Now, for the first time, the best of Goodman's provocative writings are available in one convenient volume.

Literature and Revolution, written by the founder and commander of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, in 1924 and first published in 1925, represents a compilation of essays that Trotsky drafted during the summers of 1922 and 1923. This book is a classic work of literary criticism from the Marxist standpoint. By discussing the various literary trends that were around in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Trotsky analyses the concrete forces in society, both progressive as well as reactionary, that helped shape the consciousness of writers at the time. In the book, Trotsky also explains that since the dawn of civilisation art had always borne the stamp of the ruling class and was primarily a vehicle that expressed its tastes and its sensibilities. “It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”—Leon Trotsky

This fascinating book - the first comprehensive study of reading and politics in early modern England - examines how texts of that period were produced and disseminated and how readers interpreted and were influenced by them. Based on the voluminous reading notes of one gentleman, Sir William Drake, the book shows how readers formed radical social values and political ideas as they experienced civil war, revolution, republic and restoration. By analysing the strategies of Drake's reading practices, as well as those of several key contemporaries (including Jonson, Milton and Clarendon), Kevin Sharpe demonstrates how reading in the rhetorical culture of Renaissance England was a political act. He explains how Drake, for example, by reading and rereading classical and humanist works of Tacitus, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Bacon, became the advocate of dissimulation, intrigue and realpolitik. Authority, Sharpe argues, was experienced, reviewed and criticised not only in the public forum but in the study, on the page and in the imagination, of early modern readers. 'Erudite, intelligent and fascinating ...a wonderful study of a subject central to the intellectual and cultural history of early modern England.' Anthony Grafton Kevin Sharpe was director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of 'The Personal Rule of Charles I', 'Selling the Tudor Monarchy' and 'Image Wars', all published by Yale University Press.

Discover what caused the American Revolution in this stimulating nonfiction book. With its easy-to-read text and vivid images, readers are sure to be engaged as they learn about problems colonists faced, including the Stamp Act, the Townshend Act, and Intolerable Acts. The fascinating facts and intriguing sidebars further explore the reasoning behind such documents as the First Continental Congress, Declaration of Rights and Grievances, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence. To aid in better understanding of the content and vocabulary, a useful table of contents and glossary are provided.

Shakespeare's work gives hope and inspiration to the political prisoners held on apartheid South Africa's infamous Robben Island.

Following the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, a child of the Ukrainian diaspora challenges her formative ideologies, considers innocence and complicity, and questions the roots of patriotism.

Award-winning journalist Thanassis Cambanis tells the “wonderfully readable and insightful” (Booklist, starred review) inside story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Cambanis brings to life the noble dreamers who brought Egypt to the brink of freedom, and the dark powerful forces that—for the time being—stopped them short. But he also tells a universal story of inspirational people willing to transform themselves in order to transform their society. He focuses on two pivotal leaders: One is Basem, an apolitical middle-class architect who puts his entire family in danger when he seizes the chance to improve his country. The other is Moaz, a contrarian Muslim Brother who defies his own organization to join the opposition. These revolutionaries had little more than their idealism with which to battle the secret police, the old oligarchs, and a power-hungry military determined to keep control. Basem wanted to change the system from within and became one of the only revolutionaries to win a seat in parliament. Moaz took a different course, convinced that only street pressure from youth movements could dismantle the old order. Their courageous and imperfect decisions produced an uprising with one enduring outcome: No Arab leader ever again can take the population’s consent for granted. Once Upon a Revolution is “a welcome addition to the literature on Egypt’s uprising” (Library Journal). Featuring exclusive and distinctive reporting, Thanassis Cambanis’s “fluent, intelligent, and highly informed book…convincingly explains what happened in Egypt over the last four years” (The New York Times Book Review).

Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History explores the dialectic between historical conditions and the reading strategies that arise from them. Chapters covering Plato and Derrida; G.W.F. Hegel; Karl Marx; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Robert Penn Warren; Louise Rosenblatt; Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida; Judith Butler; and Object Oriented Ontology and Digital Humanities provide overviews of and arguments about each subject’s thought in its historical contexts, suggesting how the reading strategies adopted in each case were in part motivated by specific historical circumstances. As the introduction explains, these circumstances often involved forms of democracy in crisis, so that the collection as a whole is an engagement with the dialectic between democracies that are perpetually in crisis and the seemingly unlimited freedom of our reading practices.

Winner of the 2019 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History This is a book about the links between politics and literacy, and about how radical ideas spread in a world without printing presses. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spanish colonial governments tried to keep revolution out of their provinces. But, as Cristina Soriano shows, hand-copied samizdat materials from the Caribbean flooded the cities and ports of Venezuela, hundreds of foreigners shared news of the French and Haitian revolutions with locals, and Venezuelans of diverse social backgrounds met to read hard-to-come-by texts and to discuss the ideas they expounded. These networks efficiently spread antimonarchical propaganda and abolitionist and egalitarian ideas, allowing Venezuelans to participate in an incipient yet vibrant public sphere and to contemplate new political scenarios. This book offers an in-depth analysis of one of the crucial processes that allowed Venezuela to become one of the first regions in Spanish America to declare independence from Iberia and turn into an influential force for South American independence.