Stanford University Press

Independence Park, Tel Aviv, is the best-known meeting place for gay men in Israel; Independence Park, Jerusalem, is perhaps the second-best-known; and the hope for independence is the dominant theme of this wide-ranging collection of personal narratives told in the voices of twelve gay men representing a cross-section of contemporary Israeli society.

The speakers are Jew and Arab, ranging in age from 22 to 72. They include students and teachers, a waiter, a prostitute, a journalist, and a janitor. Some are married to women, some are “married” to men, some are single; their families come from Yemen, Germany, Morocco, Romania, Egypt, Russia. They talk about their family backgrounds and early childhood memories, their first stirrings of sexuality and responses to those feelings. They reveal their emotional struggles as well as their religious and political views.

The conviction structuring this book is that by allowing these men to render their different worlds in their own words, their voices will produce a layered chorus approximating the vibrant cacophony of the Israeli street. A remarkably rich assemblage of anthropological fieldwork, the book also can be read as literature—there are some fine storytellers here—or for pure human interest, as the narratives themselves are deeply moving.

This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today’s most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke “context” in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture.

The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition—given or denied—in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the “imperial gaze” of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.

In words that are as clean and precise as his haunting, starkly beautiful photographs, the author vividly recreates the life and times of the Western Homestead Era, that period beginning around 1885 when the prairie lands lying westward from the longitude of the western Dakotas became available to pioneering farmers. Some 70 black-and-white duotone photographs, with detailed captions, record the bleak landscapes and the abandoned farms, outbuildings, farm implements, and hand tools that are mute testimonies to the failed hopes of several million families who settled on these arid and semi-arid lands.

The author explains how their failure resulted from a deadly combination of natural and economic causes. Neither the federal government nor the homesteaders themselves were aware that some of the western homestead land was so dry that artificial irrigation often was required. But irrigation was unavailable to most of these farms, and many thousands of them failed within a few years. On most of the homestead lands, however, dry farming—by which crops are watered by falling rain and snow—permitted the newcomers to plant and reap a variety of crops. For several decades, these regions produced flourishing farms, towns, railroad lines, and dirt and gravel roads.

Meanwhile, and again unanticipated by both government and the prospering farmers, the climate of these productive regions was becoming increasingly dry. This was the natural phenomenon that culminated in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which was coincidentally accompanied by the Great Depression. Crops went begging for lack of water, banks closed, railroads were abandoned, and the formerly prosperous homesteaders went broke by the several millions.

Historians of the Western United States have largely ignored the homesteaders. There is little romance in farming, especially when compared with that attached to cowboys, Indians, explorers, and fur traders. Still, the homesteaders were heroes in their own right. Theirs was the last great endeavor in the opening of the West, and this book, with its moving text, historical introduction, and stunning photographs, tells their story.

What should we make of the return to the sacred evidenced by the new vitality of churches, sects, and religious beliefs in many parts of the world today? What are the boundaries between the essential traits of religion and those of ethics and justice? Is there a "truth" to religion? This remarkable volume includes reflections on such questions by three of the most important philosophers of our time—Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Together with other distinguished thinkers, they address a wide range of questions about the meaning, status, and future prospects of religion.

In his meditation on the "return of religion," entitled "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Mere Reason," Derrida addresses the ways in which this return is intrinsically linked to transformations of which the new media are both the carriers and the symptom. Derrida coins this process one of globalatinization. This neologism signals, among other things, the process of a certain universalization of the Roman word or concept of religion, which tends to become hegemonic, as well as a certain performativity discernible in the new media and in contemporary structures of testimony and confession. Examples of this include, Derrida reminds us, not only the phenomenon of televangelism and televisual stagings of the pope's journeys, and not only the portrayal and self-presentation of Islam, but also the fetishization and becoming virtually absolute of the televisual and the multimedial as such.

Using Being and Time as a point of reference, Vattimo suggests that religious experience is both an individual experience and a manifestation of a historical rhythm within which religion regularly appears and disappears. A commentary by Gadamer summarizes and enriches the contributions by Derrida and Vattimo.

Four essays by Maurizio Ferraris, Eugenio Trias, Vincenzo Vitiello, and Aldo Giorgio Gargani complete the volume by examining other facets of the "religious."

This is a study of love, specifically of men’s and women’s emotional roles vis-à-vis one another in Northeast Brazil; of how people form conjugal relationships in this region; and of the impact of rapid socioeconomic change on courtship, marriage, cohabitation, and infidelity.

Rapid urbanization and expansion of the cash economy have transformed the region in a few decades. Among the transformations are shifts in how people conduct courtship, form marriages, view the proprieties of sexual behavior, and assess the proper social and economic roles of men and women. These changes have altered the relative importance of physical, economic, and emotional intimacy in conjugal relationships, transforming the nature of marriage—once defined as a largely economic relationship—into a largely emotional relationship, as ideas of romance once associated with infidelity, concubinage, and courtship are increasingly attached to marriage.

The book is largely based on interviews with men and women who talked about their often complicated love lives with wit and passion, and the book is rich in personal stories and quotations. Women were asked to discuss the nature of men and women, and men were asked to talk about women. Both sexes were questioned about their views on prostitution, concubinage, and promiscuity, as well as their definitions of love. Parents were asked for their views about marriage and child rearing (especially differences in raising boys and girls), their relations with their own parents, lovers, spouses, and friends, and their views on virginity and sexual propriety. The bluntness and articulateness of the informants about their motivations and experiences not only demonstrated that men and women viewed conjugal relationships very differently but enabled the author to specify and explore these differences in unusually interesting ways.

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of "ends" that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts.

The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre.

At stake are issues—texts and contexts—that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost.

This book proposes a new view of the democratization of America by recasting democracy as a symbolic theater, historically realized in an untheorized and irrational public utterance that began with the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 and extended through the Great Awakening and the antebellum era. This discursive practice gave rise, as popular voice, to a distinctive mode of political and literary subjectivity, "democratic personality," which emerged without reference to the political-philosophical currents and attendant humanistic values that anticipated the formation of a liberal democratic society.

The author constructs a genealogy of democratic personality by examining the historical and, later, fictional theaters within which it emerged to redefine the relation of appearance to reality and thus challenge hierarchies of political and cultural power. Its history, as outlined in the first half of the book, traces how colonial culture forsook Puritan cosmology to embrace the complex cultural semiosis of a democratic society based on the representational potential of the individual. As a strategy for self-production that spurred an urgent inquiry into the ontological status of representation, democratic personality crucially influenced the rise of a national literature by complicating the ideological problem of establishing a "democratic" poetics.

The second half of the book examines the development—in the work of Brown, Crèvecoeur, Burroughs, Cooper, Emerson, and Whitman—of an American "aesthetic of innocence." As a platform for the production of a national literature that would claim a unique exemption from the deformations of fiction, the aesthetic of innocence evolved into the practice of a literary eugenics that intended to domesticate democratic personality by embracing its primitive energies as uniquely American while attempting to contain the subversive uncontainability of its voice. The book concludes with a reading of Billy Budd, Melville's novelistic rejection of liberal culture's attempt to domesticate democratic personality.

This book argues that the invention of Asian American identities serves as an index to the historical formation of modern America. By tracing constructions of "Asian American" to an interpenetrating dynamic between Asia and America, the author obtains a deeper understanding of key issues in American culture, history, and society.

The formation of America in the twentieth century has had everything to do with "westward expansion" across the "Pacific frontier" and the movement of Asians onto American soil. After the passage of the last piece of anti-Asian legislation in the 1930's, the United States found it had to grapple with both the presence of Asians already in America and the imperative to develop its neocolonial interests in East Asia. The author argues that, under these double imperatives, a great wall between "Asian" and "American" is constructed precisely when the two threatened to merge. Yet the very incompleteness of American identity has allowed specific and contingent fusion of "Asian" and "American" at particular historical junctures.

From the importation of Asian labor in the mid-nineteenth century, the territorialization of Hawaii and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century, through wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and the Cold War with China, to today's Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the United States in the modern age has seen its national identity as strongly attached to the Pacific. As this has taken place, so has the formation of a variety of Asian American identities. Each contains a specific notion of America and reveals a particular conception of "Asian" and "American."

Complicating the usual notion of "identity politics" and drawing on a wide range of writings—sociological, historical, cultural, medical, anthropological, geographic, economic, journalistic, and political—the author studies both how the formation of these identifications discloses the response of America to the presence of Asians and how Asian Americans themselves have inhabited these roles and resisted such categorizations, inventing their own particular subjectivities as Americans.

Where does courtly literature come from? What is the meaning of "courtly love"? What is the relation between religious and secular culture in the Middle Ages, and why does it matter? This book addresses these questions, as its title indicates, by way of contradiction. Contradiction is central both to medieval logic and to most modern protocols of reading; it therefore informs both the production and the reception of medieval texts. Yet contradiction itself is rarely analyzed, serving more often as a spur to interpretation than as its object.

This book works between the complex philosophical culture of the twelfth century (principally the traditions of Aristotle and of philosophical Neoplatonism, which diverge significantly in their treatment of contradiction) and the no less complex thought of Lacan (which is just as bound up with contradictoriness). Situating twelfth-century Anglo-Norman, French, and Occitan literature within this philosophical embrace, the author studies the interaction of three major literary genres—hagiography, troubadour lyric, and romance—an interaction that, in the course of the century, generates what we now call "courtly literature."

She shows how preferences for different ways of dealing with contradiction migrate from one genre to another during the twelfth century. She also shows how this movement resulted, by about 1170, in different traditions converging to produce the complex artifacts that canonized literary "courtliness," not only for the Middle Ages but for us as well. Coinciding with this convergence, there is a shift in the locus of contradiction from subject to object. This crucial development not only privileges the object within texts, it also cements the value of texts themselves as object.

In a series of comparisons between religious and courtly texts that draws on the writings of Lacan and Kristeva, the author explores how these objects can be variously described in terms of the psychoanalytical concepts of abjection, sublimation, or perversion. The book concludes by suggesting that the historical importance of courtly literature lies in its capacity to mediate, through the centrality accorded to the contradictory object, this transfer from medieval to modern structures of thought and thereby to shape modern forms of enjoyment.

Socrates banished poetry from the ideal republic, adopting the philosophical position that poetic language operates outside the conventions of public discourse and is private in expression. But what does the banished language of poetry say about its relation to public space? Is it possible to draw a line severing the language of beauty from the language of truth? Derrida asks whether the line ought rather to pass between Western metaphysics, with its logic of polar opposites, and another way that does not organize everything in oppositional terms. The verbal economy organized around the poem as inscription, for instance, fits awkwardly with a division between a public discourse under the aegis of truth and a private one regulated by aesthetic pleasure.

Poetry's Appeal takes the reemergence of a viable poetry in the politicized culture of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France as a signal that poetry's sentence of exile from the public arena is unresolved. It finds that poetry addresses history and the political through a disjunction between its illusory status as a song of private, lyrical intent and its actual state as a material inscription, inevitably public in character.

The book confronts several issues raised by the gap between poetry's aesthetic status and its material state. It shows that this gap allows poetry to make a strong critique of symbols as weapons for waging ideological warfare. As lyric, a poem naturalizes linguistic structures whose artificiality, as inscription, it makes manifest. Inscription thus enables the poem to act subversively against the ideology it supposedly supports. Furthermore, the chances and economies of the letter, the mark, and the page can have productive, positing power in poetry. The author argues that the zones and pockets that emerge thanks to nonsignifying elements of language have analogies for reading the city space.

In chapters on Chénier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, the book details some of the struggles between the ideological and material sides of poetry with the nineteenth-century remappings of political space: memory and the archive, the censorship of material history, the propping of founding performatives, the legibility of founding texts, the need to redefine action where technique is productive, and the recognition and assimilation of zones owed to technique.

Institutional logics, the underlying governing principles of societal sectors, strongly influence organizational decision making. Any shift in institutional logics results in a similar shift in attention to alternative problems and solutions and in new determinants for executive decisions. Examining changes in institutional logics in higher-education publishing, this book links cultural analysis with organizational decision making to develop a theory of attention and explain how executives concentrate on certain market characteristics to the exclusion of others.

Analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data from the 1950s to the 1990s, the author shows how higher education publishing moved from a culture of independent domestic publishers focused on creating markets for books based on personal, relational networks to a culture of international conglomerates that create markets from corporate hierarchies. This book offers broader lessons beyond publishing—its theory is applicable to explaining institutional changes in organizational leadership, strategy, and structure occurring in all professional services industries.

Focusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural California counties from 1850 to 1950, Country Schoolwomen explores the social context of teaching, seeking to understand what teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it shaped their categories of experience.

The women we meet in this study taught in isolated one- and two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression years; many of them witnessed the profound upheavals brought about by the two world wars. Through the lens of their lives, the author examines the growth of state control over schools, the irrevocable impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town life, and the patterns of racism that have divided California from the time of the earliest European settlement.

