In Textual Rivalries Gilad Elbom offers a theology of textuality. By following the prompts provided by medieval kabbalistic exegesis, he argues that the universe is forged of words, God is a linguistic presence, and biblical interpretation is a semiotic practice, one endowed with a self-perpetuating power to repair an imperfect world.

This volume brings together sixteen articles on the religions, literatures and histories of South and Central Asia in tribute to Patrick Olivelle, one of North America’s leading Sanskritists and historians of early India. Over the last four decades, the focus of his scholarship has been on the ascetic and legal traditions of India, but his work as both a researcher and a teacher extends beyond early Indian religion and literature. ‘Religion and Identity and South Asia and Beyond’ is a testament to that influence. The contributions in this volume, many by former students of Olivelle, are committed to linguistic and historical rigor, combined with sensitivity to how the study of Asia has been changing over the last several decades.

After World War I, American, Irish and then Caribbean writers boldly remade the world literary system long dominated by Paris and London. Responding to literary renaissances and social upheavals in their own countries and to the decline of war-devastated Europe, émigré and domestic-based writers produced dazzling new works that challenged London's or Paris's authority to fix and determine literary value. In so doing, they propounded new conceptions of aesthetic accomplishment that were later codified as 'modernism'. However, after World War II, an assertive American literary establishment repurposed literary modernism to boost the cultural prestige of the United States in the Cold War and to contest Soviet conceptions of 'world literature'. Here, in accomplished readings of major works and essays by Henry James, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill and Derek Walcott, Joe Cleary situates Anglophone modernism in terms of the rise and fall of European and American empires, changing world literary systems, and disputed histories of 'world literature'.

The Upaniṣads have often been treated as a unified corpus of religious and philosophical texts, separate from the older Vedic tradition. It is well known that the Upaniṣads were initially composed and transmitted within specific schools of Vedic recitation, or Śākhās, but the Śākhā affiliation of each Upaniṣad has received very little attention in the scholarly literature. The author offers a new interpretation of the older Upaniṣads in the light of the Vedic school affiliations of each text. This book argues that issues of textual authority, and in particular the authority of the various Vedic schools, are central in the Upaniṣads, and that the Upaniṣads can, on one level, be read as texts about text. While analyzing the theme of textual authority in the Upaniṣads, the author also outlines a theory of textual criticism as applied to orally transmitted texts that will be of use to textual scholars in other fields as well.

Explores Paris as a desired and imagined place in Latin American postcolonial identity, uncovering the city's class, gender, political, and aesthetic resonances for Latin America

Olivia Stewart Lester examines true and false prophecy at the intersections of interpretation, gender, and economics in Revelation, Sibylline Oracles 4-5, and contemporary ancient Mediterranean texts. With respect to gender, these texts construct a discourse of divine violence against prophets, in which masculine divine domination of both male and female prophets reinforces the authenticity of the prophetic message. Regarding economics, John and the Jewish sibyllists resist the economic actions of political groups around them, especially Rome, by imagining an alternate universe with a new prophetic economy. In this economy, God requires restitution from human beings, whose evil behavior incurs debt. The ongoing appeal of prophecy as a rhetorical strategy in Revelation and Sibylline Oracles 4-5, and the ongoing rivalries in which these texts engage, argue for prophecy's continuing significance in a larger ancient Mediterranean religious context.

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land in formal texts from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These texts reveal that territories were imagined specifically as homes, cities, and regions and acted as powerful categories of belonging in the early Islamic world.

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature - and ownership - of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U.C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," Knoepflmacher probes deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and between the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales."

Quixotic Frescoes delves into the politics of imitation, self-censorship, religious ideology expressed through the pictorial, as well as the gendering of art as reflected in Cervantes' work.