"In a provocative and thoughtful essay, Estonia's preeminent poet and cultural critic, Juri Talvet, investigates the role of culture in the postmodern world. Against the large background of historical values in western and world culture, Talvet inveighs against monologues and grand narratives launched by Western centers, envisaging instead a cultural symbiosis that would create a new and fertile dialogue between the centers, borders, and peripheries of the world, enrich cultural sensibility, and broaden concern for the Other."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the first full-scale assessment of the theological, social and ideational implications of our new understandings of ancient Israel's social and religious development. Scholars now stress the gradual emergence of Israel out of the culture of ancient Palestine and the surrounding ancient Near East rather than contrast Israel with the ancient world. Our new paradigms stress the ongoing and unfinished nature of the monotheistic 'revolution', which is indeed still in process today. Gnuse takes a further bold step in setting the emergence of monotheism in a wider intellectual context: he argues brilliantly that the interpretation of Israel's development as both an evolutionary and revolutionary process corresponds to categories of contemporary evolutionary thought in the biological and palaeontological sciences (Punctuated Equilibrium).

The book offers coherent theoretical treatment of the conceptions of “World Literature” and “Comparative Literature”, in parallel with their practical application to the research of different literary phenomena (Renaissance and Baroque creativity, literary canons, philosophy of translation, etc.), especially, as viewed from the point of view of the “other”—“peripheral” (minor, minority) national(-linguistic) cultures. Envisaging womankind’s historical liberation and a budding “comparative world sensibility” has been seen as one of the greatest merits of European “creative humanists”. To explain the deep sources of creativity and image authenticity, the notions of the (aesthetic) “infra-other” and (philosophical) “transgeniality” have been introduced. The proposed aim would be to transcend monologues of ideological-cultural “centres”, as well as formalistic and sociological trends in cultural and literary research and teaching. The book advocates a plurality of creative dialogues and a mutually enriching symbiotic relationship between “centres” and “peripheries”.

This book discusses the current socio-cultural situation of North African migrants in Europe, and analyzes migration, gender, and identity in their multiple dimensions, consequences and expressions, which range from sociological approaches to culture and literature. The chapters debate the topic of migration and culture from various angles, making this volume a forum where notions of dispossession, cultural identity, and otherness are debated. It comprises contributions that range in subject matter from sociological and anthropological studies of Maghrebi diaspora and migrants in Europe to reflections on transnational literature. It is an analysis of migration with all its complex aspects, and multiple expressions of ‘exile’, ‘otherness’, and ‘pain’.

Are we ill-suited for this world? Among Europe's major contemporary poets, Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski offers a rare vision of human advancement and fulfillment: the less we intervene the more we flourish. But how then can we remain involved in what evolves of its own accord? How can we move away from a life forged by human design towards a quietly attentive yet spontaneous responsiveness? In Unforced Flourishing, Thomas Salumets seeks access to Kaplinski's life and work and finds a path to the signature of his thinking. He uncovers a man who craves human closeness that few, if any, can provide, a writer drawn towards wordless communication in a world of words, signs, and symbols, who yearns for the sacred in secular times, and who detects more richness in nature than in the human imagination. Salumets describes Kaplinski as an intellectual attracted to a contrarian sense of self, art, and culture, who searches for his homeland's mystical connections at a time when Estonia firmly aligns with values and modes of thought vastly different from his own. What emerges is a mentality firmly rooted in the belief that the greatest risk to human fulfillment results from human beings themselves. The first major study in English of one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures, Unforced Flourishing details Kaplinski’s embrace of that which is undifferentiated, intuitive, non-calculative, and natural in the modern world.

The book deals in detail with previously understudied language contact settings in the Balkans (South East Europe) that present a continuum between ethnic and linguistic separation and symbiosis among groups of people. The studies in this volume achieve several aims: they critically assess the Balkan Sprachbund theory; they analyse general contact theories against the background of new, original, representative field and historical Greek, Albanian, Romance, Slavic and Judesmo data; they employ and contribute to recent methods of research on linguistic convergence in bilingual societies; they propose new general assessments of extra- and intralinguistic factors of Balkanization over the centuries; and they outline prospects for future research. The factors relevant to contact scenarios and linguistic change in the Balkans are identified and typologized through models such as those related to a balanced or unbalanced (socio)linguistic situation.