This study challenges a number of assumptions about the lives and work of women teachers. It is often assumed, for example, that the work of women in schools has always been controlled by men—that education has, with rare exceptions, remained a patriarchal space in which women care for children in classrooms while men hold positions of authority, define issues, and set policy. Country Schoolwomen introduces us to a network of women educators who occupied positions of power at the state level, who supported one another, and who defined an alternative, far more positive image of the woman teacher. The work of these women put forth a vision of classroom teaching as a serious and stimulating profession. And for many of the women in this study, teaching clearly did provide material resources and intellectual satisfaction.

The historical record thus suggests that rather than signaling their subjugation, teaching has afforded women a potential source of power; it has offered them respect, autonomy, and financial independence. But women have had to struggle—not always successfully—to claim this potential, which male educators have often sought to deny or disregard. In addition, both university experts and local communities have persisted in viewing classroom teaching as "women's work" and have consequently been slow to acknowledge competing perspectives on the profession. This study ultimately reveals, then, not a homogeneous tradition but a dense ideological landscape, one in which representations of "the woman teacher" were often caught among contradictory and contested visions.

Lacan and the Matter of Origins traces the development of Lacan's thinking about the role of the mother in psychical formation. It examines the conceptual struggle throughout his work over issues of maternal agency in relation to the constitution of human subjectivity, and the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical reasons for this struggle. Lacan is widely held to emphasize the paternal dimension of human subjectivity and the phallic signifier. This book demonstrates that the mother occupies a crucial position in the Lacanian project, even if the maternal relation is not systematically theorized. The maternal figure appears as a Cheshire Cat who fades away and reappears at different times.

The book traces the major shifts in Lacan's understanding of the maternal within an intertextual framework that includes Augustine, Klein, Kojève, and Rank. Pursuing in Lacan's writings the sometimes contradictory or unassimilable functions of the mother, the book closely tracks his variations on and departures from the Freudian definition of such concepts as primary identification, narcissism, castration, deferred action, and the death drive. Lacan's major contribution to twentieth-century thought emerges here in the context of his ostensibly loyal yet revisionist stance toward Freud as his major precursor in the psychoanalytic field.

For those reading Lacan's often recondite work for the first time, Lacan and the Matter of Origins provides an accessible point of entry, with its clear explication of key terms together with their historical and conceptual background. For readers familiar with Lacanian theory, the book offers a reconceptualization of the evolution of his teachings from literary-critical, cultural, and biographical perspectives; it also presents a new approach to Lacan through the interplay of influences integral to the formation of his revisionary thought.

In late 1910, three American adventurers set off on a remarkable around-the-world journey by automobile. Sponsored by the Hupp Motor Car Corporation, the trip was intended to publicize the durability of the Hupmobile and help stimulate export sales.

The car was first driven from Detroit to San Francisco—a very difficult journey in its own right in 1910. From San Francisco, the car and its drivers took a steamship to Hawaii, and from there to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, unloading and touring at each port of call. The men and their machine spent the next five weeks attempting to drive through the Philippines, and then pushed on to Japan and China, where they managed to stay one step ahead of the Chinese revolution. They then drove across India, and from there, sailed to Egypt, brining the first automobile ever to be seen in that country. Next, the Hupmobilists sailed to Italy. In Rome, the adventurers met Pope Pius X, and then drove north to Germany and France. They crossed the English Channel to Folkstone, toured England, and then ferried from Liverpool to Ireland. They returned to New York in time for the 1912 auto show.

In the end, the Hupmobile was driven 41,000 miles and transported by steamship another 28,000. A new world was dawning, both for transportation and for American business enterprise.

This book examines how the early modern Portuguese state used convicts and orphans to populate its global empire over a period of two hundred years. In a country with as small a population base and the global labor requirements of Portugal, no one was expendable, not even such marginal figures as criminals, gypsies, orphans, and prostitutes. The author examines how the Portuguese judicial system, Overseas Council, Courts of the Inquisition, and charities coordinated their efforts to populate border cities in Portugal during the Middle Ages, and then turned to various sites in the empire as places of exile for these elements of society. In addition, he addresses the issue of gender in the state’s use of two distinct groups of single women as colonizers, orphan girls and reformed prostitutes, each given state-awarded dowries if they agreed to relocate overseas.

We are well acquainted with this system as it was used by the British in Australia in the nineteenth century, and much work has been done on similar efforts by other imperial powers, such as France, Spain, Russia, and China, to populate remote regions of their empires. However, this is the first study of the much earlier Portuguese case, and it provides a significant link between the medieval and modern applications of penal exile.

The Portuguese state, with a population in 1600 one-sixth that of Great Britain and one-tenth that of France, exiled around 50,000 people, the same number as each of these larger powers. The punishment of exile was thus far more pervasive in Portuguese society. This work represents a new chapter in the study of exile as a punishment and the use of criminals as colonizers. It helps to explain the longevity of the Portuguese global empire as well as the growth of informal Portuguese-related communities around the world.

What does it mean to be a child or an adolescent growing up on the streets or in a state institution? How do children define their everyday lives in the midst of global processes? This ethnographic study situates childhood and adolescence as social forms within the changing family and political structures of the complex urban world of Caracas, Venezuela.

The presence of youngsters on the streets of Caracas embodies social contradictions at the national level, and this book discusses how these contradictions are played out in an oil-producing nation afflicted with hyperinflation, generalized corruption, the deterioration of public services, increasing poverty, and violence. Vivid life stories told by street children themselves portray their relations with family and friends, as well as with people they encounter: police officers, journalists, social workers, and passersby at their local hangouts. The book also describes and analyzes the justice system and institutions for minors, illustrating the constant failures to respond to, contain, or lessen youth violence.

Many young people come from shantytowns to the streets of Caracas for a better life, and the author shows how they seek status and power through style, pursuing commodities of the global consumer market, from Nike shoes to cellular phones. Drawing on her ethnographic data and contemporary theories of power, control, and style, the author critiques the inequalities of the Venezuelan class structure and the oil boom’s failure to provide adequate social services for a great majority of the population.

Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers—Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition—fiction, poetry, critique—can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary.

The types of feeling treated in Complex Pleasure include wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Hölderlin's "swift conceptual grasp," in which "the tempo of the process of thought is stressed"; "artistic imagination," mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche ("On Moods") and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novel The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight).

Two questions have intrigued observers of the Lou Henry Hoover House, built at Stanford University in 1919 by Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover and now the official residence of the university’s president. Who was the building’s architect? And what was the motive for its unusual, cubic, flat-roofed, undecorated form? Although professional architects were involved in the project, this book shows that the architect was actually Lou Henry Hoover herself, who conceived the design of the house and worked out its details, using her architects largely for technical matters and to produce the drawings and supervise construction. As for the design, the book argues that it was inspired mainly by the Native American Pueblo architecture of New Mexico and Arizona. Herbert Hoover, in fact, called it a “Hopi house,” and Lou referred to her “Pueblo walls,” but the Pueblo connection was later denied by others involved in the project.

The book reveals that both of the Hoovers were interested in Native American culture, and that Lou, in particular, was fascinated with the “primitive” architecture of the non-Western world, which she had studied during the years when she and Herbert had lived and worked in Asia and elsewhere. Primitive forms did not appeal to her for their exoticism, as was typical at that time, but for the virtues she found in them. The Hoover House is a remarkable example of the contribution of non-Western or indigenous architecture to the development of modernism.

The essays in this volume are united by their attention to the many ways in which residents of Greece’s southern Argolid peninsula have attempted to shelter, feed, and advance the economic situation of their families over the last three centuries. This work juxtaposes a series of research projects undertaken in various communities, projects that, taken together, have made the southern Argolid the focus of more ethnographic and ethnohistorical study than any other comparable region of Greece. Ethnographic, geographic, historical, and archaeological methodologies are integrated to yield an image of the southern Argolid as a contingent countryside whose boundaries, character, people, and external connections have been reconfigured time and again.

Such notions strengthen general reformulations occurring within Greek ethnography and speak directly to archaeological attempts to connect the Greek past and present. This volume, the fourth in a series of books deriving from the Argolid Exploration Project conducted by Stanford University, sets forth the material conditions of rural Greek life as mutable and negotiated in ways that complement archaeological interest in the repeated settlement fluctuations of the Greek past. It also exemplifies recent ethnographic shifts in conceiving other aspects of modern Greek life.

The volume replaces assumptions of village longevity with inquiry into what causes settlements to form and grow or to decline. It places idealized inheritance patterns alongside records of actual land transactions. Houses expand, contract, and change over time. The social boundaries among shepherds, farmers, and sailors blur through an exploration of personal occupation histories. In short, the book reexamines and questions many of the categories and concepts by which rural Greece has long been represented.

The high school reunion occurs throughout the United States and cuts across differences in age, locality, and ethnicity. This popular event is commonly thought of as a light-hearted social occasion or an exercise in nostalgia that has little other significance in the lives of its participants. Drawing on candid personal narratives derived from reunions ranging from the fifth to the fiftieth, this pathbreaking study demonstrates, however, that for many Americans the high school reunion is a rich and often poignant experience.

Of particular interest is the fact that this ethnographic study was conducted by a Japanese anthropologist trained in the United States, who offers a comparative perspective on high schools in the two countries. High schools serve very different social purposes in Japan and the United States, and the ways people in the two countries view their high school years differ accordingly.

The author examines the American high school reunion as a dramatic scene in the construction of self and meaning in adulthood. During the high school reunion, Americans are thrown into a room full of mirrors in which they are confronted by different visions of themselves. There they see images of their high school selves filtered through the lights and shadows cast by classmates’ memories and projected against the backdrop created by the lives of those classmates in the present day. Through an analysis of the multiple reflections of self that emerge during reunions, the author shows how reunions afford people an occasion on which to reevaluate their own memories and arrive at a new understanding of self. The American high school reunion thus provides participants with a series of self-perceptions from which they can construct new narratives of their own lives.

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays—like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades—have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and modern, both literary and theoretical texts, they have attained the status of model readings for authors as diverse as da Vinci and Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust, Molière, Goethe, and Mallarmé.

However, the book is not a miscellaneous collection of exquisite essays. The first section of the volume, "From Anguish to Language," indicates the relative unity of its trajectory and its special moment in the development of Blanchot's thought. "Anguish" was a prominent notion for the existentialist philosophies of the period of his first work, and in this book Blanchot reflects on the necessary transition from the paradoxes of anguish to a focus on the paradoxes of language. He does so without ever betraying the affective tensions that attach themselves to linguistic utterances, but he also insists that the pathos of anxiety is, in the last resort, comical. Whoever writes "I am lonely" can judge himself to be quite comical, as he evokes his solitude by addressing a reader and using means that make it impossible to be alone.

This comedy of language is retraced in Blanchot's intensely luminous essays on poetry and narration, on silence and symbolism, the novel and morals, the stranger, the enigma, time, and the very possibility of literature in the works of Blake, Balzac, Rimbaud, and Gide, Bergson and Brice Parain, Rilke and Bataille, Sartre, Camus, Queneau, and so many others.

Confronting the Occupation is a study of work, education, political-national resistance, family, and community relations in a Palestinian refugee camp under conditions of Israeli military occupation. It is based on extended field research carried out by an Israeli sociologist-anthropologist in Dheisheh camp, south of Bethlehem, between 1992 and 1996. Emphasis is placed on how men and women, families, and the local refugee community confront the occupation regime as they seek livelihoods, invest in the education of younger generations, and mount a political and often militant struggle. In the process, men lose their jobs in the Israeli labor market, women, old and young, enter the workforce, university graduates are compelled to migrate to the Gulf, and political cadres challenge harsh prison circumstances by establishing their own comprehensive counterorder. While directed against the occupation, patterns of coping and resistance adopted by Dheishehians introduced tensions and conflicts into family life, furthering the transformation of gender and generational relationships.

The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the representation of the female body. To look at the construction of this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent representation of the male body.

Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Bel-Ami are flickering, episodic investigations into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human vulnerability.

An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, Io e lui, as well as various manifestations of the male body's most salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics. Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers: Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth.

In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body, ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Hervé Guibert, and Michel Foucault.

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines—politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.

Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions—sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics.

Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"—more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality.

Giving the reader a unique window into the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy in President Bill Clinton’s first term, this book highlights the major foreign policy challenges faced and decisions made in a turbulent era. The book is organized around thirty seven key speeches by the Secretary of State, each introduced by an extensive essay that describes its policy context and purpose, and includes anecdotes, local color, and brief sketches of some of the leading figures on the world stage. These introductions, which constitute more than half the book, not only give the who, what, when, and where behind the speeches, but most important, explain the why and how.

