Experience remains a politically charged and semantically ambiguous concept that arouses as much passion as it does suspicion, especially as it relates to agency and identity. Craig Ireland focuses on the eighteenth-century historical developments that led to the conceptualization of experience as a modern problem. Combining historical findings with discourse analyses and diagnostic readings of recent subaltern and aesthetic inquiry, Ireland reveals that the term experience has been incorrectly understood. Since the 1970s, persistent appeals to experience in identity politics and cultural inquiry testify not only to the influence of a particular modern concept but, more importantly, to the historical status of modern self-identity.The Subaltern Appeal to Experience demonstrates that addressing historical preconditions not only helps clarify a notoriously ambiguous concept but also elucidates the issues that revolve around how modes of identity-formation have changed in the face of earlier cultural and economic developments that continue to inform our late (or post) modern understandings of the self.

The central concern of the book is the impact of global terror networks and state counterterrorism on twentieth-century fiction. A unique contribution of this book is the comparative approach, as opposed to the single author focus of most of the edited collections on terrorism in literature.

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? This book investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge.

This collection offers a comprehensive account of the relation between diaspora and media cultures. It analyses the politics of transnational communication, the consumption of media by diasporic communities, and the views of non-governmental organizations on issues of the participation and representation of ethnic minorities in the media.

While acknowledging the significant gains modernity and post-modernity offer Western civilization in the areas of liberty and knowledge, Schmitz sees in their arguments a superficiality that does not bite to the bone. In The Recovery of Wonder he proposes we approach the world as a gift in order to regain the sense of wonder Shakespeare so eloquently recognized.

Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the defining authors in the literature and culture of post-war America. Yet he has long been a polarising figure and throughout his long career he has won the disapproval of an extremely diverse range of public moralists -- including, it would seem, the Nobel Prize committee. Far from seeking to make Roth a more palatable writer, Patrick Hayes argues that Roth's interest in transgressing against the 'virtue racket', as one of his characters put it, defines his importance. Placing the vehemence and unruliness of human passions at the heart of his writing, Roth is the most subtle exponent of a line of thinking that descends from Nietzsche and which values the arts for their capacity to scrutinise life in an extra-moral way. Philip Roth: Fiction and Power explores the depth and richness of insight that Roth's fiction thereby generates, and defines what is at stake in his challenge to widely-held assumptions about the ethical value of literature. As well as examining how Roth emerged as a writer and his main lines of influence, it considers his impact on questions about the nature and value of tragedy, the relevance of art to life, the relationship between art and the unconscious, the concept of the author, the idea of a literary canon, and how fiction can illuminate America's complex post-war history. It will appeal not only to readers of American literature, but to anyone interested in why literature matters.

"Martin Jay is one of the most influential intellectual historians in contemporary America, and here he shows once again a willingness to tackle the 'big issues' in the Western cultural tradition…. A remarkable history of ideas about the nature of human experience."—Lloyd Kramer, author of Threshold of a New World "A magisterial study of one of the most elusive, contested, and pervasively important concepts of the Western philosophical tradition. Ranging from epistemology and aesthetics to the philosophy of history, religion, and politics, Songs of Experience brilliantly traces the major lines of theory and debate. Insightful, rich, and masterfully narrated, Jay's book sings with that well-tempered voice of erudition, synthetic intelligence, and generous grace that has become his enviable trademark."—Richard Shusterman, author of Pragmatist Aesthetics "This illuminating, provocative volume consolidates Martin Jay's standing as our leading modern intellectual historian. Ranging sure-footedly from ancient to postmodern discourse, Jay offers finely balanced readings of thinkers who have wrestled with the elusive concept of experience. Because Jay respects—and presents so clearly and sympathetically—positions different from his own, Songs of Experience gives readers the resources necessary to embrace or resist his own bold interpretations of philosophers from Kant and Burke through Dilthey and Dewey to Foucault and Rorty. This book will prove as indispensable to intellectual historians as the idea of experience itself."—James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism