Chapter 4 grounds the history of Sunni revivalism in personal biography. In particular, I trace biographies of individuals situated at different ends of the Islamist spectrum. I show that individuals from a range of convictions shaped this resistance as they borrowed from transnational ideas and gained inspiration from favorable geopolitical events. In addition, as Islamists translated these inspirations to different tracts of action, they reckoned with the possibilities and constraints of the dual model of mobilization. This chapter shows that Islamist political mobilization in Turkey gathered significant momentum around two particular events: on the international front, the 1979 Iranian Revolution served as a source and inspiration for Turkey’s activists; and on the domestic front, the 1980 military coup banned center-right, ultranationalist, and communist political activism, unintentionally creating a greater margin of action for Turkey’s Islamists. Overall, the chapter demonstrates how state ambivalence encouraged Islamists to hone their adaptive capacity and expand the dual model of mobilization, the foundations of which were laid during the early republic.

Via the first volume of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Karen Kukil traces the key themes and concerns that preoccupy the writer, providing an intellectual, cultural and personal biography. Thereby, Kukil establishes the key contexts out of which Plath’s poetry and fiction emerge. After the well-documented deletions in Letters Home, and the dissatisfaction many readers felt at a selection that depicted Plath as ceaselessly happy, Kukil views the full and unabridged letters as akin to a full-length colour film after a black and white short.