Time’s Fool: Essays in Context is a collection of essays on a broad range of topics, from Gilgamesh to James Joyce – and beyond: to Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Yaşar Kemal, Cormac McCarthy, Abdulrahman Munif, and many others. Time’s Fool is a memorial to the life work of A. Clare Brandabur, who walked away from a tenure-track teaching position at the University of Illinois to embark on a career of teaching in Middle Eastern universities in Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, occupied Palestine, Cyprus, Ankara, and finally Istanbul, where she taught for the last decade and a half of her life. Had Clare stayed with a career at a “Research I” university in the United States, her scholarship would have been far less rich and free-wheeling – more narrow, concentrated, and specialized – and she would not have been able to help and inspire her graduate and undergraduate students from the Near East and, especially during her last five or six years at Fatih University, from around the world.

The essays are organized into five main groups, from “Gender and Family Relations” and “Ecocriticism,” to “Colonialism and Post-Colonialism,” “Colonialism and Ireland,” and “Colonialism, Palestine, Genocide”; and a final ‘catch-all’ section of “Miscellaneous Essays” that includes Gilgamesh, T.E. Lawrence, Yaşar Kemal, Graham Green, and modern theory. There are also sub-categories that transcend the six sections, such as Arab Literature, Catholicism, Women’s Studies, and Mythology – something for everyone, in short.

Clare’s essays give a sense of her breadth of scholarship and her very rich play of mind, but the real monument to her life’s work is in the hearts and minds of the students from around the world whom she influenced.