For example, the group of speeches on Bosnia is preceded by an incisive account of the twists and turns of U.S. policy leading up to the Dayton Conference and the intense negotiations, involving several volatile personalities, that led to the historic Dayton agreement. Among the other subjects covered by the essays are our relations with China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Haiti, the Middle East, Africa, and South America; international organizations such as NATO and the United Nations; and the global issues of human rights, terrorism, nuclear threat, and the environment.

The book begins with a Prologue that emphasizes Secretary Christopher’s long-standing interest in speeches as an instrument of public policy and the decision making behind this often overlooked aspect of statecraft. It also describes how the Secretary was offered the position by President-elect Clinton, the state of affairs as he found them when he took office, and his strategy and plans for U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. An epilogue recounts the Secretary’s decision to return to private life, offers his insights on the challenges facing the United States in the international arena in the years ahead, and sets forth some suggestions for future policy makers.

Above all, this book provides ample evidence that the author took seriously the advice that United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gave him when he served as the justice’s law clerk in the 1949 term: “Get out in the stream of history, and swim as fast as you can.”

By narrating a protracted and frequently bizarre altercation between a London minister and a member of his flock, this book provides a vivid picture of puritanism at the parish level in early Stuart England.

On February 11, 1627, Stephen Denison preached a sermon that violently denounced an erstwhile boxmaker, John Etherington, as a heretic, a sect master, and an Anabaptist. The accused stood before Denison and then was returned to prison, where he languished for another three years. Denison published his denunciation later that year under the title The White Wolf. By the 1630s, however, Denison himself was in trouble with the same Court of High Commission that had sentenced Etherington. Denison was deprived of his living after being denounced by parishioners who resented his irascible temper, his harsh pulpit style, and his belittling of their church activities. Then, in 1641, Etherington came back to haunt Denison when, taking advantage of the collapse of censorship, the boxmaker heatedly replied in print to the accusations made against him fourteen years before.

The book places this dispute in the multiple social, cultural, and political contexts necessary to understand it. What forces and what ideological and personal trajectories brought these two men into conflict? What issues did the dispute raise and what do they tell us about the religious history of early Stuart England? The story of Denison and Etherington provides an example, almost unique before 1640, of the interaction between a minister and a parishioner. We also gain a portrait of an arena of lay activities and at least potentially heterodox doctrinal debate in puritan circles.

The author challenges the bad name that polemic has acquired of late among scholars by using overtly polemical sources, arguing that polemical intensity allows us a privileged glimpse into a world we do not usually get to see. He reads his sources against the grain, collating and comparing them to overcome the biases, silences, and exaggerations that the polemical mode also produces. In the end, the polemical constructions through which the story of Denison and Etherington has come down to us become necessarily a part of the story itself.

Victorian Testaments examines the changing nature of biblical and religious authority during the first half of the Victorian period. The book argues that these changes had a profound impact on concepts of cultural authority in general. Among the figures discussed are Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Florence Nightingale, and the missionaries of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In developing its picture of Victorian religious ideology, the book analyzes major works of the period, as well as works and documents that have received little critical attention. Its methods are interdisciplinary, building upon recent ideas in literary theory, cultural criticism, and gender studies.

The book proposes that changes in religious faith and Bible reading tended in two directions, the one a celebration of spiritual individualism, the other of the nuclear family. As the credibility of a supernatural source for the scriptures diminished, the need for certainty in moral and religious matters was increasingly filled by the importance attached to individual character. Those Victorians who nurtured their individual character on Bible reading were understood to reveal the perfect spirit of the scriptures—just as the scriptures themselves, it seemed, could no longer do so. However, the desire for religious heroes was counterpoised by another and highly sentimentalized model of the spiritual life, one where religious authority was decentered across a social spectrum of fathers, mothers, and children. In this second direction explored by the book, a complex economy of spiritual power and authority is created by the distribution of sexual, intellectual, and affective attributes to figures who together constitute the nuclear family—one might say the secular holy family.

By tracing these two narrative patterns—the intellectual drama of the spiritual hero and the sentimental saga of the nuclear family—the author demonstrates that the spirituality of many nineteenth-century texts was not an allegory of transcendence so much as a by-product of the narratives themselves. A large-scale cultural confrontation with the disappearance of God was, to a certain extent, deferred by narratives that picked up the slack in faith, creating performances of sacred power with characters who demonstrated either an awesome religious interiority or a recognizably sentimental display of idealized femininity or childhood innocence.

Two features of mathematics stand out: its menagerie of seemingly eternal objects (numbers, spaces, patterns, functions, categories, morphisms, graphs, and so on), and the hieroglyphics of special notations, signs, symbols, and diagrams associated with them. The author challenges the widespread belief in the extra-human origins of these objects and the understanding of mathematics as either a purely mental activity about them or a formal game of manipulating symbols. Instead, he argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing.

Mathematics as Sign addresses both aspects—mental and linguistic—of this machine. The opening essay, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics" (long acknowledged as a seminal contribution to its field), sets out the author's underlying model. According to this model, "doing" mathematics constitutes a kind of waking dream or thought experiment in which a proxy of the self is propelled around imagined worlds that are conjured into intersubjective being through signs.

Other essays explore the status of these signs and the nature of mathematical objects, how mathematical ideograms and diagrams differ from each other and from written words, the probable fate of the real number continuum and calculus in the digital era, the manner in which Platonic and Aristotelean metaphysics are enshrined in the contemporary mathematical infinitude of endless counting, and the possibility of creating a new conception of the sequence of whole numbers based on what the author calls non-Euclidean counting.

Reprising and going beyond the critique of number in Ad Infinitum, the essays in this volume offer an accessible insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called "one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics."

According to the poet Victor Hugo, the year 1870/71 was France's année terrible. The country suffered a humiliating defeat by the Prussian military, and Parisians endured a cruel siege. In the wake of the siege, Paris exploded and revolutionaries proclaimed the birth of the Paris Commune.

The conservative government of the young Third Republic portrayed the Communards as savage destroyers of civilization. The Communards were depicted as plagued by original sin, the evil nature of fallen man, and atavistic degeneration. These alleged traits aligned them with tribal peoples who were commonly thought to be severed from justice, liberty, and divine love. The punishment of the Communards was an odd one; some 4,500 revolutionaries were exiled to the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia with the hope that the inherent truths of nature would instill in their minds a natural morality.

However, the French government had not sufficiently considered the presence of the indigenous people of these "wilderness islands," the Melanesian Kanak. If the Communards were to be moralized by New Caledonia, how was it that the Kanak—who had lived for thousands of years on this land—did not also profit from this moralizing influence? This was just the first paradox provoked by the deportation of Parisian "political savages" to the land of these "natural savages." The surprising parallels and interactions between the Melanesians and the Parisians in their confrontation with the forces of French civilization form the substance of this book. It explores such themes as the history of the self, moralization as a means to civilization, nostalgia as a fatal illness, and colonial humanitarianism and gendered hybridity.

The French attempt to impose a universal moral standard and a particular form of "civilized self" on Communards and Kanak provoked fearsome battles, acerbic rhetorical inversions and fictional re-visionings through which oppositional identities and non-civilized "selves" took on form and solidity. This book places moral imperialism within the context of French republicanism and points to the beginnings of an era (the 1910s) when the recognition, rather than the domination, of the other attained an honored place in French theory.

At the close of the twentieth century, democracy appeared to have overcome the Cold War partition of the world, as countries across the globe had deposed autocratic regimes and held free elections. Nowhere were these developments dramatized more brightly than in Eastern Europe in 1989, as newly formed civic movements replaced long-standing Leninist regimes with democratic governments.

Yet it is clear that the “waves” of democracy that initially seemed similar have led to widely varying outcomes. While some countries in Eastern Europe were invited to join NATO and the European Union, others were excluded. Former communists were elected to power in post-communist Poland and Hungary, but were largely absent in the Czech Republic and were transformed into populists in Slovakia. These differences have led the author to address several questions, including: How similar actually were the Leninist regimes before their dissolution, and how similar were their demises? How did the way communism fell affect the founding of democratic states in Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia?

This book offers a critique and reformulation of existing theories of democratization, as well as of earlier understandings of the fall of communism. By contrasting the negotiated pact in Poland with the collapse of the regime in Czechoslovakia, it provides a theoretical framework to explain how different paths of democratization affected the prospects for sustainable democracy. The book goes beyond the explanation that a “Gorbachev” effect determined events in the late 1980s by contrasting mobilization against Leninist regimes with negotiations for democratic institutions. It highlights competition between aspiring leaders, reconceptualizing the notion of civil society as a master frame within which movements and leaders sought to mobilize popular support.

The book also emphasizes the transformation of networks associated with the birth of a democratic nation, such as the Catholic Church in Poland and the theater strikes in Czechoslovakia. Finally, it analyzes how paths of change structured political competition in new democracies in both the short and the medium term.

The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. The Mottled Screen studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

The author of Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, a widely acclaimed study of Rembrandt's discursive, rhetorical, and narrative painting, now offers a symmetrical counterpart to that study with this sustained "visual" reading of Proust's masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. She focuses on the narrative and descriptive passages, examining how they make us "see," arguing that this visual writing is by no means a derivative writing that uses visual imagery as an inspiration or model. Instead, it is the writing of a true vision.

Beginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops a Proust à la Chardin, working around Chardin's painting The Skate, but only after first reading Chardin through Proust. Viewing a Chardin with anxieties and emulation, Proust writes in Chardin's mood when he sets up the mottled screen as the metaphor of reading. Chardin's appeal to a wavering, roving eye is matched by Proust's uncertain perceptions, and the nervous quality of The Skate is matched by the famous passages recording Proust's disgust at the debris of the breakfast table.

The second part of the book is devoted to Proust's use of optical instruments—such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the telescope—to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the raw material of his poetic imagination. These optical instruments guide the probing of the paradoxes of seeing close-up or at a distance, the latter flattening out, the former blinding.

The final part reads the specifically "photographic" writing that permeates Remembrance as a highly original and astonishing contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics. The photographic shows in the way Proust's narrator frames what he sees, contrasts light and dark, zooms in and out, and represents "contact sheets" of snapshots rapidly taken so as to capture the most fleeting sensations and visions.

In this collection, a leading sociologist brings his distinctive method of social criticism to bear on some of the most significant ideas, political and social events, and thinkers of the late twentieth century. Of the seventeen essays, two are published for the first time, and several of the previously published essays have been expanded and updated for this volume.

In the first section, the author critiques several concepts that have figured prominently in political-ideological controversies—capitalism, rationality, totalitarianism, power, alienation, left and right, and cultural relativism/multiculturalism. He considers their origins, historical shifts in their meaning and the myths surrounding them, and their subtle resonance beyond their formal definitions.

The second section highlights the author’s lifelong interest in the relation of intellectuals to social classes and institutions. The author critically assesses the notion of a “New Class” in which intellectuals have been alleged to play a prominent role, considers the implications for class structure of the increasing centering of intellectual life in the university, and assesses the relation of sociology to professional jargon. The final essays in this section discuss four influential thinkers: David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Allan Bloom. The book closes with an autobiographical statement centered on the author’s intellectual-political life.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.

Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature.

In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.

This book studies Nahuas and Spaniards in the central Mexican jurisdiction of Coyoacan from the Spanish conquest until 1650, crafting a multidimensional portrait of their relations in both institutional and informal settings.

Initially, the primary site of Nahua-Spaniard contact was institutional, as Spanish authorities attempted to reshape local practices to fit their own notions and needs, changing regional states into Spanish municipalities and Christian parishes, local ruling bodies into town councils, and tribute goods into standardized payments in coin. These efforts were never entirely successful, as Nahuas only partially adjusted their own practices when faced with the changes initiated by the Spaniards. The author explores the ways in which new forms of government and economic customs developed, drawing on both Nahua and Spanish traditions.

Nahua-Spanish contact was not limited to formal political and economic settings. The author describes the development of Spanish estates and the market economy, which opened up a new arena of cultural contact in the countryside. A growing number of Nahuas found themselves working for a Spanish landowner, acquiring a horse for peddling fruit from a local Spaniard, or selling land to a newly-arrived Spaniard. The Spanish land market altered Nahua land tenure and led to the loss of much Nahua land. The author demonstrates how Nahua practices came into play as they resorted to indigenous concepts of land tenure to justify the sale of land or of legal process to formalize it.

In bringing Nahuas and Spaniards together in this study, the book explores the changing contours of their relationship in Central Mexico, emphasizing informal interethnic contact in the making of both the Spanish colonial economy and postconquest Nahua society.

This book provides an authoritative history of the Brazilian army from the army’s overthrow of the monarchy in 1889 to its support of the coup that established Brazil’s first civilian dictatorship in 1937. The period between these two events laid the political foundations of modern Brazil—a period in which the army served as the core institution of an expanding and modernizing Brazilian state.

