This is the first volume in any language that collects Hannah Arendt's remarkable series of essays and notes on literary figures and cultural questions.

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays offers evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and culture.

This is the first comprehensive text to address addiction and its multiple effects on and extensions into art, literature, philosophy, and psychology. Most research into addiction has taken place within the disciplines of medicine, criminology, politics, and social psychology. When seen from a broad cultural perspective, however, addiction emerges directly alongside modernity, haunting its various discourses of digression, dissent, and the transcendence of the commonplace. Who could even imagine modern writing without the addictive, visionary excesses of writers like Baudelaire, DeQuincey, Poe, Burroughs, or Artaud? Or, for that matter, modern culture without its "outsiders," its incorrigible addicts, its defaced subjects: smokers, users, overeaters, alcoholics, the insane? Taking a cultural studies approach to addiction, High Culture offers a readable and accessible collection of essays on these socially marginalized practices and discourses so central to modernity.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.” James Arthur Baldwin Cross cultural encounter between first and second generation Asian-American woman and their dilemma of cultural choice between assimilation into main body or safeguarding self culture as an outsider immigrant have always lured a large numbers of Asian-American writers. Although such literary work is still face the debate of whether it is a part of American literature or of outsiders. Maxine Hong Kingston a well known Chinese-American author who has written about the experiences of the Chinese immigrants living in America has shielded her American inheritance as a writer like, “Actually I think that my books are much more American than they are Chinese. I felt that I was building, creating myself and these people as American people… Even though they have strange Chinese memories, they are American people. Also, I am creating part of American literature, and I was aware of doing that, of adding to American literature.” (Paula Rabinowitz, 1987)

There is much discussion of multiculturalism in education. This is especially true of multicultural literature for children and young adults. The rise of multicultural literature is a political rather than a literary movement; it is a movement to claim space in literature and in education for historically marginalized social groups rather than one to renovate the craft of literature itself. Multicultural literature has been closely bound with the cause of multiculturalism in general and thus has been confronted with resistance from conservatives. This book discusses many of the controversial issues surrounding multicultural literature for children and young adults. The volume begins with a look at some of the foundational and theoretical issues related to multicultural literature. The second part of the book addresses issues related to the creation and critique of multicultural literature, including the authorship of such works and the role of the reader in determining whether or not a work is multicultural. The third looks at the place of multicultural literature in the education of children and young adults. Throughout its discussion, the book makes extensive references to a large body of multicultural fiction and provides a thorough review of research on this important topic.