Bücher veröffentlicht von Lexington Books

Is the USA hospitable to the slow movement? The land of fast food, get-rich-quick schemes, and 24/7 news feeds? In Slow Culture and the American Dream: A Slow and Curvy Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, Mary Caputi argues that the slow movement has much to teach the United States at this moment in time. Although slow philosophy is in many ways opposite to the prevalent American Dream, the current cultural setting demands that we heed its teachings. The climate crisis should make us rethink our fast-paced, ever-accelerating lifestyle so that we can lighten our carbon footprint and decelerate--if not reverse-- the damage done to the planet. Equally important, however, is the movement's mandate that we slow down and savor life, focusing on quality, beauty, and calm rather than quantity and speed. Slow Food, Cittaslow (slow cities), slow fashion, slow travel, and slow parenting are examples of a philosophy that seeks to shift our focus away from "progress" as currently understood and revalue quality-of-life issues. Drawing deeply on her involvement with Slow Food and Cittaslow, the author advocates mainstreaming the philosophy of slow and thus reprioritizing the American Dream in ways that sustain the planet and teach Americans to develop a more refined aesthetic principle.

Crime in TV, the News, and Film provides a fresh look at the interplay between criminal events and the media outlets that cover them. The authors' diverse backgrounds a criminologist researcher, a documentarian and media professor, a police officer, and a criminologist who is a former TV reporter allow for frank discussion. Combining field experience with criminological research, the book gives insight to the everyday media operations that can produce most people's views on crime and profoundly influence public opinion public opinion that often frames public policy.Viewers of crime dramas and consumers of news will gain a new understanding of the way their programs are produced. Readers will become more aware of the issues and biases that sometimes cloud perceptions of crime and criminals. Finally, both experts and scholars interested in the subject will improve their discernment of media stories and media depictions, shining a light on crime in a hazy field. This book can be used in the classroom for an array of courses in the fields of media and communications, criminology, sociology, and more.

This book examines Joseph Stalin's increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalinthe one projected by the generation that saw the tail end of the USSR, the post-Soviet millennials. This book is not a biography of one of the most controversial historical figures of the past century. Rather, through a combination of sociopolitical commentary and autobiographical elements that are uncommon in monographs of this kind, the attempt is to explore how Joseph Stalin's complex legacies and the conflicting cult of his irreconcilable tripartite of personalities still loom over the region as a whole, including Russia and, perhaps to an even deeper extent, Koba's native landnow the independent Republic of Georgia, caught between its unreconciled Soviet past and the potential future within the European Union.

Women of the 1920s led a revolt against the old standards of womanhood that were dominating US culture. Flappers and feminists, they spoke and acted out, inspiring other women to follow. This book analyzes the work of eleven important 1920s female authors who chronicled this revolt: Anzia Yezierska, Anita Loos, Mae West, Josephine Lovett, Nella Larsen, Mourning Dove, Djuna Barnes, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, and Dorothy Parker. These trailblazers wrote counter-narratives to the sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia women faced during the Jazz Age. The author brings their novels, poems, plays, film scenarios, and blues lyrics into conversation with each other for the first time to show different approaches female readers could take to become autonomous individuals and full citizens. The works also encouraged readers to maintain supportive relationships with other progressive women. The author argues these works presented female readers with examples of how they could act individually and collectively to attain the political power, social status, economic independence, sexual freedom, and artistic recognition they deserved.

Francophone Sephardic Fiction:Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity approaches modern Sephardic literature in a comparative way to draw out similarities and differences among selected francophone novelists from various countries, with a focus on North Africa. The definition of Sepharad here is broader than just Spain: it embraces Jews whose ancestors had lived in North Africa for centuries, even before the arrival of Islam, and who still today trace their allegiance to ways of being Jewish that go back to Babylon, as do those whose ancestors spent a few hundred years in Iberia. The author traces the strong influence of oral storytelling on modern novelists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the idea of the portable homeland, as exile and migration engulfed the long-rooted Sephardic communities. The author also examines diaspora concepts, how modernity and post-modernity threatened traditional ways of life, and how humor and an active return into history for the novel have done more than mere nostalgia could to enliven the portable homeland of modern francophone Sephardic fiction.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions of climate change are features of post-normal times. In Sociology in Post-Normal Times, Charles Thorpe contends that the modern project of creating normalcy within the nation state has broken down. Integral to this is sociology, which is the science of social reform. Drawing from the work of seminal theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, Thorpe contends that sociologys ';society' is no longer viable because globalization has put an end to social reform, thus the assumptions and goals of sociology must be left behind in order to create a new global humanity. In the face of the pandemic and climate change, Sociology in Post-Normal Times demands no less than the birth of a global humanity beyond nation states as the precondition for human survival.

