Historical Dictionary of Albania

Historical Dictionary of Albania
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 663
Release: 2010-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 081087380X

Albania is not well known by outsiders; it was deliberately closed to the outside world during the communist era. Now it has thankfully become free again, its borders are open and it can be visited, and it is increasingly integrating with the rest of Europe and beyond. Unfortunately, Albania has had its share of problems in the post-communist era; it's a land of destitution and despair, thanks in part to the Albanian mafia, which has turned the country into one of blood-feuds, kalashnikovs, and eternal crises. Yet, Albania is, in essence, a European nation like any other and will soon, it is to be hoped, advance and take its proper place in Europe and the world. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Albania relates the history of this little-known country through a detailed chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, appendixes, and over 700 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, and events; institutions and organizations; and political, economic, social, cultural, and religious facets.

In Byron's Shadow

In Byron's Shadow
Author: David Ernest Roessel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2002
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195143868

In Bryon's Shadow draws on a wide range of sources to create a model for literary history that synthesizes literary investigation and cultural studies to develop a fuller understanding of the historical forces influencing the Anglo-American conception of modern Greece."--Jacket.

The Muslim Bonaparte

The Muslim Bonaparte
Author: K. E. Fleming
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400864976

Ali Pasha of Ioannina (?1750-1822), the Ottoman-appointed governor of the northern mainland of Greece, was a towering figure in Ottoman, Greek, and European history. Based on an array of literatures, paintings, and musical scores, this is the first English-language critical biography about him in recent decades. K. E. Fleming shows that the British and French diplomatic experience of Ali was at odds with the "orientalist" literatures that he inspired. Dubbed by Byron the "Muslim Bonaparte," Ali enjoyed a position of diplomatic strength in the eastern Adriatic; in his attempt to secede from the Ottoman state, he cleverly took advantage of the diplomatic relations of Britain, Russia, France, and Venice. As he reached the peak of his powers, however, European accounts of him portrayed him in ever more "orientalist" terms--as irrational, despotic, cruel, and undependable. Fleming focuses on the tension between these two experiences of Ali--the diplomatic and the cultural. She also places the history of modern Greece in the context of European history, as well as that of Ottoman decline, and demonstrates the ways in which contemporary European visions of Greece, particularly those generated by Romanticist philhellenism, contributed to a unique form of "orientalism" in the south Balkans. Greece, a territory never formally colonized by Western Europe, was subject instead to a surrogate form of colonial control--one in which the country's history and culture, rather than its actual land, was annexed, invaded, and colonized. Originally published in 1999. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Selected Poems of James Merrill

Selected Poems of James Merrill
Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2008-10-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 037571166X

This volume brings together the best of Merrill—and dazzles at every turn. This balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to his work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars. James Merrill himself once called his body of work “chronicles of love and loss,” and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life—comic and haunting, exotic and domestic—to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. Includes poems from the domestic rupture of “The Broken Home” to the universal connections of “Lost in Translation”; from the American storyteller of “The Summer People” to the ecologically motivated satirist of “Self-Portrait in a TyvekTM Windbreaker.” Log Then when the flame forked like a sudden path I gasped and stumbled, and was less. Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash, Dear light along the way to nothingness, What could be made of you but light, and this?

James Merrill

James Merrill
Author: Judith Moffett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1984-04-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780231515139

James Merrill

Sufism and the Way of Blame

Sufism and the Way of Blame
Author: Yannis Toussulis
Publisher: Quest Books
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2012-12-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0835630307

Gold Winner of the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award and the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award! This is a definitive book on the Sufi “way of blame” that addresses the cultural life of Sufism in its entirety. Originating in ninth-century Persia, the “way of blame” (Arab. malamatiyya) is a little-known tradition within larger Sufism that focused on the psychology of egoism and engaged in self-critique. Later, the term referred to those Sufis who shunned Islamic literalism and formalism, thus being worthy of “blame.” Yannis Toussulis may be the first to explore the relation between this controversial movement and the larger tradition of Sufism, as well as between Sufism and Islam generally, throughout history to the present. Both a Western professor of the psychology of religion and a Sufi practitioner, Toussulis has studied malamatiyya for over a decade. Explaining Sufism as a lifelong practice to become a “perfect mirror in which God contemplates Himself,” he draws on and critiques contemporary interpretations by G. I Gurdjieff, J. G. Bennett, and Idries Shah, as well as on Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. He also contributes personal research conducted with one of the last living representatives of the way of blame in Turkey today, Mehmet Selim Ozic.