A&P is a multidiscilinary journal which gathers international scholars and thinkers to analyse the latest debates in the field of philosophy and anthropology.

Russell Kirk (1918--1994) is renowned worldwide as one of the founders of postwar American conservatism. His 1953 masterpiece, The Conservative Mind, became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in the nation's attitudes toward traditionalism. A prolific author and wise cultural critic, Kirk kept up a steady stream of correspondence with friends and colleagues around the globe, yet none of his substantial body of personal letters has ever been published -- letters as colorful and intelligent as the man himself. In Imaginative Conservatism, James E. Person Jr. presents one hundred and ninety of Kirk's most provocative and insightful missives. Covering a period from 1940 to 1994, these letters trace Kirk's development from a shy, precocious young man to a public intellectual firm in his beliefs and generous with his time and resources when called upon to provide for refugees, the homeless, and other outcasts. This carefully annotated and edited collection includes correspondence between Kirk and figures such as T.S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Ray Bradbury, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Charlton Heston, Nikolai Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, Richard Nixon, and Herbert Hoover, among many others.Kirk's conservatism was not primarily political but moral and imaginative, focusing always on the relationship of the human soul in community with others and with the transcendent. Beyond the wealth of autobiographical information that this collection affords, it offers thought-provoking wisdom from one of the twentieth century's most influential interpreters of American politics and culture.

To engage with the aesthetic is to watch yourself watching and what you see cannot be reached, for all that exists is the reflection of the vision performed by you. The aesthetic experience offers insights into the consciousness that are both ancient and linked to creative inventions in present-day art culture. In "A Place to Know", Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf interprets twelve recent artworks, from Sol LeWitt to Katharina Grosse. She sets out the unique claims and qualities which are inherent in seeing and understanding contemporary art. The book presents four analytical categories of artwork, charting the character of the aesthetic experience and the traditions that determine how we think about visual art. She peels back the layers of consciousness to lay bare the forgotten seams of experience, interwoven with artistic expression. The ancient thus arcs into a deepened awareness of avant-garde art.

The first full-length study to treat both parts of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's foundational text Royal Commentaries of the Incas as a seminal work of political thought in the formation of the early Americas and the early-modern period. It is also among a handful of studies to explore the Commentaries as a "mestizo rhetoric," written to subtly address both native Andean readers and Hispano-Europeans.

The Once and Future Muse presents the first major study of the life and work of Dominican-born bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932). Beginning with her literary celebrity as the youngest poet ever inducted into the Poetry Society of America, it traces her relative obscurity after 1952 when she married and took on family and employment responsibilities, to her triumphant return to the poetry spotlight decades later when she reclaimed her former prestige with a series of award-winning poetry collections. The authors define Espaillat's place in American letters with attention to her formalist aesthetics, Hispanic Caribbean immigrant background, poetic community building, bilingual ethos, and domestically minded woman-of-color feminism. Addressing the temporality of her oeuvre—her publishing before and after the splitting of American literature into distinct ethnic segments—this work also highlights the demands that the social transformations of the 1960s placed on literary artists, critics, and readers alike.

Biography, Identity and Religion: Federicomaria Muccioli gives a useful brief history of divinisation in biographical writing and discusses Plutarch’s depiction of ruler cult in these terms; Daniel Harris-McCoy deals with accounts of dreams in biographical works and their influence on Artemidorus; Jennifer Rea compares the ways in which women are biographized, the early Christian martyr St. Perpetua, and the twentieth-century Christa McAuliffe, who lost her life in the Challenger disaster; Matthew Ferguson considers eschatological elements in the Alexander Romance, a late-antique highly fictionalized version of the life of Alexander the Great. Greek Lives under Roman rule: Alexei Zadorojnyi identifies the way in which very highly condensed ‘Lives’, for which he uses the term ‘biographical synecdoche’, serve interesting functions within biographical works; Andrew Scott writes about the tensions which arise in Cassius Dio from the fact that he was sometimes a participant in the history he relates; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin is also interested in the relation between biography and real life, and looks in great detail at how this is worked through in the tradition of NeoPlatonic biography.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Puerto Rico was swept by a wave of modernization, transforming the island from a predominantly rural society to an unquestionably urban one. A curious paradox ensued, however. While the island underwent rapid urbanization, and the rhetoric of economic development reigned over official discourses, the newly installed insular government, along with some academic circles and radio and television media, constructed, promoted, and sponsored a narrative of Puerto Rican culture based on rural subjects, practices, and spaces. By examining a wide range of cultural texts, but focusing on the film production of the Division of Community Education, the popular dance music of Cortijo y su combo, and the literary texts of Jose Luis Gonzalez and Rene Marques, Concrete and Countryside offers an in-depth analysis of how Puerto Ricans responded to this transformative period. It also shows how the arts used a battery of images of the urban and the rural to understand, negotiate, and critique the innumerable changes taking place on the island.