The emergence of the social sciences, established in the mid to late nineteenth-century, had a substantial bearing on how researchers, academics, and eventually the general public thought about criminal behavior. Using Modernism as a lens, Stephen Brauer, examines how these disciplines shaped Americans' understanding of criminality in the twentieth-century and how it provides a new way to think about culture, social norms, and ultimately, laws. In theory, laws act as articulations and codifications of a community's beliefs, values, and principles. By breaking laws, criminals help us reinforce social norms by providing the opportunity to affirm what is believed to be right. By operating outside the bounds of acceptable behavior, the criminal serves as a useful figure to understand what is at stake in the culture, what the central issues of that culture might be, and what the fears and anxieties are. Criminality serves as a lens through which we can read ourselves and how the criminal operates as a cultural figure signifies the things we are negotiating in our lives and in our communities. Brauer focuses on two main concepts, central to the very concept of Modernism, to explore criminality: contingency, the idea that the individual might not be in control of their own deviance, and agency, the notion that the criminal makes a conscious choice to use crime as a means of economic success. The figure of the criminal is a powerful one and is key to exploring American twentieth-century culture. This book would be of interest to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, history, and many others.

Sociology of Death and the American Indian examines dying, death, disposal, and bereavement practices and applies those concepts to selectAmerican Indian tribes historically and currently, supplemented with oral histories. The focus is that learning about other cultures can enhance the understanding of one's own culture by comparing traditional and modern societies. Gerry R. Cox addresses the centuries of injustices committed against American Indians that led to a neglect of learning about American Indian cultures and attempts to fill the gaps in knowledge of American Indian practices.

This book provides insight into barriers women experience when seeking treatment for substance use disorders. Findings indicate that models of "maternal instinct" often impede efforts for women seeking treatment, and recovery is more achievable when proper social and structural supports are in place.

Virtuous conduct is the philosophy of agency within Early Confucianism. Drawing on the ideas of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, this book characterizes Early Confucianism as a progressive philosophy due to its human-centered program for social reform, its process view of self-cultivation, and its development.

The Emergence of the Evangelical Egyptians traces the complex cultural encounter between American Presbyterian missionaries and the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox leaders over indigenous Protestant conversion in late Ottoman Egypt, 1854-1878.

An Advaitic Modernity?: Raimon Panikkar and Philosophical Theology poses Raimon Panikkar as a stimulating dialogue partner in postmodern philosophical theology who can help us rethink the relationship between transcendence and immanence through an advaitic critique of modernity. Andrew D. Thrasher argues that Panikkar advaitic critique of modernity may transform several discourses, such as how Panikkar's cosmotheandric metaphysics may reshape a theology of religion and offer a religious interpretation of a relational ontology that builds on the Heideggerian ontological tradition and how Panikkar's metaphysics solves problems in Heidegger's ontology.

This volume explores the political theology of Paul Tillich, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. Tillich's discerning analysis of fascism, grounded in his socialist commitments, and continuing efforts to write theology in correlation with culture, make his voice a crucial one for contemporary political theology.

This is the story of the region where monotheism multiplied, where Christianity came into being, where Judaism reinvented itself, and where Islam won some of its greatest triumphs. This book tells the story of the monotheistic faiths in Galilee from Jesus and Josephus to the Crusades.

Exploring emotions as social relations through the lens of dramatic television serials, this book investigates the profound role emotions play in popular mediated narratives. E. Deidre Pribram argues that collective emotions, activated through aesthetic attributes, play a crucial role in cultural storytelling.

This book uses a theory of cyborg semiotics to explore the similarities between language and cyborgs in their formation, interpretation, and relationships. This intersectional theory provides a unique perspective on power and the human condition.

