Savage Century

At the dawn of the twentieth century, observers heralded a new era of social progress, seemingly limitless technological advances, and world peace. But within only a few years, the world was perched on the brink of war, revolution, and human misery on an unprecedented scale. Is it possible that today, in the early twenty-first century, we are on the verge of similar, tumultuous times? Blending a detailed knowledge of international security affairs with history, philosophy, psychology, and literature, Thérèse Delpech vividly reminds us of the signs and warnings that were missed as the "civilized" world failed to prevent both world wars, the Holocaust, Soviet death camps, and Cambodian killing fields that made the twentieth century so deadly. Drawing a parallel between 1905 and 2005, Delpech warns that it could happen again in this current era of increasing international violence and global lawlessness. She looks ahead to imagine various scenarios and regions that could become flashpoints in the future. Winner of the 2005 Prix Femina de l'essai. Praise for the original French edition, L'Ensauvagement "One doesn't know what to admire most in this book: the precision of information, the scope of reference, the originality of the approach?" —Le Nouvel Observateur "From Iranian nuclear ambitions to the Taiwan question, Delpech reviews all the situations which might lead mankind to succumb to the perennial temptation of savagery—a passionate and lucid book." —L'argus de la presse "L'ensauvagement transcends its surface content, articulating great hope that our reason and will might take hold and overcome unreason." —Politique étrangère "Combining introspection and prediction, geopolitics and philosophy, Thérèse Delpech has issued a warning cry." —Politique Internationale

This book is a literary history of the Noble Savage and a comprehensive metamorphology of the American mind. Wide-ranging and deep-diving, this book suggests many reevaluations of American heroes and attitudes.

The Savage and Modern Self examines the representations of North American "Indians" in novels, poetry, plays, and material culture from eighteenth-century Britain. Author Robbie Richardson argues that depictions of "Indians" in British literature were used to critique and articulate evolving ideas about consumerism, colonialism, "Britishness," and, ultimately, the "modern self" over the course of the century. Considering the ways in which British writers represented contact between Britons and "Indians," both at home and abroad, the author shows how these sites of contact moved from a self-affirmation of British authority earlier in the century, to a mutual corruption, to a desire to appropriate perceived traits of "Indianess." Looking at texts exclusively produced in Britain, The Savage and Modern Self reveals that "the modern" finds definition through imagined scenes of cultural contact. By the end of the century, Richardson concludes, the hybrid Indian-Brition emerging in literature and visual culture exemplifies a form of modern, British masculinity.

Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities—a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Above all it is reflective and self-critical, critical of the discipline of anthropology and of the civilization that produced that discipline. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilizations as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization. He rejects the associations which have been made in the ideology of our civilization, consciously or unconsciously, between Western dominance and progress, imperialism and evolution, evolution and progress.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.