Writing The New World

Writing New Worlds analyses the different ways in which travel literature constituted a fundamental pillar in the production of knowledge in the modern era. The impressive frequency of publication and the widespread circulation of translations and editions account for the leading and essential contribution of travel literature for a better understanding and awareness about the dynamics and practices associated with decoding and making sense of the prose of the world. These texts, in some cases accompanied by illustrations, covered a broad and extensive panoply of languages, grammars and ways of seeing, translating and writing new worlds. In drawing special attention to internationally less-studied sources from Portugal and Germany, the book shows how authors, scholars and artists between the 15th and 17th centuries responded to the challenges of modernity, and explores the cultural dynamics involved in grasping and understanding the New.

An Economist Book of the Year, 2001. In the 18th century, a debate ensued over the French naturalist Buffon’s contention that the New World was in fact geologically new. Historians, naturalists, and philosophers clashed over Buffon’s view. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the New World and its people. In addressing this question, the author offers a strikingly novel interpretation of the Enlightenment.

Exploring the proliferation of polyphonic texts following the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, this book is an important advance in the study of early American literature and writings of colonial encounter.

International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award In Writing the New World, Mauro Caraccioli examines the natural history writings of early Spanish missionaries, using these texts to argue that colonial Latin America was fundamental in the development of modern political thought. Revealing their narrative context, religious ideals, and political implications, Caraccioli shows how these sixteenth-century works promoted a distinct genre of philosophical wonder in service of an emerging colonial social order. Caraccioli discusses narrative techniques employed by well-known figures such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as less-studied authors including Bernardino de Sahagún, Francisco Hernández, and José de Acosta. More than mere catalogues of the natural wonders of the New World, these writings advocate mining and molding untapped landscapes, detailing the possibilities for extracting not just resources from the land but also new moral values from indigenous communities. Analyzing the intersections between politics, science, and faith that surface in these accounts, Caraccioli shows how the portrayal of nature served the ends of imperial domination. Integrating the fields of political theory, environmental history, Latin American literature, and religious studies, this book showcases Spain’s role in the intellectual formation of modernity and Latin America’s place as the crucible for the Scientific Revolution. Its insights are also relevant to debates about the interplay between politics and environmental studies in the Global South today. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Virginia Tech.

A history still in the making -- Australian women writers through their letters, diaries and fictions have created a new world of literature. Dale Spender in this lively and provocative history of white women's literature presents a fresh and forthright view of the achievements of convict writers to writers and feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Brief Candles (1930), Aldous Huxley's fifth collection of short fiction, consists of the following four short stories: "Chawdron" "The Rest Cure" "The Claxtons" "After the Fireworks" Brief Candles takes its title from a line in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Set in London in the year AF 632 (2540 AD) this political and dystopian science fiction novel, paints a chilling picture of a consumerist society where being a misfit spells utter doom for a person. Here assisted reproductive technologies, mindless sex and orgies, and guided rules for expressing of human emotions reduce relationships to mechanical farces. Written in 1931, the novel is still relevant today and more so because, as Huxley mentioned in "Brave New World Revisited", our real world is turning into the world of the novel much faster than we originally thought! Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

Theodore Sider presents a broad new vision of metaphysics centred on the idea of structure. To describe the world well we must use concepts that 'carve at the joints', so that conceptual structure matches reality's structure. This approach illuminates a wide range of topics, such as time, modality, ontology, and the status of metaphysics itself.