. What begins as a series of apparent terrorist attacks is revealed to be the beginning of an international chess game involving the volatile and Byzantine politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; the race to develop nuclear weapons in the region; the Russian mob; a burgeoning rogue terrorist organization; and an American government set back on its heels in the international arena. As the horrifying scale of the threat becomes clear, Secretary Adams and her team realize it has been carefully planned to take advantage of four years of an American government out of touch with international affairs, out of practice with diplomacy, and out of power in the places where it counts the most. To defeat such an intricate, carefully constructed conspiracy, it will take the skills of a unique team: a passionate young FSO; a dedicated journalist; and a smart, determined, but as yet untested new secretary of state. State of Terror is a unique and utterly compelling international thriller cowritten by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th secretary of state, and Louise Penny, a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling novelist.

Download or read book Dream Nation written by María Acosta Cruz and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-19 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past fifty years, Puerto Rican voters have roundly rejected any calls for national independence. Yet the rhetoric and iconography of independence have been defining features of Puerto Rican literature and culture. In the provocative new book Dream Nation, María Acosta Cruz investigates the roots and effects of this profound disconnect between cultural fantasy and political reality. Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how imaginings of national independence have served many competing purposes. They have given authority to the island’s literary and artistic establishment but have also been a badge of countercultural cool. These ideas have been fueled both by nostalgia for an imagined past and by yearning for a better future. They have fostered local communities on the island, and still helped define Puerto Rican identity within U.S. Latino culture. In clear, accessible prose, Acosta Cruz takes us on a journey from the 1898 annexation of Puerto Rico to the elections of 2012, stopping at many cultural touchstones along the way, from the canonical literature of the Generación del 30 to the rap music of Tego Calderón. Dream Nation thus serves both as a testament to how stories, symbols, and heroes of independence have inspired the Puerto Rican imagination and as an urgent warning about how this culture has become detached from the everyday concerns of the island’s people. A volume in the American Literature Initiatives series

Download or read book Nation written by Terry Pratchett and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-10-05 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a devastating tsunami destroys all that they have ever known, Mau, an island boy, and Daphne, an aristocratic English girl, together with a small band of refugees, set about rebuilding their community and all the things that are important in their lives.

Download or read book Thieves of State Why Corruption Threatens Global Security written by Sarah Chayes and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. "I can’t imagine a more important book for our time." —Sebastian Junger The world is blowing up. Every day a new blaze seems to ignite: the bloody implosion of Iraq and Syria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine; abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria. Is there some thread tying these frightening international security crises together? In a riveting account that weaves history with fast-moving reportage and insider accounts from the Afghanistan war, Sarah Chayes identifies the unexpected link: corruption. Since the late 1990s, corruption has reached such an extent that some governments resemble glorified criminal gangs, bent solely on their own enrichment. These kleptocrats drive indignant populations to extremes—ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion. Chayes plunges readers into some of the most venal environments on earth and examines what emerges: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also redesigning Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. In many such places, rigid moral codes are put forth as an antidote to the collapse of public integrity. The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Through deep archival research, Chayes reveals that canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument connecting the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Thieves of State presents a powerful new way to understand global extremism. And it makes a compelling case that we must confront corruption, for it is a cause—not a result—of global instability.

Download or read book Latin American Detectives against Power written by Fabricio Tocco and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how Latin American detective stories portray individualism and the state through the figures of the private eye and the police. Fabricio Tocco argues that these portrayals constitute a far more radical critique than the one developed by the Anglo-American canon, culminating in a transnational “poetics of failure” rooted in dissatisfaction with the neoliberal state.

Download or read book Chicago Stories written by James Thomas Farrell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents twenty-five short fiction stories by American author James Farrell, drawn from his first ten collection, all set in Chicago.

Download or read book Certain American States written by Catherine Lacey and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certain states are hard to shake, or so Catherine Lacey's characters find in these twelve tales of love, loss and longing. A grieving wife gives away the shirts her husband has left behind. A flirtatious widow takes a honeymooning couple to see her husband's grave. A businessman working for a shadowy organization known as 'The Company', checks-in to a room in a strange and remarkable hotel.