By examining non-fiction travel narratives and travel fictions in relationship to each other, Daniel Cooper Alarcón highlights the sophisticated ways that both types of writing have anticipated ideas central to critical studies of travel, tourism, and migration.

This volume examines questions concerning the construction of gender and identity in the earliest days of what is now Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Methodologically explicit, the contributions analyze textual and material sources related to these religious traditions in their cultural contexts. The sources examined are predominantly products of patriarchal elite discourses requiring innovative approaches to unveil aspects of gender otherwise hidden. This volume extends the discussion represented in the volume Gender and Second-Temple Judaism (2020) and highlights the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research beyond anachronistic discipline distinctions.

Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel is the first biography of Gordon Merrick, the most commercially successful writer of gay novels in the twentieth century. This book shows how Merrick's novels were largely based on his own life and time as a Princeton theater star, a Broadway actor, a New York reporter, an OSS spy, and the friend of countless artists and celebrities as an expatriate in France, Greece, and Sri Lanka. He lived much of his life as an openly gay man with his longtime partner, Charles Hulse. His 1970 novel, The Lord Won't Mind, broke new ground by showing that an affirming, explicitly gay novel could be a bestseller. His subsequent gay novels were both a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod for literary critics. This book also examines the complex, often conflicting responses to Merrick's novels by gay readers and critics, and it thus recovers the early post-Stonewall debates over the definition of ';gay literature.' By reconstructing Merrick's life and critical fortunes, this book expands our understanding of what it means to be a gay man in the twentieth century.

Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing: Outcast Subcultures examines the ways in which caste intersects and shapes matters of desire, gender, religion, and language. This book argues that the epistemology violence in contemporary India derives its strength from caste texts.

A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue is a historical, theological, and phenomenological engagement of the Hindu and Jewish traditions, two "root" traditions that give rise to other-in some ways very different-types of religious traditions. Rachel Fell McDermott and Daniel F. Polish explore conceptions of the divine, which are frequently cited as the most serious obstacle to a serious theological engagement between the two traditions; differences in attitude towards heroes, saints, and holy people; the religious resources and challenges experienced by Hindu and Jewish women; what can be learned about Hindu and Jewish spiritual outpouring by comparing Hindu devotional poetry and the Book of Psalms; the ways in which the two traditions address the fraught question of theodicy, or why bad things happen to good people; the status of "the land" and nationalist claims on it; and the uncomfortable question of caste and its possible social parallels in the Jewish tradition. The authors weave considerations of these topics into an ongoing conversation that offers students of both traditions new ways of thinking both about their intersections and about the history of religion in general. A coda explores these same issues by recounting an actual series of discussions convened between Hindu and Jewish practitioners.

This bookdiscloses the history of relations among members of the Quakers of Philadelphia and Japanese intellectuals, educators, and activists. Throughout the modern era, these ties, often between women, have transformed efforts for peace, equality, and women's rights in Japan and the United States.

This book examines the rituals and texts of the Hutsuls, who inhabit a small mountainous region located in today's Ukraine. The pages cover local affairs, habits, and dispositions as they manifested themselves in rituals and texts in the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century.

In Earth Polyphony, Suhasini Vincent analyzes the theory of ecocriticism in its entirety, and its existence in the global paradigm of climate change. Vincent shows how a polyphony of voices can affect law and decision making in the era of the Anthropocene, and aptly shows how voices can coexist as in Bakhtinian polyphony where multiple perspectives coexist despite contradictions and differences.Vincent argues that both material and non-material worlds are endowed with storied forms of knowledge that prompt ecocritical writers to engage in new experimental modes of expression. She explores the 'material turn', the 'animal turn' and the 'narrative turn' to highlight how law meets literature, prompts eco-activism, and how these crisscrossing narratives influence each other to spark judicial activism in forums around the planet.

The book provides robust discussions on the ways in which Jamaicans are experiencing flawed democracy; the impact it has not just on the political system and their political participation but also economic development and socio-cultural challenges.

The US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and the return of international sanctions against Tehran turned out to have enormous implications for the Middle Eastern country's commercial interactions with its largest trading partner, China, affecting corrosively every aspect of economic, financial, and technological relationship between the two sides.