The book is based on detailed research in Brazilian, British, American, and French archives, and on numerous interviews with surviving military and civilian leaders. It also makes extensive use of hitherto unused internal army documents, as well as of private correspondence and diaries. It is thus able to shed new light on the army’s personnel and ethos, on its ties with civilian elites, on the consequences of military professionalization, and on how the army reinvented itself after the collapse of its command structure in the crisis of 1930—a reinvention that allowed the army to become the backbone of the post-1937 dictatorship of Getulio Vargas.

In a bold reassessment, this book analyzes the works of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself.

The two poets share a feature that seems to block their placement in such an easy chronological or historical scheme: each accounts for an experience that will not fully enter memory, but dissipates in the mind in the form of trauma, fragments, and shock. While Baudelaire, as Paul Valéry was the first to show, explores the trauma of the minute personal shocks of everyday existence in modern life, Celan engages with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust and how it has altered our understanding of history. Can we relate the shocks registered in Baudelaire's poems to the historical horror addressed in Celan's work without denying either the singularity of suffering and loss or the uniqueness of the historical event of the Shoah?

Drawing on trauma studies and Holocaust research, Remnants of Song challenges existing interpretations of Baudelaire and Celan by constantly holding in view both the aesthetic dimension of their works and their historical import. The author demonstrates that the act of engaging with a poem on its own terms may serve as an important model for an ethical response to the radical experiences of trauma. Answering Adorno's famous dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, he shows that Celan's poetry continues to posit its own truth by drawing on Baudelaire as a precedent—yet it does so in ways that have little to do with conventional understandings of history.

What made some 700 men and women in the Yorkshire town of Kingston-upon-Hull, in the years 1837 to 1900, decide to suffer no longer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and take their own lives? In this study, the author seeks to uncover the experiences that drove people to suicide; to analyze how suicide was understood by victims, by their families and friends, and by legal and medical authorities; to study how the presumed causes of suicide and the meanings of suicide changed over time and in response to changed social circumstances; and to see what “suicide narratives” elicited by coroners’ inquests can tell us about Victorian life, beliefs, and values in general.

The book is based on an unprecedentedly complete and comprehensive collection of inquest files covering the entire Victorian era in Hull (most coroners’ files have not survived or exist only in fragmentary form). Hitherto, suicide in the Victorian period has been examined only on a national basis; where local evidence has been used, it has come chiefly from London. Through the testimony of relatives, neighbors, friends, and even the deceased (by means of suicide notes), the author has been able to get closer to the experience of suicide and its social construction than has been possible in any previous study.

The framework within which the author evaluates the paths to suicide is the life cycle. By placing each suicide in its local socioeconomic context, and by examining each stage in the life course for each sex and for different social levels, the author has been able to assess causation factors with great confidence. He establishes arguments (such as the importance of declining wages and job security for older men and the loss of a marital partner for either sex) more securely than have earlier studies, and puts some new arguments on the agenda (such as the importance of the presence or absence of interpersonal ties and the influence of Poor Law policy).

Despite the rousing stories of male heroism in battles, the Trojan War transcended the activities of its human participants. For Homer, it was the gods who conducted and accounted for what happened. In the first part of this book, the authors find in Homer's Iliad material for exploring the everyday life of the Greek gods: what their bodies were made of and how they were nourished, the organization of their society, and the sort of life they led both in Olympus and in the human world. The gods are divided in their human nature: at once a fantasized model of infinite joys and an edifying example of engagement in the world, they have loves, festivities, and quarrels.

In the second part, the authors show how citizens carried on everyday relations with the gods and those who would become the Olympians, inviting them to reside with humans organized in cities. At the heart of rituals and of social life, the gods were omnipresent: in sacrifices, at meals, in political assemblies, in war, in sexuality. In brief, the authors show how the gods were indispensable to the everyday social organization of Greek cities.

To set on stage a number of gods implicated in the world of human beings, the authors give precedence to the feminine over the masculine, choosing to show how such great powers as Hera and Athena wielded their sovereignty over cities, reigning over not only the activities of women but also the moulding of future citizens. Equally important, the authors turn to Dionysus and follow the evolution of one of his forms, that of the phallus paraded in processions. Under this god, so attentive to all things feminine, the authors explore the typically civic ways of thinking about the relations between natural fecundity and the sexuality of daily life.

A study of the women who led the United States section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the interwar years, this book argues that the ideas of these women—the importance of nurturing, nonviolence, feminism, and a careful balancing of people's differences with their common humanity—constitute an important addition to our understanding of the intellectual heritage of the United States.

Most of these women were well educated and prominent in their chosen fields: they included Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, the only two United States women to win Nobel Prizes for Peace; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; and Dorothy Detzer, the woman who prompted the investigation of the munitions industry in the 1930's. The ideas of these women were not usually expressed in forms conventionally studied by intellectual historians. On the whole, their ideas must be teased out of organizational records, statements of principle and policy, and personal correspondence. When combined with an understanding of the personal backgrounds of the WIL leaders and placed in the context of early-twentieth-century America, these documents tell us what these women thought was important and why.

The ideas of the WIL leaders are also analyzed in the context of the intellectual themes of Victorianism and modernism. Our understanding of these themes has been based largely on the work of privileged European and American men, and the ideas of women often fit uncomfortably into these traditional categories. A reconstruction of the ideas of the WIL leaders suggests that historians have overlooked an important, alternative intellectual tradition in the United States. To understand and appreciate women's thoughts, we must dissolve the old constructs and let new, multifaceted ones replace them.

This volume aims both to establish cinema as a vital force in Shanghai culture and to direct attention to early Chinese cinema, a crucial chapter in Chinese cultural history long neglected by Western scholars.

The editor’s introduction surveys the history and historiography of Chinese cinema through the 1940’s and identifies subjects and sources that await further research. In Part I, “Screening Romance,” Zhen Zhang discusses how the influence of teahouse culture gradually yielded to cinematic and narrative concerns in the early 1920’s. Kristine Harris’s analysis of a costume drama reveals the director’s cultural heritage and a rich psychological subtext created by new film techniques. Leo Ou-fan Lee examines the ways various urban institutions were utilized to promote a certain type of film culture in Shanghai.

In Part II, “Imaging Sexuality,” Andrew Field traces the public perception of cabaret girls in Shanghai, and Michael Chang studies the discursive processes by which three generations of early movie stars were elevated to stardom. Yingjin Zhang contends that prostitution was a focal point in the urban imagination and that its public presentation furnished Chinese filmmakers with a highly contested space for projecting different ideologies.

In Part III, “Constructing Identity,” Zhiwei Xiao examines the role Nationalist film censorship played in promoting a new national culture, and Sue Tuohy locates in film music a wide range of conflicting ideals and models. Shelley Stephenson brings us to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where a Manchurian-born, Chinese-educated Japanese film star masked her true identity.

Representing the disciplines of film, literature, and ethnomusicology, the contributors seek to redefine concepts of cinema and urban culture in Chinese historiography. The volume will appeal to scholars whose interests lie, not just in film studies and Chinese history, but in the fields of modernity, urban studies, and popular culture.

Displaced to Italy by their politics and morals, Byron and Shelley wrote, between 1816 and 1823, a series of closet dramas that the author reveals as being deeply embedded in contemporary radical culture. Why did they write dramas in Italy that were to be published in England but not to be produced theatrically? Why do these dramas invoke and apparently oppose textual and theatrical versions of themselves? In answering these questions, this book addresses other questions about the historical invention of English literature, the relation between literature and drama, and the relation between literature and political culture.

The plays are shown to acquiesce in, and yet also resist, subvert, and ironize by means of a parodic self-censorship, the political, theatrical, and ecclesiastical censorship of the post-Waterloo period. The author argues that they not only explore questions of political action in their plots but also reconstruct, by reconvening, a radical audience that had been virtually eliminated in England during the period of the counterrevolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

Like the radical culture of the 1790's, Byron and Shelley's plays are informed by a "new" politics of language. Focusing on the discursive conditions of radical culture and the plays, and bringing the procedures of cultural materialism into contact with those of deconstruction, the author highlights the political and literary operation of the plays' language. In the process, he shows how the plays contributed to the recrudescence of a polite radicalism that sought to align itself with and establish control over its plebeian counterpart.

Detailed discussion of individual plays—Manfred, Sardanapalus, Prometheus Unbound, Marino Faliero, Hellas, Cain, Heaven and Earth, The Two Foscari, and The Cenci—is supported by investigations into Romantic criticism of the drama, the dynamics of the reviewing journals, and the philosophical construct of the "closet" of reasoning and reading.

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice—which, like most Western political philosophy since the seventeenth century, considers ethics to be foundational to a proper understanding of the political—this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

To achieve this, it focuses on the notion of political "representation" as the heart of parliamentary democracy, openly welcoming and embracing all the aestheticist connotations of the term. Representation will always present us with an "aesthetic gap" between the represented and the representation; it is in this aesthetic gap that legitimate political power and all political creativity originate.

In a representative democracy, this aesthetic gap appears in the fact that the representative is not a mandatary but a delegate of the voter (possessing a certain autonomy with regard to the voter, much in the same way that a painting has a certain autonomy vis-à-vis what it depicts). This was made clear by Burke more than two centuries ago and has been the practice of well-functioning representative democracies to the present day. The author sees totalitarianism as the inevitable consequence of the abandonment of aestheticism.

This "brokenness" of the political world of representative democracy places an aesthetic political philosophy of democracy in the tradition of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Schumpeter, by contrast to most of contemporary political philosophy. The aesthetic view enables us to develop a new and original account of the origins and nature of democracy, one that demonstrates how the present shortcomings of democracy can best be remedied to meet the challenges of the new century.

Outlandish addresses geographical displacement as a lived experience in the twentieth century, as a predicament of writing, and as a problem for theory. It focuses on the work of three transnational writers from diverse backgrounds working in different genres: Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born Polish novelist and storywriter living in Britain at the turn of the century; Theodor W. Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher and sociologist transplanted to Los Angeles during the Second World War; and Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British novelist and journalist, recently released from the peculiar conditions of his notorious houseless arrest.

The author argues that Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie emblematize significant shifts over the course of the century, from a modernist expression of almost universal deracination, to a post-Auschwitz disarticulation of home and subjectivity, to an emergent conceptualization of displacement in terms of migrancy, hybridity, and flow. He theorizes a mode of reading between exile and diaspora—two fundamentally different descriptions of displacement—and allows the "outlandish" writing of these three figures to complicate this seemingly continuous trajectory.

Drawing on texts from literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and geography, the author explores what he calls the "rhetoric of displacement"—the struggle to assert identity out of place. He reads this writing predicament against the backdrop of the century's salient economic and technological changes, political upheavals, and mass migrations. In doing so, he draws attention to those aspects of exile and diaspora that have remained insufficiently considered: their relation to nationalism and colonialism, to authority and institutionality, and, above all, to broader questions of subjectivity, "race," location, and language, as these concepts themselves subtly change over the course of the century.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the study of intellectual and cultural history was often denigrated for its alleged elitist and canonical nature. Today, the situation has changed dramatically. Enriched by the methods and insights of such neighboring areas of inquiry as social history, the history of mentalités, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and cultural history is experiencing a renewed vitality. The far-ranging essays in this volume, by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, represent a generous sampling of these new studies.

The book is in five parts: The Enlightenment and Its Heritages; Mind and Culture in the Victorian Middle Classes; European Cultural Modernism; Culture, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany; and Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. Striking for its interdisciplinarity, the volume includes essays in political theory, historical philosophy, cultural criticism, theology, literature, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Among the topics are Thomas Hobbes's civil science, Enlightenment philosophies of history, ancien régime pornography, German modernist architecture, T. S. Eliot's social criticism, the history of cultural censorship in Germany, German-Jewish women during the Nazi persecution, and Freud's attitudes toward death and dying.

The essays have been written in honor of Peter Gay, one of the most provocative and influential historians of the twentieth century and one of the leading American scholars of European thought and culture today; the essays reflect themes and issues running through his work. The contributors are W. F. Bynum, David Cannadine, Stefan Collini, Robert Darnton, Robert L. Dietle, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Judith Hughes, Martin Jay, Peter Jelavich, Marion A. Kaplan, Thomas A. Kohut, Peter Loewenberg, Mark S. Micale, Harry C. Payne, Quentin Skinner, John Toews, R. K. Webb, Dora B. Weiner, and Jay Winter.

Accounting for Growth is a study of information systems in American business during the quarter-century before World War I, a period that saw the birth of the large modern corporation as the dominant form of American enterprise. The book takes as its starting point the way in which the Dow Chemical Company constructed and reconstructed its internal information systems during years of rapid growth and technological change in the chemical industry. The book also discusses how changes in information systems affected Dow's organization and management, as well as the extent of its technological innovation.

