Harvard University Press – Knjiga.hr

The Failure of Political Islam

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:58:38 +0000

In this influential study, French political scientist Olivier Roy examines the rise and limits of modern Islamist movements across the Middle East and beyond. Challenging the widespread assumption that “political Islam” represented a coherent and unstoppable alternative to Western modernity, Roy argues that Islamist movements failed to translate their ideological vision into sustainable political systems. Drawing on examples such as Iran, Afghanistan, and Algeria, he explores the gap between religious rhetoric and social reality, and the internal contradictions that hindered Islamist governance. Rather than signaling a civilizational clash, Roy suggests that Islamism reflects broader processes of modernization, globalization, and political fragmentation. Written with clarity and analytical rigor, this book remains a key text for understanding contemporary debates about Islam, secularism, and political change.

Moral Essays I

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 06:32:01 +0000

Seneca in Ten Volumes I Moral Essays in Three Volumes I English Translation by John W. Basore

The Ruin of Kasch

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:59:56 +0000

Taking as its focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time, Roberto Calasso recounts, elucidates, and interprets the downfall of what Baudelaire was already calling ‘the Modern’. The downfall came as a sequel to an earlier and opposite collapse: that of archaic societies which were regulated by the movements of the stars and the rituals of sacrifice. At the centre of the work stands the story of Kasch, a legendary African kingdom whose annihilation becomes emblematic of the ruin of the ancient and modern world.

Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:05:48 +0000

In this landmark work, the seven great writers of the American Renaissance–Emerson, Thoreau, Writman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson–are examined together in their cultural contexts. David Reynolds reveals how these authors broadly assimilated the themes and images of popular culture. Their classic works–among them Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, Walden, and the tales of Poe–are given strikingly original reading when viewed against the rich, often startling background of long neglected popular writings of the time. Reynolds also explores a whole lost world of sensational literature, including grisly novels, openly sold on the street, that combined intense violence with explicit eroticism. He demonstrates as well how common concerns with issues of religion, slavery, and workers’ (as well as women’s) rights resonate in the major writings.

Raising Cain

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:04:10 +0000

Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn’t the approved reading, but then, blackface wasn’t the approved culture either–yet somehow we’re still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock ‘n’ roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon’s account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.

RECORDS OF A BIBLIOGRAPHER. Selected Papers of William Alexander Jackson.

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:35:12 +0000

RECORDS OF A BIBLIOGRAPHER. Selected Papers of William Alexander Jackson. Bond, William H.; William Alexander Jackson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. First Edition. Hardcover. Quarto (4to). xiv, 236 pages of text.

Studies in Biography

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:32:46 +0000

ENGLAND’S HELICON: 1600, 1614 Volume I-II

Sat, 17 May 2025 11:50:15 +0000

ENGLAND’S HELICON: 1600, 1614 Volume I-II (1935) Edited by Hyder Edward Rollins. pp 228, 241.

A Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 19:01:43 +0000

This is the first English edition of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev’s Book, originally published in 1790, and considered a landmark in Russian intellectual history. — It is primarily an attack on serfdom and an appeal to the Sovereign and the landed gentry to free the serfs voluntarily. — The book was banned immediately and the author first sentenced to death, then banished to eastern Siberia. On the order of Empress Catherine II, who read the book carefully, all copies that could be found were collected and burned. — This edition of the Journey contains not only an English translation of the work. the introduction includes an account of Radishchev’s life, the feelings and beliefs which led him to write this and other important works, and a complete analysis of the Journey – its content and background, historical source material and points of departure, literary analogues or sources, Radishchev’s language, style and literary technique, and the influence and aftermath of it all. Extensive notes clarify points which might not be immediately clear to English readers, and often make reference to the Empress Catherine IIs own notes on the Journey, which appear in translation at the back of the book. by Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev (Author), Roderick Page Thaler (Editor), Leo Wiener (Translator)

The Palestinian People : A History

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 17:32:52 +0000

In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an authoritative account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond. Palestinians struggled to create themselves as a people from the first revolt of the Arabs in Palestine in 1834 through the British Mandate to the impact of Zionism and the founding of Israel. Their relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel has been fundamental in shaping that identity, and today Palestinians find themselves again at a critical juncture. In the 1990s cornerstones for peace were laid for eventual Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, including mutual acceptance, the renunciation of violence as a permanent strategy, and the establishment for the first time of Palestinian self-government. But the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a reversion to unmitigated hatred and mutual demonization. By mid-2002 the brutal violence of the Intifada had crippled Palestine’s fledgling political institutions and threatened the fragile social cohesion painstakingly constructed after 1967. Kimmerling and Migdal unravel what went right–and what went wrong–in the Oslo peace process, and what lessons we can draw about the forces that help to shape a people. The authors present a balanced, insightful, and sobering look at the realities of creating peace in the Middle East.