This is a collection of essays focusing on conventions of change in the arts, philosophy, and literature.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.

Even though many of France’s former colonies became independent over fifty years ago, the concept of "colony" and who was affected by colonialism remain problematic in French culture today. Seloua Luste Boulbina, an Algerian-French philosopher and political theorist, shows how the colony’s structures persist in the subjectivity, sexuality, and bodily experience of human beings who were once brought together through force. This text, which combines two works by Luste Boulbina, shows how France and its former colonies are haunted by power relations that are supposedly old history, but whose effects on knowledge, imagination, emotional habits, and public controversies have persisted vividly into the present. Luste Boulbina draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant to build a challenging, original, and intercultural philosophy that responds to blind spots of inherited political and social culture. Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa offers unique insights into how issues of migration, religious and ethnic identity, and postcolonial history affect contemporary France and beyond.

For too long urban design has been seen as a subsidiary to architecture and urban planning, sitting somewhere between the two without establishing itself as a field of study in its own right. This book sets out to challenge that assumption and establish a comprehensive framework for restructuring urban design knowledge. Cuthbert builds upon the base of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities in this thought provoking book.

In contemporary Anglo-Caribbean literature, the dialectic interrelations of “exile” and “return” are essential for conveying meta-reflections on literature and language, as well as the role they play in the construction of personal and collective identities. While this volume focuses on the specificity of a cultural area whose history is marked by colonialism, diaspora, slavery and racial conflicts, it also raises epistemological questions surrounding the complexity of literature, and its function in a world which is ever more composite, hybrid and transcultural. By developing a new, systematic approach which combines post-colonial studies, theories of intertextuality and philosophy of language, it explores how contemporary literary texts reflect, elaborate and redefine the experiences of societies that are currently dealing with ever-growing global interdependencies and newly-formed cultural and semiotic context.

This work offers a fascinating insight into a crucial genetic process. Recombination is, quite simply, one of the most important topics in contemporary biology. This book is a totally comprehensive treatment of the subject, summarizing all existing views on the topic and at the same time putting them into context. It provides in-depth and up-to-date analysis of the chapter topics, and has been written by international experts in the field.