During this period, Dow transformed itself from a small, single-product firm, which sold all its output through a national cartel, into a technologically dynamic, vertically integrated firm selling pharmaceutical, agricultural, and industrial chemicals throughout the world. These organizational and strategic changes required changes in the firm's information systems, which measured and recorded what occurred within the firm, particularly in the areas of monitoring and planning. Most of these changes were incremental and were initiated by Dow's managers, who relied heavily on the expertise of large stockholders associated with other firms.

The book examines the impact of the accounting profession and its new standards in cost accounting on the development of information systems at Dow. It compares Dow's accounting practices to those of other manufacturing firms as well as to the emerging ideas of accountants and engineers about how information systems should be designed. Despite urging from professional accountants, Dow declined to include allocated overhead in its calculation of product costs, relying instead on measures of average variable cost except when it was making prospective investment decisions. Such innovations changed both the information available to managers and the incentives that followed.

These information changes encouraged Dow's master strategy of product diversification (moving into new markets and out of some large but less profitable ones) and vertical integration, rather than cooperation with cartels, which controlled distribution as well as output decisions.

During the period of the professionalization of American medicine, many authors were concerned with a concurrent tendency to define identity in biological terms. Most of them doctors or patients themselves, they used literature polemically to convey their views about the meaning of the body and the origin and cure of disease. This book demonstrates that emergent medical beliefs about bodily functions and malfunctions surface in the writings of these authors not simply as thematic concerns but as problems for narrative form. Through a series of careful, historicized readings of works by a range of authors—including Louisa May Alcott, Charles W. Chesnutt, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E. Watkins Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Pauline E. Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—the book relates both the what and the how of representation to specific theories of embodiment emerging during this burgeoning yet awkward period of medical history.

Through five case studies, Bodily and Narrative Forms charts the possibilities literature offers for promoting or contesting biological definitions of the self. These studies identify narrative structure as one of the places where the body is represented—a place often overlooked but crucial to understanding the complicated, mediated relationship between context and content, as well as the dynamic, complex properties of form, whether narrative or corporeal. Each of the studies documents authorial efforts to depict corporeal beliefs via literary forms, demonstrating that these depictions extend beyond narrative content to include generic and stylistic choices. They also show the complex ways in which formal attributes and strategies may complicate authors' attempts to directly represent—as well as readers' attempts to directly access—the body through literature.

This monumental study provides an innovative and powerful means for understanding institutions by applying problem solving theory to the creation and elaboration of formal organizational rules and procedures. Based on a meticulously researched historical analysis of the U.S. Navy’s officer personnel system from its beginnings to 1941, the book is informed by developments in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, operations research, and management science. It also offers important insights into the development of the American administrative state, highlighting broader societal conflicts over equity, efficiency, and economy.

Considering the Navy’s personnel system as an institution, the book shows that changes in that system resulted from a long-term process of institutional design, in which formal rules and procedures are established and elaborated. Institutional design is here understood as a problem-solving process comprising day-to-day efforts of many decision makers to resolve the difficulties that block completion of their tasks. The officer personnel system is treated as a problem of organized complexity, with many components interacting in systematic, intricate ways, its structure usually imperfectly understood by the participants. Consequently, much problem solving entails decomposing the larger problem into smaller, more manageable components, closing open constraints, and balancing competing value premises.

The author finds that decision makers are unlikely to generate many alternatives, since searching for existing solutions elsewhere or inventing new ones is an expensive, difficult enterprise. Choice is usually a matter of accepting, rejecting, or modifying a single solution. Because time constraints force decisions before problems are well structured, errors are frequently made, problem components are at best only partially addressed, and the chosen solution may not solve the problem at all and even if it does is likely to generate unanticipated side-effects that worsen other problem components.

In its definitive treatment of a critical but hitherto entirely unresearched dimension of the administration of the U.S. Navy, the book provides full details over time concerning the elaboration of officer grades and titles, creation of promotion by selection, sea duty requirements, graded retirement, staff-line conflicts, the establishment of the Reserve, and such unusual subjects as “tombstone promotions.” In the process, it transcends the specifics of the personnel system to give a broad picture of the Navy’s history over the first century and a half of its development.

The subject of religious liberty in the nineteenth century has been defined by a liberal narrative that has prevailed since Mill and Macaulay to Trevelyan and Commager, to name only a few philosophers and historians who wrote in English. Underlying this narrative is a noble dream—liberty for every person, guaranteed by democratic states that promote social progress though not interfering with those broadly defined areas of life, including religion, that are properly the preserve of free individuals.

At the end of the twentieth century, however, it becomes clear that religious liberty requires a more comprehensive, subtle, and complex definition than the liberal tradition affords, one that confronts such questions as gender, ethnicity, and the distinction between individual and corporate liberty. None of the authors in this volume finds the familiar liberal narrative an adequate interpretive context for understanding his particular subject. Some address the liberal tradition directly and propose modified versions; others approach it implicitly. All revise it, and all revise in ways that echo across the chapters.

The topics covered are religious liberty in early America (Nathan O. Hatch), science and religious freedom (Frank M. Turner), the conflicting ideas of religious freedom in early Victorian England (J. P. Ellens), the arguments over theological innovation in the England of the 1860’s (R. K. Webb), European Jews and the limits of religious freedom (David C. Itzkowitz), restrictions and controls on the practice of religion in Bismarck’s Germany (Ronald J. Ross), the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Europe (Raymond Grew), religious liberty in France, 1787-1908 (C. T. McIntyre), clericalism and anticlericalism in Chile, 1820-1920 (Simon Collier), and religion and imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain (Jeffrey Cox).

This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations, theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology, desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a subject for representation and study.

Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its reflection in both creative and critical writing.

The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions. The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry to readings of medical records, from examinations of twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of gender in the post-colonial world. For that reason, the editors have given the collection the title Articulation of Difference, for in that title, beyond gender and genre, is the idea of new production, new worlds, and new ideas.

In the early 1890’s, an armed rebellion fueled by religious fervor erupted over a wide area of northwestern Mexico. At the center of the outburst were a few hundred farmers from the village of Tomochic and a teenage folk saint named Teresa, who was ministering to thousands of people throughout the area. When the villagers proclaimed, “We will obey no one but God!,” the Mexican government exiled “Santa Teresa” to the United States and trained its guns and bayonets on the farmers. A bloody confrontation ensued—God against government—that is still remembered in song, literature, films, and civic celebrations.

The tangled roots of the conflict reach into Mexico’s Indian past, stretch through its colonial experience, embrace the peculiar temperament of its Northerners, and encompass the ambitious program of rapid modernization launched by the government at the end of the nineteenth century. The government and its supporters had one vision of what they wanted Mexico to be; many villagers had a different view of what was right for them. Tomochic was split along fissures that had long marked local society, with religious dissenters reveling in the inspiration of Santa Teresa while others stood aside to await the government’s resolution of the upheaval.

After suffering several humiliating defeats by the faithful, more than a thousand army troops placed Tomochic under siege. Fighting was fierce, and as the military tightened the noose on its prey, an image of Santa Teresa was seen rising to glory into the heavens above the burning village.

In the minds of many, Tomochic has come to symbolize a people’s unending search for justice. Santa Teresa, in her day internationally known for miraculous healings, is still invoked by Mexican communities to help cure their social ills. Small wonder that only recently a young peasant rebel in Chiapas avowed: “I seek a decent life—liberation—just as God says.”

Speaking to the ongoing debate over the development of urban space and culture, this book demonstrates the centrality of the physical and social being of cities to American literature and other arts in the twentieth century. The author’s reading of aesthetic texts alongside urban planning, economics, sociology, law, and historiography—discourses he treats as form-producing arts in their own right—shows as misleading the common dichotomy of models that focus on the structure of urban space and institutions, and those that describe cities as fluid constellations of social practices.

The ideal of mobility was invoked early in this century by the urban pluralists of the Chicago School, who reasoned that the greater diversity and lighter attachments among urbanites would make the city a zone in which people might realize themselves by pursuit of “their particular vices or talents.” It also was hailed by the Progressives, who sought through techniques of social management to foster democracy, to reform the material conditions of urban life, and to make cities more efficient centers of production and cultural reproduction. Urban Verbs elucidates the different kinds of cities these ideals of mobility produce.

This volume explores the appropriation of the past in modern British culture. Today, at the beginning of a new millennium, the mass media would have us believe that Britain is suffering an identity crisis. If the pundits are correct, we are witnessing a manipulation of British history at the hands of those keen to project a new national image—or in the language of commodification, to "rebrand" Britain.

The twelve essays in Singular Continuities take a different tack. They argue that to distinguish between "the new" and "the traditional" in modern English culture often draws a false dichotomy, that British-ness, in fact, has been the product of continuous creation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors strongly suggest that "tradition" derives from constant reimagining, if not from calculated invention.

Such reimagining has often assumed surprising forms. Thus, for example, at the end of Victoria's reign, an "enemy" culture—that of the Boer farmer—was recruited to the British ideal of pastoral self-sufficiency. Similarly, the iconoclastic surrealism of the interwar artist Humphrey Jennings was actually suffused with a celebratory sense of the British past. And during the 1970s and 1980s, working-class autobiography eulogized not the triumph of character over circumstance but rather an industrial nostalgia that recalled a cityscape where slum neighbors once knew their turf and the people who occupied it. Related themes are pursued in essays that range from the demonizing of Irish immigrants in early-Victorian London to the impact of reading on suffrage activism, from the professionalization of social work to the selling of the past in Thatcher's Britain.

What has been termed "heritage-bashing" finds few echoes in this collection. "Heritage" is a remarkably protean notion, as useful to the political left as to the right, to feminists as well as to would-be patriarchs. It is the malleable nature of British cultural continuity that makes its heritage "singular."

Representation is the subject of this book, representation taken in a series of senses, from the formal and linguistic to the social and political. Representation poses a theoretical problem that can be located in the inconsistency between two vocabularies for compositional method: one positing a “centre of consciousness” (James’s term), the other being a story of displaced agency and intermediaries, of deputies, delegates, and substitutes. What the center promises—that consciousness can be fully incarnated in a given character who will then constitute a foundation for meaning and truth in the novel—is exactly what the “delegate” acknowledges as an impossibility.

Drawing largely on the theory of representation of Jacques Derrida, this book examines the interplay between the two contradictory positions in detailed readings of James’s stories of writers and artists and his novels The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age. Throughout, the readings are organized by the supplementary logic of representation—a logic that understands that a thing standing for another thing both completes it and suggests a lack or limitation in that which it completes, and hence ultimately in itself.

Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture.

The book’s second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the affinities between Olive Schreiner and Friedrich Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the nihilist positivism and eurocentrism of the culture hypothesis.

The third part examines the relation between the utopian globalism of international socialism and the geopolitical dystopia of world war. One chapter delineates the geography of politics in the 1890s through the medium of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s political journalism and early modernist sketch-artistry. The final chapter traces the meaning of “sabotage” from its anarcho-syndicalist origins to its geopolitical significance in early films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, the book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the nineteenth-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the twentieth-century fiction of geopolitics.

The theoretical writings from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s short tenure at Jena (1794-99) are among the most difficult and influential works of classical German philosophy. Fichte’s appropriation of Kant’s transcendental project not only established the framework for the subsequent idealist tradition (Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel), but also introduced philosophical themes and strategies that would dominate the Continental tradition well into the twentieth century.

This book offers a new interpretation of Fichte’s Jena system, focusing in particular on the problem of the objectivity of consciousness. The Jena system, the author argues, set out to develop an account of the constitutive structures of subjectivity in virtue of which conscious states have objective content. It is in the context of this project that Fichte’s central philosophical innovations must be understood: his account of the acts of “self-positing” and “opposing”; his attack on the thing in itself; the development of a dialectical strategy in transcendental inquiry; and his bold assertion of the “primacy of practice.”

Fichte’s investigations of objectivity find their center of gravity, it is argued, in two powerful insights. First, the theory of objectivity must be idealistic rather than naturalistic or “dogmatic.” That is, it must transcend the conception of human beings as simply complex mechanisms determined by their causal transactions with the world. Second, the theory of objectivity must find its basis in an account of the practical character of human beings—our character as agents, comporting ourselves teleogically in a world in which we find resistance.

The account of Fichte’s Jena project developed here demonstrates that Fichte’s thought is of far more than antiquarian interest. In its attempt to explore the limits of naturalistic accounts of human subjectivity and its articulation of the practical foundations of human representational capacities, Fichte’s Jena project is of direct relevance to contemporary debates in both analytic and continental philosophy.

This book argues that The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. These continuities are displayed above all in the entanglement of his surface narratives, in the self-consuming artifice of his writing, in the interplay of his voices, posturings, and ironies—in a word, in his staging of meaning rather than in his advocacy of one position or another.

