Somali is one of the Cushitic family of languages spoken in the horn of Africa and the official language of Somalia. This practical grammar, published in 1905, was prepared by J. W. C. Kirk, who first learnt to speak the language during his service with Somali troops during the British Empire's failed attempt in 1902–1904 to wrest control of the region from the Dervish state under Muhammad Ab…
Indefatigable as a writer and reformer on rural and political questions in his native Britain, William Cobbett (1763–1835) wrote the present work during the period he spent as a farmer in the United States. Intended for young people and especially 'soldiers, sailors, apprentices, and plough-boys' (Cobbett had himself been one of the latter), it provides concise and practical explanations of g…
The Civil War stands vivid in the collective memory of the American public. There has always been a profound interest in the subject, and specifically the participation of black Americans in and reactions to the war and the war's outcome. Almost 200,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War. Although most were illiterate ex-slaves, several thousand were well-educated, …
"Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been i…
This book takes a corpus-based approach, which integrates translation studies and contrastive analysis, to the study of translational language. It presents the worlds first balanced corpus of translational Chinese, which, in combination with a comparable native Chinese corpus, provides a reliable empirical basis for a comprehensive account of the macro-statistic, lexical, and grammatical featur…
Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers…
"In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories,…
In Writing the Yugoslav Wars, Dragana Obradović analyses how the Yugoslav wars of secession helped shape the region’s literary culture. Obradović argues that the crisis of the country’s disintegration posed an ethical challenge to self-identified postmodernists. This book takes a transnational approach to literatures of the former Yugoslavia that have been, since the 1990s, studied separa…
In this volume, John Farrell shows that political utopias—societies with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature for the benefit of our collective existence—have a perennial opponent, the honor-based culture of aristocracy that dominated most of the world from ancient times into early modernity and whose status-based competitive psychology persists to the pres…
This extract from Ovid's 'Theban History' recounts the confrontation of Pentheus, king of Thebes, with his divine cousin, Bacchus, the god of wine. Notwithstanding the warnings of the seer Tiresias and the cautionary tale of a character Acoetes (perhaps Bacchus in disguise), who tells of how the god once transformed a group of blasphemous sailors into dolphins, Pentheus refuses to acknowledge t…