Books published by Lexington Books

This book tells the stories of twentieth century Jewish intellectuals and activists who converted to Islam. Some were motivated by religious reasons, others by political considerations. The book reveals whether the geopolitical events of the twentieth century confirmed, complicated, or refuted their aspirations.

Using the Edo ne Ekue as a case study, this book examines Edo people during the pre-colonial period by shedding light on their political institutions, trading networks, and associations affiliated with the Benin royal imperial court while simultaneously being distinct from the court.

An inquiry on how one of the most conservative Christian faiths adapts to the digital technological realities, facing secularization and theories that portray religion as doomed to extinction. An atypical process for the hierarchical East-European Orthodoxy, in which believers, as Ortho-bloggers, set the norms of the digital Orthodoxy.

In nine personal essays that blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, Andrea Jeftanovic explores border regions with a luminous, perceptive voice, covering diverse sociohistorical contexts including the Balkan wars, the border between Chile and Peru, Clarice Lispector¿s Brazil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and 1970s California.

This book explores the gradual and long-lasting integration of contested memory in the cultural memory of Ukraine. Epistolary expressions by Mykola Hohol, Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko illustrate the circulation of contested memory sponsored by Russia through memory policies and social forgetting.

Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at Fairfax County, Virginia, and Daechi-dong, Seoul, Korea, Korean Kirogi Families explores how transnational activities of kirogi families influence their sense of place and belonging.

Liminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between brings together a collection of essays in conversation with each other surrounding a widely untapped field of study in children's and young adult literature.

Rein Vihalemm's philosophy of science left two prominent philosophical legacies: a methodological distinction of scientific disciplines and the practical realist philosophy of science. The diverse perspectives in this book explore some of the ideas that have sprung from Vihalemm's philosophy of science, and the applications of these approaches.

Agency and Bodily Autonomy in Systems of Care examines how humans and their bodies become enmeshed in systems of care. This book establishes the need for advocacy and policy change to improve health outcomes by re-envisioning systems of care as spaces that include individual agency and bodily autonomy.

This volume considers Dostoevsky's The Gambler from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its psychological, cultural, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic aspects. Dostoevsky presents gambling as a fundamental problem of human existence, with implications in the realms of philosophy, religion, and aesthetics.

This book examines the role that the American Film Institute had in supporting experimental and independent cinema at a key moment of change in the history of American film. Gracia Ramirez provides a rich contextualization of the institution¿s history and offers a grounded assessment of its achievements and shortcomings.

Communicated Stereotypes at Work highlights the pervasiveness and complexity of stereotypes in the workplace by analyzing the role they play in a variety of professional settings. Contributors explain how and why stereotypes are communicated, explore the role each of us plays in perpetuating them, and suggest alternative modes of discourse.

This book examines how Chinua Achebe presented the Igbo-African world in his writing by analyzing his engagement with critical issues like historical representation, gender, and indigenous political institutions. Contributors study how his work draws from African historical reality and identity while challenging Western epistemological hegemony.

In Instructional Cinema and African Audiences in Colonial Kenya, 19261963, the author argues against the colonial logic instigating that films made for African audiences in Kenya influenced them to embrace certain elements of western civilization but Africans had nothing to offer in return. The author frames this logic as unidirectional approach purporting that Africans were passive recipients of colonial programs. Contrary to this understanding, the author insists that African viewers were active participants in the discourse of cinema in Kenya. Employing unorthodox means to protest mediocre films devoid of basic elements of film production, African spectators forced the colonial government to reconsider the way it produced films. The author frames the reconsideration as bidirectional approach. Instructional cinema first emerged as a tool to ';educate' and ';modernize' Africans, but it transformed into a contestable space of cultural and political power, a space that both sides appropriated to negotiate power and actualize their abstract ideas.

In Art in the Pre-Hispanic Southwest: An Archaeology of Native American Cultures, Radoslaw Palonka reconstructs the development of pre-Hispanic Native American cultures and tribes in the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Palonka also examines the wider context through the lenses of settlement studies and social transformation, while paying close attention to the material manifestations of pre-Hispanic beliefs, including intricately decorated ceramics and rock art iconography in paintings and petroglyphs.

The Bohemian reformer Jan Hus made a substantial and critical contribution to the development of the medieval church, owing especially to his views and teachings on Scripture, the church, faith, conscience, and spirituality. This book offers a presentation of Hus's theological commitment centered on his understanding of truth. Lek and Franklin explore Huss preaching ministry and his long-drawn-out legal struggle against charges of heresy as ethical outworkings of this approach to truth. Central to this exploration is a new annotated translation of Hus's Appeal to Jesus Christ as the Supreme Judge against the pope and canon law. This document was not only a protest against papal power, but expressed a fundamentally new legal situation: in bypassing canon law, it essentially represented a personal claim to freedom of conscience. This unheard-of principle from within the medieval legal framework preceded other related ecclesiastical and legal developments by several centuries. The authors argue that Hus's appeal thus represents a momentous event in church history and European history as a whole. Due to the historical significance of his martyrdom and commemoration by many churches throughout Europe, this book demonstrates that Hus remains an important figure not only for the study of European history, but also for understanding contemporary values of Western civilization.

Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity examines white masculinity in Poes fiction and the culture it represents. Poes men are tormented by chronic illness, deviant attachments, and ugly emotions. As it analyzes these afflictions, this book illuminates the pathologies of American masculinity that emerged in a terrible history of imperialism, capitalism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. One of its central contentions is that we can better understand a past and present American masculinity through a reckoning with its perverse feelings. More pointedly, this book asks: What does masculinity feel? What does white American masculinity feel in the first decades of nation formation? What does it feel in the crucible of its revolution, its slave system, its democracy, its nascent capitalism, and its pursuit of happiness? What feelings besiege and beleaguer Poes men? And what can they teach us about the antagonisms of contemporary white American masculinity?

This book explores the interconnectedness of the cultural zeitgeists around the anthropocene and the undead showing how the latter reveals increasing cultural anxieties over who and what constitutes humanity in the twenty-first century and whether it has a place in any possible post-Anthropocene futures.

Using a case study approach, Celebrities in American Elections contends that celebrities have the talent, fame, and resources to succeed in electoral politics. These factors account for the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Fred Grandy, Sonny Bono, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Franken, and Donald Trump. However, the author argues that these items are insufficient without a favorable political environment; as many celebrities have lost elections as have won them. They lose because their persona does not match the politics of their time, or they represent the minority party in a one party dominated district or state, or they advocate for unpopular policies. Among those that won, nearly half were elected by a plurality not a majority of voters. This does not suggest overwhelming public support for celebrity candidates despite their many advantages. With a few exceptions, celebrities that won tended to also win the fundraising battle, while celebrities that lost tended to raise less than their opponent the normal laws of politics still apply. The celebrity factor, while helpful, does not fully explain why celebrities win or lose elections.

The United States Supreme Court is commonly thought to be an institution far removed from American public opinion. Yet nearly two-thirds of modern Supreme Court decisions reflect popular attitudes. Comparing over 500 Supreme Court decisions with timely nationwide poll questions since the mid-1930s, Thomas R. Marshall shows that most Supreme Court decisions agree with poll majorities or pluralities across time and across issues and often represent Americans' views to the same degree as federal policymakers. This book looks beyond the litigants, economic interests, social movements, organized interest groups, or units of governments typically involved and instead examines how well the Court or the justices represent Americans' views. Using nationwide public opinion, broken down by key subgroups, race, gender, education, and party affiliation, better describes exactly whom Supreme Court decisions and the justices' individual votes best represent. His book will be of interest to scholars in political science, legal studies, history, and sociology.

Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table examines early draft manuscripts and published poems by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in order to uncover the compositional approaches that they held in common. Both poets not only honed the minutiae of individual poems but also reworked the shape of overall sequences in order to cultivate unique theories of an ars poetica. The book incorporates drafts of their work from Indiana University's Lilly Library, Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Smith College's Mortimer Rare Book Room, and the British Library. After assessing the writing and revision strategies that the poets' early drafts reveal, the book investigates the material that they borrowed from one another and then reimagined through two major sequences: Plath's Ariel and Hughes's Crow. The book enhances its analysis of the poets' shared techniques by discussing several pairs of poems from Ariel and Hughes's Birthday Letters that respond to one another. Its final chapter also includes an evaluation of some of Hughes's unpublished journal entries and unpublished letters that comment on his last collection's public reception. In the conclusion, the author chronicles Hughes's and Plath's own remarks on their writing process as further evidence of their ars poetica.

In Belfast Imaginary: Art and Urban Reinvention, Katharine Keenan argues for the reimagining of place in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit. This deeply researched ethnography depicts the work of artists and policy makers as they imagine and perform a new urban identity for Belfast in the liminal time between the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit.

"This work can be used as a basic reference book. In addition, this book is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date studies in the field of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies"--

The publication of the Harry Potter series in the United States coincided with the coming-of-age of its main target audience, the millennial generation. Harry Potter and the Myth of Millennials: Identity, Reception, and Politics takes an interdisciplinary view of Harry Potter, as a series and a phenomenon, to uncover how the appeal of Harry became a lifestyle, a moral compass, and a guiding light in an era fraught with turbulence and disharmony. As a new phenomenon at the time, Harry Potter provided comfort through the heroism of the main characters, showing that perseverance and ';constant vigilance,' to quote one of the professors, could overcome the darkest of times. Hobbs argues that Harry Potter prepared an entire generation for the chaotic present marked by the 2016 Election and 2020 Pandemic by shaping the political attitudes of its readers, many of whom were developing their political identities alongside Harry. Her analysis focuses on both the novels themselves and the ways in which fans connected globally through the Internet to discuss the books, commiserate about the events swirling around them, and answer calls to action through Harry Potter-inspired activism. In short, Harry Potter and the Myth of Millennials examines how Harry Potter became a generations defining mythology of love, unity, and transformation.