The author shows that many of the substantive elements of The Birth of Tragedy are reminiscent of Nietzsche's earlier revisions of philology and that they anticipate the later writings: the inversion of the Dionysian and Appollinian domains; the interest in the atomistic challenge to Platonism (one of Nietzsche's lifelong concerns); and the theory of the all-too-human subject that emerges as a cultural anthropology, a hauntingly present reminder of human pretensions and their limits, which is likewise a thread that runs through the whole of Nietzsche's oeuvre, critically undoing what his philosophy appears to erect. The author argues that the coherence of Nietzsche's writings up to and including The Birth of Tragedy is incontestable. It points to a fact that needs to be turned to account in any reading of The Birth of Tragedy, namely that Nietzsche is a most unreliable witness to his own meaning.

The first parts of the study focus on broader issues: the relation of The Birth of Tragedy to the later writings; the problems of what the author calls "the metaphysics of appearances" (as opposed to the identification of the metaphysical as a realm lurking "behind" appearances); and the appearance—the apparition—of metaphysics in both the early and late works. In the latter parts of the study, the focus falls more narrowly on the formal and thematic complications in the narrative of The Birth of Tragedy. This book, the author argues, is a self-standing, complexly organized, and complete piece of imagining that needs to be examined on its own terms. And so while the surrounding philosophical reflections that Nietzsche made prior to and at the time of The Birth of Tragedy are brought in as needed, for instance the notes on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange, the primary interest lies in the self-presentation of the work itself.

This book redefines the place of the Wordsworthian imagination in a cultural moment often classified as the transition from "Romantic" to "Victorian." Taking The Excursion and a constellation of related texts as a framework, the book suggests that the staggering critical neglect of Wordsworth's major project is correlated with the persistent inability of literary historians to chart that transition. To understand this elusive phase of literary and cultural history, the author proposes, we need to understand Wordsworth's role in it.

The book reevaluates the significance of The Excursion, both in Wordsworth's corpus and in the contexts of the French Revolution and the post-Napoleonic industrial/imperial order leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832. Through a series of theoretically informed readings of The Excursion alongside other Wordsworthian texts, the author reveals Wordsworth's ongoing vital engagement with questions of imagination and ideology, questions that persist, in ever-shifting forms, through the continuities and discontinuities of historical "context."

Foregrounding problems of rhetorical interpretation as The Excursion's central concern, this study focuses on the implications of these problems for the text's promotion of a social vision. It examines various figural systems—family narratives, property, education, and imperialism—and shows how diverse critical strategies of assimilating poetic text to doctrine meet with a resistant "blankness" at the heart of the figural production of meaning in the poem. This blankness is suggestive of the gap between Wordsworth's poetry and its simple appropriation by cultural or political analysis. Paradoxically it also suggests that an understanding of the dynamics of poetic figuration is crucially relevant to any study of Wordsworth's social and political theory.

Many long-held assumptions of historians and literary critics are sharply challenged in this interpretation of the cultural consequences of social, economic, and political change in early modern London. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, greater London’s population nearly quintupled, surpassing 500,000 before 1700, making it Europe’s largest metropolis. Contemporaries often complained that the many problems accompanying this urban development were the result of immigrants flocking to the rapidly expanding suburbs around the City of London. Such complaints assumed that immigrants chose to live outside the City in order to avoid the economic oversight of its trade guilds.

Sharing such assumptions, many scholars have found an inherent conflict between residents of the traditional, orderly City and those of the relatively licentious suburbs. According to their view, this conflict encouraged both the decline of the guilds and the appearance of new forms of representation in Renaissance literature, notably in the plays staged in suburban theatres. The author offers an alternative to this view of London’s expansion.

His argument begins with an analysis of sermons, tracts, and poems suggesting that some Londoners of the time considered the suburbs subject to the same kinds of authority as the City, which consequently made them integral parts of the metropolis. The author then draws on the records of more than twenty guilds to demonstrate that many members lived and worked in the suburbs and were as capable of flaunting City traditions and authority as immigrants; trade guilds, therefore, were metropolitan by nature.

However, the extent to which guilds continued to offer a sense of community—of meaningful association—to their members depended in turn on the desire of individual members to identify themselves with their guild’s goals and values. The author argues that guilds, as principal sites for the collision of tradition and innovation, generally took a flexible approach to change rather than simply trying to prevent it.

Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia's cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin's image.

Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia's relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin's self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia's myth of a national poet.

This is the first English translation of a monumental account of American railroads (and canals) in the years 1838-1839. Its author, Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, was Europe's leading authority on railroad construction, and he conducted his study at the behest of the Russian government, which rightly felt that the United States would provide a more suitable model for the construction of a Russian railroad system than England. For a century and a half, Gerstner's Die innern Communicationen has been recognized as by far the most comprehensive and detailed work on the development, construction, finance, and operation of early American railroads and canals, enriched by accounts of the pioneering men who were involved in the enterprise that was to transform the century.

Most of the technological data presented is to be found nowhere else; for example, virtually every technique for constructing the various kinds of track is explained and illustrated by line drawings. Gerstner supplemented his first-hand observations of every railroad in the United States with data from transportation companies and government documents, including the amounts, dimensions, and kinds of rolling stock, personnel, funds dispersed, revenues collected, ton-miles of freight, and seat-miles of passengers. Throughout, Gerstner's insights and commentary reflect his vast experience and knowledge of railroads (he built what is often called the first railroad on the European continent and the first Russian railroad).

Gerstner went beyond technology to examine the management and organization of railroads and canals and to review the structures and responsibilities of state boards for the oversight of transportation firms. In addition, he included vivid accounts of many aspects of American culture, such as early "Jim Crowism," with blacks traveling in baggage cars rather than coaches, and the horrific working conditions of both free laborers and slaves (the highly profitable Tallahassee Railroad owned its own slaves for working on the line). All in all, the publication in English of Gerstner's encyclopedic work is a major event in the economic and transportation history of the United States.

Since 1979, China has been building new legal institutions made necessary by economic reforms that have reduced the role of state planning, and by the decline of Maoist totalitarianism. This book analyzes the principal legal institutions that have emerged and assesses the prospects for increasing the rule of law in China.

The book first establishes the cultural and institutional context in which legal reforms take place. It traces the main features of pre-Communist Chinese legal tradition, the drastic impact on law of thirty years of Maoist rule, and the extensive changes throughout Chinese society since Mao’s death, notably the rise of the local party-state at the expense of central government power. The book’s analysis begins with the Chinese leadership’s policy toward law, identifying basic ambivalence toward law that makes the Chinese commitment to legality incomplete. It then surveys major developments, emphasizing the creation of new rights, revision of criminal law and procedure, and construction of a nascent administrative law.

The book then examines in detail dispute resolution by extrajudicial mediation and the courts. Although mediation is no longer infused with Maoism, it is still used as an instrument to maintain public order. The study of the courts examines court organization, the selection and training of judges, the rise of litigation, the critical influence of localism, and ongoing conflicts between professionalism and a continuing tendency to view the judge as a soldier of the state. The author suggests that the limited role that Chinese courts are today permitted to play combines with the organization of the judicial process and the mentality of the judiciary to make Chinese adjudication more akin to bureaucratic decision making than judging in the West.

How should the accomplishments of legal reform and the continuing obstacles to further reform affect U.S. policy toward China? The book concludes by appraising implications for U.S. policy on such issues as human rights, Chinese involvement with the World Trade Organization, and bilateral relations generally. The author argues that U.S. policy makers must neither moralize about the rule of law nor dismiss it as a concept alien to China. They must also curb both optimism and expectations that legal reform will lead to political reform. Chinese law can only grow slowly, no matter how urgently the West may desire quick progress.

This book challenges much that has been written about the decline of sociology as a vital, essential area of inquiry into the human condition. Against this Greek chorus of woe, these papers show by example that sociology can make progress, select significant problems, and cumulate an integrated and coherent set of findings and theoretical understandings.

Although the twenty papers in the book engage a wide variety of issues, they are united by their adherence to one of the most active and successful traditions in sociology, the group process tradition. Group process research programs can examine tractable problems posed by social psychological phenomena for which sociology has the best methods of study; they have the potential for a hardware-based, technological research front that discovers new phenomena; and they come closest of all approaches in sociological research to using cognitive criteria in the choice of problems and to studying immutable phenomena. The overall aim of the book is to provide models for researchers struggling to develop, construct, and integrate coherent sociological theory and knowledge.

The papers are grouped around three themes: (1) the problem of theory construction in sociology, including what is meant by “theory” and the methods of testing it, particularly empirical testing; (2) the extension and elaboration of existing theories of group processes, notably in the study of status, sentiment, and the comparison process; and (3) the theoretical issues at the intersection of social structures, the pattern of connection in social networks, and the process of rational choice.

"The inertia of language," declares Geoffrey Hill, is also "the coercive force of language." Good poets write against coercion, and Against Coercion is essentially about the power of words. Looking at our most highly organized form of words, poems, and how they work, it observes how that work speaks—always indirectly—to historical, ethical, and aesthetic questions, including matters of culture, identity, and feminism. It also demonstrates how to read poetry—how to go beyond an elementary (and usually boring) approach, thereby recovering the sheer pleasure of good poems and resisting the coercion of language, that power of words to do ill.

A study in advanced poetics, Against Coercion pays close attention to the intricate workings of poems, building larger claims on specific evidence and enjoying the praxis of master writers. The focus is on modern poets, from the early moderns (Stevens, Eliot) through to mid-century (Bishop) and recent (Merrill, Hill). Some chapters reach back to Milton, Wordsworth, and Aristophanes, however, while two even widen to encompass prose fiction.

The opening section centers on matters of empire, war, and nation. It includes chapters on Eliot, Keynes, and empire, and on Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop (with reflections on language and war). The second section moves to questions of culture and the uses of memory, notably in allusion to earlier writers. It examines what our collective memory chooses to retain and to forget. The range of reference here extends from the King James Bible through Milton and Wordsworth to A. R. Ammons.

In the third section, poetry is seen at play, offering those happy occasions when work and play become one. Chapters treat the concept of play in Milton (including some feminist questions), the poetics of punning in Stevens and Bishop, riddles both large and small, in Stevens, a proposed typology of riddles, and a newly recovered Graeco-Latin pun in Alice in Wonderland. The final section moves to practical criticism and offers a new theory of ghost rhymes, a new suggestion of a formula in dream literature, a model for reading a poem, using John Hollander's "Owl" as an illustration, and, taking Stevens as an example, a pedagogical argument that emphasizes the importance of logic and thought in poetry.

In virtually all advanced industrialized countries, the explosive topic of immigration has engendered heated argument, political anger, cultural anxieties, and blatant racism. In the United States, most of the attention is on the stream of Mexicans crossing the border in such numbers that early in the next century Latinos—immigrant and U.S.-born—are expected to surpass African Americans as the largest minority group.

This book focuses on key aspects of the problem, including the puzzling differences between Mexcio-born adolescents and adolescents born in the United States. Whereas Mexico-born adolescents are highly motivated to learn English and use the educational system to improve their lot, U.S.-born adolescents seem angry, frustrated, and less interested in academic achievement. What accounts for this difference?

In a unique research design, the authors seek answers in a psychological and cultural study of four groups of adolescents: a group in a Mexican town with a high rate of migration; a group that had migrated to the United States with their families, a group of second-generation Latinos; and a group of white ethnographic observations, the authors pursue such questions as: How is achievement motivation patterned Mexican family life? How do the concerns of white American adolescents differ from those of the other groups? What happens to immigrant families as children shift cultural values in the new country?

Among the many significant conclusion to emerge from this study is that whereas Mexicans see their achievements in the context of family obligations, white adolescents struggle with issues of independence and ambivalence toward authority, and U.S.-born Latinos—hybrid children of two worlds—share concerns with both white and Mexico-born peers.

Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence of science advice, its authority is often problematic, and struggles over expert advice are thus a crucial aspect of contemporary politics. Science on Stage is a theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.

Building on the sociology of Erving Goffman, the author analyzes science advice as a form of performance, examining how advisory bodies work to bring authoritative advice to the public stage. From this perspective, advisory bodies emerge as performers who engage in impression management: they selectively reveal and conceal themselves, actively presenting some things to their audiences while hiding others "backstage."

The book demonstrates that techniques for information control—including stagecraft, strategic self-presentation, and unauthorized disclosures or "leaks"—play a fundamental role in efforts to create and contest expert authority. The author uncovers this complex assemblage of dramaturgical machinery through a richly detailed comparative analysis of three controversial reports on diet and health, including a proposed revision to the Recommended Daily Allowances, prepared by the National Academy of Sciences—the most prestigious source of expert advice in the United States today.

This lively and accessible analysis—which includes its own drama, complete with Greek chorus—provides not only new insights about science advice but also a fresh look at the social dimensions of scientific writing. The theatrical metaphor highlights issues that more familiar theoretical frameworks often leave waiting in the wings. In the author's hands, scientific texts emerge not just as rhetorical constructions or forms of discourse, but also as crucial parts of systems for controlling the enclosure and disclosure of information, and thereby for structuring relations between experts and their audiences.

