Investigates the politics and poetics of women's gendered identity in West Africa.

Selfish Gifts examines how early modern clients moved quickly and strategically to assimilate the language of competition and equality, characteristic of an emerging market economy, within their existing discourses of gift exchange, in order to maximize the rewards they might induce from an increasingly diverse group of patrons."--Jacket.

Winner of the 2001 Joel Gregory Prize, presented by the Canadian Association of African Studies Offering Senegalese women's autobiographical discourses as an original contribution to the critical debate about identity and self-representation, Lisa McNee asks how Senegalese women represent themselves, rather than asking who has the right to represent them. Selfish Gifts describes and analyzes the public spaces for verbal self-representation that the Wolof form of panegyric (taasu) and written autobiographies offer to women. In contrasting performances of taasu to autobiographical works written in French, McNee addresses important issues in literary criticism, folklore studies, and anthropology, and develops a theory of an African aesthetic of self-representation.

100 pages of high quality paper (50 sheets)It can be used as a journal, notebook or just a composition book6" x 9" Paperback notebook, soft matte cover

Janet E. Smith has been among the world’s preeminent voices in the study of the issues raised by Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical letter Humanae vitae. Self-Gift: Essays on Humanae Vitae and the Thought of John Paul II presents Smith’s critical collection of essays on the vocation of marriage, human sexuality, contraception, and more. Her groundbreaking scholarship touches on all the areas implicated in Humanae vitae: from natural family planning to parenthood and natural law to personalism. This collection not only includes Smith’s English translation of the encyclical from the original Latin text, but also helpful background on the development and release of this authoritative magisterial document. With a particular emphasis on the personalist and Thomistic philosophy of Pope St. John Paul II and how it illuminates the two-millennia tradition of Catholic teaching on human sexuality, Self-Gift delivers crucial insight into the Creator’s plan for human sexuality and our full flourishing in Christ.

This study considers the nature of gift-giving in early-modern England - looking at what gifts were, how they were offered and received, and what did they mean politically under the different monarchs of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Question of the Gift is the first collection of new interdisciplinary essays on the gift. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, including anthropology, literary criticism, economics, philosophy and classics, it provides new paradigms and poses new questions concerning the theory and practice of gift exchange. In addressing these questions, contributors not only challenge the conventions of their fields, but also combine ideas and methods from both the social sciences and humanities to forge innovative ways of confronting this universal phenomenon.