This book presents archaeological research from places of war, violence, protest and oppression of the 20th and the 21st century; sites where the material relics give a deep insight to fateful events – a shadow of war. Alongside renewed interest in National Socialism and the Holocaust, archaeological interest started in former concentration camps of the Nazi dictatorship. The focus was on the central places of the camps, such as the gas chambers, the crematoria, or execution sites, as well as prisoners’ barracks and the parade ground. In many cases, these sites revealed forgotten and vanished structures, where archaeological excavations can offer the possibility for commemorating the victims. The research has since widened and includes other sites of Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War, as well as the First World War, the Cold War and locations of civil wars and civilian protest against state authorities and against companies and corporations in many parts of the world. In order to come to a comprehensive understanding contemporary archaeology must take a global perspective. Archaeological finds often shed light on daily life, revealing survival conditions in the internment camps; the lives of people and their fighting and dying on battlefields and in trenches. Likewise, the relics of politically active people in protest camps give an impression of their commitment in civilian protest. Sometimes material remains can help to tell an alternative or balancing narrative to the state’s official recorded history. The enormous volume and diverse range of material culture presents challenges and opportunities. Through careful archaeological investigation, we can present different and new perspectives that are not recorded clearly in existing written, pictorial or oral archives. The merging and examination of all sources together is what enables us to understand the complexity of the history. This book will also present future directions in contemporary archaeology that will help bring the study focus beyond sites and assemblages of war and protest.

Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles, reviews, and discussions in Italian, French, and English on the thought of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The journal is produced in cooperation with the Italian Società di Studi su Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and is distributed by Mimesis International, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin in France, and Pennsylvania State University in the United States. All issues are available online from the Philosophy Documentation Center. The journal is abstracted and indexed in The Philosopher's Index, PhilPapers, and the Philosophy Research Index.

For 7,000 years seals have functioned as signs of authority. This publication deals specifically with aspects of status in the history of seals, exploring this theme across a diverse range of cultural contexts—from the 9th century up to the Early Modern period, and, across the world, looking at Byzantine, European, Islamic and Chinese examples. These objects are united by the significant role they play in social status hierarchies, in the status of institutions, indications of power and finally in notions of relative status among objects themselves. In addition to their chronological and geographical diversity, these studies concentrate on many different phases of seal use. Therefore, together they highlight the importance of studying the full life cycle of seals, from the way in which they were made and used through to their cancellation, loss and sometimes destruction. The volume will look at seals used by all members of society, from kings to fishmongers, and will examine the history of objects, with examples ranging from the medieval matrix with a classical gem showing the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius to the 17th-century Providence Island matrix from America. This publication complements the British Museum’s ongoing programme of the digitisation of the Museum’s collection of medieval seal matrices which will widen access to this fascinating body of material.

In Search of the Sacred Book studies the artistic incorporation of religious concepts such as prophecy, eternity, and the afterlife in the contemporary Latin American novel. It departs from sociopolitical readings by noting the continued relevance of religion in Latin American life and culture, despite modernity's powerful secularizing influence. Analyzing Jorge Luis Borges's secularized "narrative theology" in his essays and short stories, the book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists, from María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, to Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Lezama Lima, to "sacralize" the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the "desacralization" of the novel by more recent authors, from Elena Poniatowska and Fernando Vallejo to Roberto Bolaño.

In 1924, B. Russell claimed the crucial importance of relationships to our understanding of many unresolved philosophical problems. Such observation is more than fundamental for the contemporary philosophical agenda: ontology, philosophy of religion and several other theoretical fields require an explanation for the very nature of what a relationship is and how it works. Collecting several contributions on the very meaning of relations, the volume aims to expand the international debate in the field from a philosophical perspective. Ranging from history of philosophy to ontology, from philosophy of religion to the history of religious doctrines, leading scholars from all over the world come together to address this timely topic.

Tasteful Domesticity demonstrates how women marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, and class used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of taste and domesticity. Taste discourse engages cultural values as well as physical constraints, and thus serves as a bridge between the contested space of the self and the body, particularly for women in the nineteenth century. Cookbooks represent important contact zones of social philosophies, cultural beliefs, and rhetorical traditions, and through their rhetoric, we witness women's roles as republican mothers, sentimental evangelists, wartime fundraisers, home economists, and social reformers. Beginning in the early republic and tracing the cookbook through the publishing boom of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive era, and rising racial tensions of the early twentieth century, Sarah W. Walden examines the role of taste as an evolving rhetorical strategy that allowed diverse women to engage in public discourse through published domestic texts.

To use Alan Badiou's words, "It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy." The present book, Time Without Becoming, is the text of a conference that Meillassoux gave at Middlesex University in London in May 2008. Following his seminal After Finitude, Meillassoux proceeds here to further explore his notion of absolute contingency, which is able to produce and destroy, without a reason, any becoming. In her contribution, Anna Longo challenges this idea by confronting Meillassoux’s speculative materialism with emergentism.

Children's and young adult literature has become an essential medium for identity formation in contemporary Latino/a culture in the United States. This book is an original collection of more than thirty interviews led by Frederick Luis Aldama with Latino/a authors working in the genre. The conversations revolve around the conveyance of young Latino/a experience, and what that means for the authors as they overcome societal obstacles and aesthetic complexity. The authors also speak extensively about their experiences within the publishing industry and with their audiences. As such, Aldama's collection presents an open forum to contemporary Latino/a writers working in a vital literary category and sheds new light on the myriad formats, distinctive nature, and cultural impact it offers.

Literary scholars and historians have long considered W. E. B. Du Bois (1868--1963) an extremely influential writer and a powerful cultural critic. The author of more than one hundred books, hundreds of published articles, and founding editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis, Du Bois has been widely studied for his profound insights on the politics of race and class in America. An activist as well as a scholar, Du Bois proclaimed, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy."In A Political Companion to W.