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.

“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)

As one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt is well known for her writings on political philosophy. Less familiar are her significant contributions to cultural and literary criticism. This edition brings together for the first time Arendt's reflections on literature and culture. The essays include previously unpublished and untranslated material drawn from half a century of engagement with the works of European and American authors, poets, journalists, and literary critics, including such diverse figures as Proust, Melville, Auden, and Brecht. Intended for a wide readership, this volume has the potential to change our view of Arendt by introducing her not only as one of the leading political theorists of her generation, but also as a serious, committed, and highly original literary and cultural critic. Gottlieb's introduction ties the work together, showing how Arendt developed a form of literary and cultural analysis that is entirely her own.

This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the contributors here contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled “Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world” (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled “Symbiotic Anthropologies” (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields.

Cultural Reflections takes the best from a writing process approach and adds a social dimension, demonstrating how to make cultural criticism the driving force in the high school English curriculum. Students carry different baggage than we did when we were in school- what engaged students thirty years ago does not engage them today. Cultural Reflections acknowledges those differences and addresses them in ways that make sense to teachers and keep students interested. Gaughan's work is that of a master teacher, continually developing his craft, drawing insight from his students, and featuring them in his accounts. From him, readers will learn about the importance of names and naming, not only for their students but also for themselves. They will learn new ways to think about language and the racist, sexist, and political assumptions that sometimes underlie the words we use. And they will see how teaching thematically removes the curricular constraints imposed by chronological approaches to literature. The book will help broaden teachers' notions of what constitutes legitimate texts to include not only young adult and contemporary multicultural texts, but audio and video texts as well. Preservice and inservice English teachers will find in Cultural Reflections a compelling vision for rethinking what "English" is or can be. Tom Romano writes in the foreword, "After reading it, you might revise your teaching. You might take charge in a new way."