San Antonio College Library

In Nausea, the 1938 novel that made Sartre famous, the protagonist is a historian who abandons the biography he is writing because he comes to believe that all histories are fictional, escapist, and useless. He sought the one and only truth of history; a truth that would revolutionize the world. By the time Sartre published his most mature works, he claimed to have written a biography that was perfectly true. This book examines how and why Sartre's...

George Moore was all one could ask for in a man of letters and is considered a literary giant. An Irish Catholic absentee landlord, self-educated within the Parisian cafe culture of the 1870s, Moore was a friend to the Impressionists, a disciple to Zola, a preacher for literary naturalism, a self-proclaimed messiah to the Irish Revival, and a revelatory satirist of those among whom he practiced his vocation. Courageous, innovative, controversial,...

"This is the first comprehensive account of Kant's cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant's views with those of his German contemporaries and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant's philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent...

Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a central literary voice of American culture because he gave lasting expression to its most fundamental and widely shared liberal values. Liberalism is a form of civilization, a set of values, a culture, a way of representing and living in the world. This is an exposition of Emerson's writings as a contribution to the theory and practice of liberal culture. It looks at Emerson's body of work within the classical liberal...

"FDR and Reagan is a study of how old regimes unravel, how new ones are constructed, and how the political system is rejuvenated. Adapting noted presidential scholar Stephen Skowronek's framework, Sloan analyzes how two iconic "reconstructive" presidents redefined the country's fundamental philosophy, priorities, and policies as he weighs their similarities, differences, and impacts. He compares their lives, core policies, and leadership traits and...

African American intellectual thought has long provided a touchstone for national politics and civil rights, but, as Kimberly Smith reveals, it also has much to say about our relationship to nature. In this first single-authored book to link African American and environmental studies, Smith uncovers a rich tradition stretching from the abolition movement through the Harlem Renaissance, demonstrating that black Americans have been far from indifferent...

There is a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman, a pillar of his parish, come to embrace one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? Darwin risked a great deal in publishing his theory of evolution, so something very powerful--a moral fire--must have propelled him. That moral fire, argue authors Desmond and Moore, was a passionate hatred of slavery. They draw on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, correspondence,...

"In the early decades of the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed literary texts - novels, poems, contemplative essays - as a way to conceptualize the new societies they sought. After exploring conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Dohra Ahmad shows the...

"What is the role of literature in the formation of the state? Anthony J. Cascardi takes up this fundamental question in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics, a comprehensive analysis of the presence of politics in Don Quixote. Cascardi argues that when public speech is constrained, as it was in seventeenth-century Spain, politics must be addressed indirectly, including through comedy, myth, and travellers' tales. Cervantes, Literature,...

Rudyard Kipling has been one of the most loved and the most loathed of English writers. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life is a study of the forces and influences that shaped his work -- including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of Empire, and the deaths of two of his children -- and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him, but could never ignore him.