A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one--including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors--the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring villages engaged in long-running feuds; of bookkeepers calculating the annual costs of horseshoes, halters, and hay; of Tatar couriers and British travelers sharing drunken nights at post stations; of swimming with horses across rivers; and of hiding from marauding bandits in the desert. By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.

In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.

"Reinventing the Sublime looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and postmodern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history, including '9/11'. It reads Burke and Kant alongside postmodern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism, and considers 'modernist' inflections of the sublime in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard's reading of the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular and disruptive 'event', to argue that the sublime in its postmodern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative relationship to the ironies of temporality and history." -- Publisher website.

Machine generated contents note: Contents List of Acronyms List of Spanish Terms List of Images Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Part One: The Sphere of Tourism Consumption 1 Alpine-Style Mountaineering: Resolve and Death in the Andes 2 Adventure Trekking: Pursuing the Alpine Sublime Part Two: The Sphere of Service Production 3 Comerciante Entrepreneurship: Investment Hazard and Ethical Laboring 4 Golondrina Laboring: Informality and Play Part Three: The Sphere of the Conservation State 5 Community-Based Conservation: Land Managers and State-Civil Society Collaborations 6 Conservation Policing: Education and Environmental Impacts Part Four: The Politics of the Green Economy 7 Defending Popular Sustainability in la Comuna 8 Kirchnerismo and the Politics of the Green Economy Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism - 'postmodern nihilism' - that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature in two chapters, the first on aesthetics and the second on ethics. It offers a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature.

Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.

This compact, indispensable overview answers a vexed question: Why do so many works of modern and postmodern literature and art seem designed to appear 'strange', and how can they still cause pleasure in the beholder? To help overcome the initial barrier caused by this 'strangeness', the general reader is given an initial, non-technical description of the 'aesthetic of the strange' as it is experienced in the reading or viewing process. There follows a broad survey of modern and postmodern trends, illustrating their staggering variety and making plain the manifold methods and strategies adopted by writers and artists to 'make it strange'. The book closes with a systematic summary of the theoretical underpinnings of the 'aesthetic of the strange', focussing on the ways in which it differs from both the earlier 'aesthetic of the beautiful' and the 'aesthetic of the sublime'. It is made amply clear that the strangeness characteristic of modern and postmodern art has ushered in an entirely new, 'third' kind of aesthetic – one that has undergone further transformation over the past two decades. Beyond its usefulness as a practical introduction to the 'aesthetic of the strange', the present study also takes up the most recent, cutting-edge aspects of scholarly debate, while initiates are offered an original approach to the theoretical implications of this seminal phenomenon.