The jurist Ebu's-suud (c. 1490–1574) occupies a key position in the history of Islamic law. An Ottoman tradition, which began in the seventeenth century and which modern historians often reiterate, asserts that Ebu's-suud succeeded in harmonizing the secular law with the shari 'a, creating, in effect, a new ideal Islamic legal system. This book examines the validity of this assertion.

The author begins by choosing five areas of Islamic law for analysis: the Sultan and legal sovereignty; land tenure and taxation; trusts in mortmain; marriage and the family; and crimes and torts. In each of these areas, he lays out the most important rules and concepts in the Islamic juristic tradition, and then gives his translations of a selection of Ebu's-suud's writings on the topic in question, with a brief analysis. From these materials, the author suggests that readers draw their own conclusions as to whether Ebu's-suud did indeed reconcile Ottoman secular legal practice with the sacred law.

This masterful, richly illustrated account of the planning and building of the most important and influential early American railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, is an essential contribution not only to railyway history but also to the broader history of the development of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.

There was no precedent for the building of the B&O. The construction of the 380-mile line from Baltimore to the Ohio River over a period of 25 years is an epic story of astute planning and innovative engineering that overcame many formidable obstacles, notably the arduous traversing of 200 miles of mountain wilderness. Its successful inauguration provided a spur to internal improvements throughout the United States. Railroads, and certainly the B&O, epitomized progress, not only in the development and extension of the Western frontier but in the revelation that personal travel and the delivery of freight could be dramatically faster, better, and cheaper.

The railroad deeply affected the development of Baltimore's port, industry, and urban geography, as well as its financial, educational, and cultural institutions. George Peabody, Enoch Pratt, William Walters, and Johns Hopkins—the city's most prominent philanthropists—were involved with the B&O, some intimately; the Johns Hopkins University was founded on B&O Railroad stock. The B&O also contributed by aiding in the growth of the state's iron and coal industries.

The B&O came to be called "the Railroad University of the United States." Its civil engineers formed the core of the railroad engineering profession in America. The company's annual reports during the building of the line were, according to the American Railroad Journal in 1835, "a textbook and their road and workshops have been as a lecture room to thousands."

Throughout, the author highlights the many types of men who were involved in that history: promoters, financiers, politicians, lawyers, newspaper editors, fixers and bagmen, civil engineers, inventors and mechanics, foremen, contractors, and feuding Irish laborers, who together built the first long-distance, general-purpose railroad in the United States.

The book is illustrated with 80 photographs and drawings and 5 maps.

This innovative work explores the historical consciousness of a people caught between two life-worlds. The Duna of Papua New Guinea have developed their own views of historical change, expressed in a fusion of two elements: indigenous ideas of cosmological cycles, and introduced Christian notions of world’s end.

The book explores how the formation of historical consciousness is constituted differently for men and women. A central focus is the fluid social environment of the Duna, where new contests about gendered personhood and agency emerge in the context of changing power relationships and arenas of cooperation between the sexes. The author reveals the links between gender and history and uses a gendered analysis as a lens of historical perception for viewing a wide range of topics. In the process, gender becomes “an idiom of thinking” that permeates all social domains, including kinship, marriage, and residence.

The theme of consumption emerges forcefully throughout the book, engaging such crucial issues as gender and inequality, constructions of personhood, and the influence of historical change on social life. The sphere of consumption is also where cultural projections and social practice meet in the powerful domain of notions about female witchcraft, since female agency and consumption wishes form the basis for male fear of witches. The author explains how, in circumstances of historical indeterminacy, there has been a shift in the semantic platforms on which Duna witchcraft notions are grounded, a shift that has led to a process of symbolic reconfiguration.

The book contributes to emerging trends in anthropological research in three ways. Ethnographically, it presents a transformed picture of people whose lives were examined by earlier, male ethnographers in terms of Marxist or sociobiological models. Analytically, it uses new perspectives to provide a more interpretive and nuanced account of gender relations. Theoretically, it explores the potential value of the theme of historical consciousness for an anthropology concerned with questions of change and with people’s perceptions about their past and their future.

Established in 1968 to improve conditions in the barrio of East Los Angeles, the East Los Angeles Community Union has had a pronounced impact on the area, providing social services, helping increase political representation, and, most notably, promoting economic development, particularly through extensive real estate dealings. The history of TELACU is especially significant because it has provided a model for community development in other Mexican-American neighborhoods throughout the Southwest (including Oakland, California; San Antonio, Texas; Embudo, New Mexico; and Phoenix, Arizona).

TELACU and other ethnic community development corporations also offer a successfully tested general model of cooperative economic development for the nation’s cities. Though this model cannot end poverty in America and its attendant problems, it offers a vision of economically self-sufficient communities equitably integrated into larger regional and national bodies for mutual improvement.

Moreover, as nonprofit, cooperative institutions that operate between government and business, organizations like TELACU offer a viable alternative in a world where many have rejected the extremes of collectivism, but still suspect capitalism. Such community development corporations can help prepare society for the larger cooperative efforts necessary for the progress of national and global communities.

Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of "the broader modernity", which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church.

As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the perspective of the "subject," modernity has entailed a heightened sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological dogmas.

Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with the Kantian notion of the artist as an "original genius," the author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity in which human beings were forced to define knowledge and establish authority according to their own devices. In the process, the author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, as well as Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Dürer, Mondrian, and Rothko.

As a work of critical theory, The Aesthetic Contract posits an alternative model to Kant's "original genius." The author explores an understanding of art powered by the notion of the aesthetic contract, in which artists and intellectuals choose to operate within the parameters of certain explicit experiments until the contractual clauses that delimit these endeavors lose their currency or validity. As an intellectual analog to Rousseau's social contract, the aesthetic contract has allowed the modern artist to address issues of knowledge, authority, and experience once thought to fall within the domain of arbitrary, remote, and inaccessible agencies.

Given the attacks on the humanities by the right ("Goethe is not taught anymore!") and the left ("Why teach dead white males?") over the past decade, how can we teach and research in the humanities in the years to come? Drawing on thirty years of experience, a distinguished teacher and scholar here presents a series of closely interconnected exercises in understanding the present state and future possibilities of the humanities, especially the teaching of "foreign" languages and culture.

Rather than rail at a worldwide conspiracy by universities against the humanities, the author argues that the gradual erosion of the status of the humanities has been due to the muddling of the goals of teachers, students, and administrators: all are at fault. Teachers are at fault because they have lost sight of the goal of their profession—the clear and direct transmission of critical thinking and complex knowledge to those who may not immediately benefit from it. Students are at fault because they want social mobility without the necessary investment of time in an apprenticeship to learning and the generation of knowledge. Administrators are at fault because they want to have an economically viable structure in a world in which value is too often measured by a cost/benefit ratio. All three groups must rethink the university.

The underlying theme of the eight essays and addresses, four of them published for the first time, is that teachers in the humanities are the spokespersons of the university's history and future, doing the heavy lifting in teaching the bulk of the students those intellectual skills—critical reading, writing, culture, and thought—that will serve them no matter what their major or future employment. The volume illustrates a series of positions from how a teacher should be able to get tenure to what can be taught in innovative, cross-disciplinary teaching. Other topics address why one should teach European languages, how books and jobs are related in today's academy, and whether scientific research can have a place in the teaching of the humanities.

Taking Our Pulse is a book about women's health: what it is, why it is the way it is, and what needs to be done to improve it. It differs from many other books about the health of women by: integrating up-to-date medical research with practical information for use in daily lives; offering a way of looking at health issues affecting women that accentuates their living better rather than just longer; emphasizing a developmental approach by examining health issues at different stages of the life cycle; and using a lucid, almost conversational, style of presentation that makes complex medical conditions and procedures readily intelligible to lay readers. Furthermore, it is written by a woman who is a physician, an educator of future physicians, a medical researcher, and a student of feminism.

Because the field of medicine has been traditionally dominated and controlled by men, male constructs have largely defined the causes and remedies of women's health problems. A host of myths has accumulated about women's health—the beliefs that most women's health problems are related to their reproductive function and that women tend to have more emotional diseases than physical ones. Even today, such simplistic and medically unsound views persist and are reflected in the amount of insufficient research conducted on the specific health needs of women. One of the major aims of this book is to expose these myths, in the process re-educating not only physicians but women themselves, who have been socialized to accept them unquestioningly.

After four chapters that deal with life-span differences in women's health (childhood and adolescence, early adulthood, the perimenopausal years, and the older years), the book considers the following topics: sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy and its prevention, mental health, substance abuse, violence (including sexual and child abuse, rape, domestic violence, and elder abuse), nutrition, medical care, women as doctors, and choosing the right physician.

The "Golden Age" of opera-going in Russia, from the 1840s through the 1880s, coincided with the flourishing of Russian prose realism. During this period, opera and literature exerted a reciprocal influence on one another, each adopting and providing a new context for the other's artistic conventions. Opera permeated the culture of the drawing room so often depicted in literature, and literature simultaneously discovered the opera theater. The relationship between these two artistic genres inspired the use of performative models and conventions in Russian literary art, and led to the interpolation of specific operatic subtexts into literature and life.

To many, these genres were antithetical, since opera historically aimed for the high stylistic register, and prose fiction experimented with the low. But the author shows that the attempt to translate opera into prosaic contemporary lives was characteristic of nineteenth-century Russia, since literature provided an alternative cultural theater in Russia to which the opera theater was analogous and parallel. As contested and self-regarding social space, the opera theater offered its visitors a rare public forum. The reception of opera as an art form in Russia resembles the impact of the early cinema on Russian audiences in the early twentieth century, since opera and film both brought about an aesthetic reconfiguring of social space.

This book treats opera-going in imperial Russia from multiple perspectives, and discusses such canonical works as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Goncharov's Oblomov, major operatic works including Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Verdi's La Traviata, the impact of Western opera in Russia and the Russian-style prima donna. The book engages with poems, sketches, feuilletons, stories, and rarely-discussed Russian novels, as well as non-fictional reminiscences, reviews, and visual images. Throughout, the book is enriched with examples and anecdotes about performers, spectators, and critics, and reception histories of specific operatic works.

The study of Greece as an icon of culture appears to be as old as Greece itself, as if, like Pallas Athene springing from the head of Zeus, its cultural significance had attained full maturity at birth. In Silent Urns, the author reveals how Greece attained such significance as the result of the attempt to reconcile individuality, freedom, history, and modernity in eighteenth-century aesthetics. He argues that Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) produced this reconciliation by developing a concept of culture that effectively defined our modern understanding of the term, as well as our sense of what it is to be modern. From this reconciliation, Greece emerges as the form in which culture is first conceptualized as a historically and politically defined category.

In readings of works by Keats, Schelling, Aeschylus, Shelley, and Hölderlin, the author studies different aspects of Winckelmann's conceptualization of culture as it passes into Romantic Hellenism. Through these readings—in which individuality, identity, freedom, the tragic, and memory are all discussed—the book demonstrates how Romanticism took issue with the legacy of Greece that emerged in the eighteenth century, and did so in the name of a freedom that our cultural modernity no longer recalls.

Durkheim's writins on politlcal theory and the nature of government have been among the most neglected of his contributions to modern social science. The editor, one of the first to argue the importance of Durkheim's political thought, has assembled the first English-language collection of that author's significant writings on politics, government, the nature and function of the state, socialism, and Marxism. The introductory essay provides a critical appraisal of Durkehim's political ideas and situates them within the framework of the author's general sociology and social philosophy. The selections are taken from a wide range of Durkheim's writings—books, lecture series, review articles—and almost all appear in new translations. Several of these works have been, up to this time, poorly rendered or unavailable in English.

Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to the life and work of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), considered by many the major African-American fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance by virtue of the three novels and two collections of short stories he published between 1899 and 1905.

Less familiar are the essays he wrote for American periodicals from 1899 through 1931, the majority of which are analyses of and protests against white racism. Collected as well in this volume are the addresses he made to both white and black audiences from 1881 through 1931, on topics ranging from race prejudice to the life and literary career of Alexandre Dumas.

The 77 works included in this volume comprise all of Chesnutt’s known works of nonfiction, 38 of which are reprinted here for the first time. They reveal an ardent and often outraged spokesman for the African American whose militancy increased to such a degree that, by 1903, he had more in common with W. E. B. Du Bois than Booker T. Washington. He was, however, a lifelong integrationist and even an advocate of “race amalgamation,” seeing interracial marriage as the ultimate means of solving “the Negro Problem,” as it was termed at the end of the century. That he championed the African American during the Jim Crow era while opposing Black Nationalism and other “race pride” movements attests to the way Chesnutt defined himself as a controversial figure, in his time and ours.

