When fiction and reality meet: Probably no contemporary novel has shaped reality as powerfully Houellebeck’s Submission. No previous analysis of Submission is as deep and encompassing as this volume written by experts on politics and literature

The contributors to Transnational French Studies situate this disciplinary subfield of Modern Languages in actively transnational frameworks. The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities – both material and non-material – that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book considers the transnational dimensions of being human in the world by focussing on four key practices which constitute the object of study for students of French: language and multilingualism; the construction of transcultural places and the corresponding sense of space; the experience of time; and transnational subjectivities. The underlying premise of the volume is that the transnational is present (and has long been present) throughout what we define as French history and culture. Chapters address instances and phenomena associated with the transnational, from prehistory to the present, opening up the geopolitical map of French studies beyond France and including sites where communities identified as French have formed.

Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine), secular republicans (Victor Hugo), and disillusioned satirists (Michel Houellebecq) alike. France's self-understanding as a new Rome – republican during the Revolution, imperial under successive Napoleons – makes it a special case in the Roman tradition. The same story returns repeatedly. A golden age of restoration glimmers on the horizon, but comes in the guise of a decadent, oriental empire that reintroduces and exposes everything already wrong under the defunct republic. Central to the price of social order is patriarchy's need to subjugate women.

Studies of the right and radical right have proliferated since the rise of European nationalist and populist parties in the 1980s. Yet, the literature on the right and the radical right has a largely Euro-American bias and has been limited by partisan academics that focus on the left. The Right and Radical Right in the Americas hopes to be a pioneering work that examines the history and contemporary manifestations of the right and radical right throughout the Americas. From interwar Canada to contemporary Chile, the right and radical right have come in diverse ideological currents. Those ideological currents have undergone historical changes and the strategies of the right and radical right need to be contextualized in respect of country and region. The right and radical right also have distinctive meanings throughout the Americas and in different epochs.

Mock Ritual in the Modern Era explores the complex interrelations between ritual and mockery, the latter of which is not infrequently the unofficial face of claims to rationality. McGinnis and Smyth consider how the mocking and parodying of ritual often associated with modern rationalism may itself become ritualized, and other ways in which supposedly sham ritual may survive its "outing." This volume traces the evolution of "mock ritual" in various forms throughout the modern era, as found in literary, historical, and anthropological texts as well as encyclopedias, newspapers, and films. Mock Ritual in the Modern Era places famous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors in dialogue with contemporary popular culture, from Diderot, Sterne, and Flaubert to the TV shows Survivor and Judge Judy, and from Voltaire to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy of 2015. Ritualistic and mock ritualistic aspects of comedy and ridicule are considered along with those, notably, of sexuality, medicine, art, education, and justice.

Nathaniel Scudder, a well-educated Presbyterian physician, was an idealistic early advocate of the rebellion. Like many of his fellow graduates of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) he believed in the Calvinist vision of a pious republic. His wife, Isabella Anderson Scudder, a wealthy heiress and granddaughter of a royal governor, reluctantly accepted her husband's radical political inclinations while fearing the tragic consequences that might result. After a brilliant career as a physician and elder of the Presbyterian Church, he was elected to represent New Jersey in the Continental Congress, where he became one of the signatories of the Articles of Confederation. He eventually grew so frustrated by the blatant corruption he experienced that he abandoned politics and helped form an extra-legal vigilante organization, the Retaliators. Nathaniel's inner journey to the abandonment of his congressional mandate in favor of participation in violent retaliation was driven by his friendship and admiration for David Forman, the main architect of the retribution strategy. On October 16, 1781, Nathaniel Scudder became the only person who served in the Continental Congress to die in action in the War of American Independence. In a skirmish between Retaliators and Loyalists, he was struck by a bullet meant for David Forman.

A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author. Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history -- and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.