Glimpsing Modernity is a collection of papers presented at the US Army Medical Museum-sponsored conference on medical aspects of the First World War held in San Antonio, Texas, in February 2012. It captures the metamorphosis of military medicine during the war in a series of inter-related vignettes. Some of these stories provide new and insightful interpretations of known military medical themes, while others depart from these to examine less well-known, but truly important medical topics.

Literature and Modern Time is a collection of essays that explore literature in the context of a wave of challenges to linear conceptions of time introduced by thinkers such as Bergson, Einstein, McTaggart, Freud and Nietzsche. These challenges were not uniform in character. The volume will demonstrate that literature of the era under scrutiny was not simply reacting to new theories of time—in some cases it is actually inspiring and anticipating them. Thus Literature and Modern Time promises to offer a genuine dialogue between literature and time theory and in doing so will uncover and examine influences and connections— sometimes unexpected—between philosophers and writers of the era. It will examine literary attempts to transcend and escape time and also challenge rupture-based accounts of modernist time by demonstrating that literary texts commonly associated with brokenness, decline or stasis, also, at the same time, maintain faith in healing, renewal and mobility. This collection contains interdisciplinary research of the quite highest kind - to see so many different kinds of time - narrative, historical, mechanical, subjective, non-linear time, myth and nostalgia - as well as time/space discussed here is very stimulating indeed. Professor Simon James

Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity—which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation—this study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Of the hundreds of foreign students who attended the Munich Art Academy between 1910 and 1915, Walter Ufer (1876–1936) and E. Martin Hennings (1886–1956) returned to the United States to foster the development of a national art. They ultimately established their reputations in the American Southwest. The two German American artists shared much in common, and both would gain membership in the celebrated Taos Society of Artists. Featuring nearly 150 color plates and historical photographs, A Place in the Sun is a long-overdue tribute to the lives, achievements, and artistic legacy of these two important artists. In tracing the lifelong friendship and intersecting careers of Ufer and Hennings, the contributors to this volume explore the social and artistic implications of the artists’ German heritage and training. Following their training in Munich, both men hoped to build careers in the spirited art environment of Chicago. Both were sponsored by wealthy businessmen, many of German descent. The support of these patrons allowed Ufer and Hennings to travel to the American Southwest, where they—like so many other talented artists—fell under the spell of Taos and its picturesque scenery. They also encountered the region’s Native peoples and Hispanic culture that inspired many of their paintings. Despite their mutual interests, Ufer and Hennings were not identical by any means. Each artist had a distinct artistic style and, as the essays in this volume reveal, the two men could not have had more different personalities or career trajectories. Connoisseurs of southwestern art have long admired the masterworks of Ufer and Hennings. By offering a rich sampling of their paintings alongside informative essays by noted art historians, A Place in the Sun ensures that their significant contributions to American art will be long remembered. A Place in the Sun is published in cooperation with the Denver Art Museum.

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study. Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aimé Césaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Négritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.