The essays and speeches in this volume are not, however, limited to polemical writings. An educator, attorney, and man of letters with wide-ranging interests, Chesnutt stands as a humanist addressing subjects of universal interest, including the novels of George Meredith, the accomplishments of Samuel Johnson, and the relationship between literature and life.

This book deals with a sequence of lively and often bizarre episodes within San Francisco's Russian community set in motion in early 1888 by the arrival in San Francisco of a new Russian Orthodox bishop—and his entourage, which included some twenty clergymen and eleven boys.

It did not take long for the bishop to clash with Dr. Nicholas Russel, a colorful Russian revolutionary exile who was one of the leaders of the Russian community. They became bitter enemies, and Bishop Vladimir's three-and-a-half-year tenure in San Francisco was punctuated by a series of remarkable scandals and lawsuits, by an excommunication, by an unconsummated duel, and by a host of lurid allegations that received extensive local publicity—including charges of arson, perjury, attempts to hire potential assassins, bigamy, and, most sensationally, sodomy and child abuse.

All of this centered around the combative bishop and his church administration, and eventually involved, in one way or another, a large part of San Francisco's Russian community, as people took sides with either the bishop or his tireless antagonist, Dr. Russel. These local furors reverberated in high places in St. Petersburg, as the procurator-general of the Holy Synod and officials of the Russian autocracy sought, in vain for the most part, to curb the bishop and bring peace to the local community.

This vivid example of "microhistory" sheds light on a number of intriguing issues, notably the workings of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, the nature of European ethnic communities in late-nineteenth-century America, the mentality of the two protagonists (who represented widely different Russian social groups), Russian church-state relations, and nineteenth-century legal and sexual mores.

This first book-length study of gender relations in the Lower Yangzi region during the High Qing era (c. 1683-1839) challenges enduring late-nineteenth-century perspectives that emphasized the oppression and subjugation of Chinese women. Placing women at the center of the High Qing era shows how gender relations shaped the economic, political, social, and cultural changes of the age, and gives us a sense of what women felt and believed, and what they actually did, during this period.

Most analyses of gender in High Qing times have focused on literature and on the writings of the elite; this book broadens the scope of inquiry to include women's work in the farm household, courtesan entertainment, and women’s participation in ritual observances and religion. In dealing with literature, it shows how women's poetry can serve the historian as well as the literary critic, drawing on one of the first anthologies of women's writing compiled by a woman to examine not only literary sensibilities and intimate emotions, but also political judgments, moral values, and social relations.

After an introductory chapter that evaluates the historiography of Chinese women, the book surveys High Qing history, charts the female life course, and discusses women's place in writing and learning, in entertainment, at work, and in religious practice. The concluding chapter returns to broad historiographic questions about where women figure in space and time and why we can no longer write histories that ignore them.

This book focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a Yugoslav nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea ultimately failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state. The author argues that the collapse of multinational Yugoslavia and the establishment of separate uninational states did not result from the breakdown of the political or economic fabric of the Yugoslav state; rather, that breakdown itself sprang from the destruction of the concept of a Yugoslav nation. Had such a concept been retained, a collapse of political authority would have been followed by the eventual reconstitution of a Yugoslav state, as happened after World War II, rather than the creation of separate nation-states.

Because the author emphasizes nation building rather than state building, the causes and evidence he cites for Yugoslavia’s collapse differ markedly from those that have previously been put forward. He concentrates on culture and cultural politics in the South Slavic lands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to delineate those ideological mechanisms that helped lay the foundation for the formation of a Yugoslav nation in the first place, sustained the nation during its approximately seventy-year existence, and led to its dissolution.

The book describes the evolution of the idea of Yugoslav national unity in four major areas: linguistic policies geared to creating a shared national language, the promulgation of a Yugoslav literary and artistic canon, an educational policy that emphasized the teaching of literature and history in schools, and the production of new literary and artistic works incorporating a Yugoslav view.

In the book’s conclusion, the author discusses the relevance of the Yugoslav case for other parts of the world, considering whether the triumph of particularist nationalism is inevitable in multinational states.

In Ecuador, every year since 1990 Indian protestors have brought the country to a standstill; in Mexico, Zapatista indigenous guerillas rose up in arms to protest North American free trade. In Brazil, shamans faced down bulldozers to block World Bank dams, while in Bolivia, peasants attacked U.S. troops for the right to grow coca. These are a few examples of the rise of a transnational human rights movement among the hemisphere’s most isolated and powerless people, Latin American Indians.

This book tells the story of the unexpected impact of the Indian rights movement on world politics, from reforming the United Nations to evicting oil companies. Using a constructivist theoretical approach that synthesizes international relations, social movement theory, ethnic politics, and work on democratic transitions, the author argues that marginalized people have responded to globalization with new, internationalized forms of identity politics that reconstruct power relations.

Based on case studies from Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, this book analyzes the implications of these human rights experiences for all of Latin America’s 40 million indigenous citizens, and the 300 million native people throughout the world. The thematic organization of the book allows the author to trace distinctive dynamics of interstate relations, global markets, and transnational civil society. The book concludes with an analysis of the movement’s impact and policy recommendations.

The last twenty years have seen a growth of fascination with the Japanese, and the emergence of Japan as a world economic power has stimulated many works that have attempted to understand Japanese culture. The focus of this book is not on Japanese culture or society per se: rather, it is on how Japnese culture and society structure, shape, and mold the emotions of the Japanese people. All cultures shape and mold emotions, but the degree to which Japanese culture shapes emotion has led to several misunderstandings about the emotional life of the Japanese, which this book attempts to correct.

Describing the findings of over two decades of research, this book persents the Japanese as human beings with real feelings and emotions rather than as mindless pawns caught in the web of their own culture. In the process, it unmasks many myths that have grown up around the subject and reveals important similarities as well as differences betweeen the emotional life of the Japanese and that of people of other cultures.

Given our increased theoretical understanding of Japanese culture and society, we are now better able than before to link culture with individual behavior and emotions. Owing in part to the advancement in methods of examining emotions scientifically, the study of emotion has gained considerable standing in the scholarly community, and systematic research on emotion in Japan has produced a substantial body of knowledge that lifts what was previously unsubstantiated speculation to well-accepted facts.

The author's work has been an important factor in this growing field, as his research in Japan has spanned a wide range of topics on emotion, with in-depth assessments of hundreds of individual Japanese living in various areas of Japan. In the present work, he also addresses the fact that many studies of Japanese culture hold to a single point of view—sociological, anthropological, or to a lesser extent sociological. In response, he integrates these three points of view in a new theoretical framework for understanding Japanese culture.

This work seeks to understand how, in nineteenth-century Germany, Jews and non-Jews shaped and experienced Jewish emancipation, a process whereby Jews were freed from ancient discriminatory laws and, over the course of decades, became citizens. Unlike most other works on German Jewish emancipation, this book examines how so fundamental and dramatic a transformation in the relation of Jews and non-Jews was experienced by the people who lived it, how economic, social, political, and ideological forces interacted to bring about change, and how accommodation actually occurred.

The book focuses on Cologne, the most populous and economically powerful city in the Rhineland. Jews, excluded since 1424, returned under French Revolutionary rule, but Napoleonic legislation in 1808 compromised their equality and gave city elders an opportunity to reassert Cologne's historic control when the territory passed to Prussia in 1814. A long struggle between municipal and state authorities ensued, with the city hostile to Jewish rights but ultimately losing its bid to exercise local sovereignty over the Jews.

The 1840’s saw the advent of the railway age, and Cologne's economic and political climate was transformed. The city soon became the center for Rhenish liberal advocacy of Jewish rights, led by regional entrepreneurs in association with Jewish bankers. The author demonstrates, however, that Jewish emancipation was not simply conferred on Jews from above or engineered by financial mavericks in the community. Rather, it occurred as part of a broad societal transformation and as the result of the efforts and behavior of ordinary Jews, whose voices the author records.

The book reveals how such Jews responded to the lure of equality and the pressures of continued discrimination in their business and private lives, and shows how their response fostered a new, positive perception of Jews as honorable people deserving of civic inclusion. It also illustrates how Jews, enjoying unprecedented success and acceptance, fought not only for individual rights but for the right of organized Judaism to achieve a secure place in society.

By exploring in detail land reform movements in Britain and the United States, this book transcends traditional labor history and conceptions of class to deepen our understanding of the social, political, and economic history of both countries in the nineteenth century.

Although divided by their diverse experiences of industrialization, and living in countries with different amounts of available land, many working people in both Britain and the United States dreamed of free or inexpensive land to release them from the grim conditions of the 1840’s: depressing, overcrowded cities, low wages or unemployment, and stifling lives. Focusing on the Chartist Land Company, the Potters’ Joint-Stock Emigration Society, and the American National Reform movement, this study analyses the ideas that motivated workers to turn to land reform, the creation of working-class land reform cultures and identities among both men and women, and the international communication that enabled the formation of a transatlantic movement.

Though there were similarities in the ideas behind the land reform movements, in their organizational strategies, and in their relationships with other reform movements in the two countries, the author’s examination of their grassroots constituencies reveals key differences. In the United States, land reformers included small proprietors as well as artisans and factory workers. In Britain, by contrast, at least a quarter of Chartist Land Company participants lived in cotton-manufacturing towns, strongholds of unpropertied workers and radical activity.

When the land reform movements came into contact with the organs of the press and government, the differences in membership became crucial. The Chartist Land Company was repressed by a government alarmed at the prospect of workers’ autonomy, and the Potters’ Joint-Stock Emigration Society died the natural death of straitened finances, but the American land reform movement experienced some measure of success—so much so that during the revolution in American political parties during the 1850’s, land reform, once a radical issue, became a mainstream plank in the Republican platform

Lu Ling (1921-94) was one of modern China's most intensely psychological writers, foregrounding in his many novels and short stories the narrative representation of consciousness and the individual psyche. His mentor Hu Feng (1902-85), a leftist literary theorist, was a leading proponent of the subjective view of literature, who asserted an active and dynamic role for the self in the creative process. In the 1930's and 1940's, when they were most productive, Lu Ling and Hu Feng stood for a position in the leftist literary field that was opposed to the political, utilitarian view of literature held by Mao Zedong and the cultural bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The tension that existed between these two positions before the revolution exploded after the CCP came to power. In 1955, Hu Feng, Lu Ling, and a group of other writers associated with Hu Feng became the objects of a national media assault that led to their arrest and imprisonment.

Centered on these two key figures, this study explores in theoretical and fictional representations of the subject a problematic at the heart of the experience of modernity in China. Chinese scholarship in the recent post-Mao liberalization has tended to represent Hu Feng and Lu Ling as heroic promoters of May Fourth Enlightenment in the face of the oppressive and authoritarian legacy of Yan'an and the Maoist discourses of revolutionary collectivism. Rather than a confrontation between the values of personal enlightenment and rational salvation, the author sees Chinese modernity as the interaction and interdependence of the two.

Subjectivism and psychological fiction constitute an assertion of an empowered subject against the CCP's efforts to inscribe the subject into the ideology of collective self-sacrifice. But the writings of Hu Feng and Lu Ling are also discursive responses to the deeper epistemological problem of the self and its relation to the outer world engendered by the reception of Western discourses of modernity. Hu Feng's response was to merge the social-historical orientation of the realist mode with the subjectivism of romanticism, thus allowing for a potential unity of self with the outer world through the creative process. Lu Ling's intellectual characters are emblematic of this modern problematic of self: minds caught in a schizophrenic attraction/revulsion with romantic individualism and the relinquishing of self to the revolutionary power of the masses.

The author also shows that beneath Hu Feng's and Lu Ling's modern theoretical and fictional attention to the subject are ties to the neo-Confucian self and its relation to tian, the divine. By looking at modernity in terms of discursive responses shaped by traditional cultural desires, he aims to contribute to a breakdown of the strict division between modernity and tradition that continues to define modern Chinese literature.

Each year in the United States, 250,000 infants are born too soon, weighing too little. For these low birth weight, premature infants, the future is uncertain, since they are at risk for a variety of serious medical and developmental problems—including behavioral and learning disorders that may have damaging effects for the rest of their lives. The extent to which a comprehensive early intervention program could improve or prevent these adverse outcomes was examined in the Infant Health and Development Program, a randomized controlled trial involving almost 1,000 infants in eight cities in the United States. This book describes in detail the program, its research methodology, the progress of the program, and the results of the clinical trial.

The program was administered by an interdisciplinary team composed of physicians, biostatisticians, child development specialists, and researchers from several disciplines. It was instituted upon the discharge of the infants from the neonatal nursery and was maintained for three years. One-third of the infants were randomly assigned to an intervention group, the remainder to a follow-up group. Infants in both groups received pediatric care and community referral services, but only those in the intervention group participated in a program that included extensive home visits, attendance at a child development center, and group meetings for parents.

The results of the program proved to be clinically important; at age three, the children in the intervention group had significantly higher IQ scores, greater cognitive development, and fewer behavioral problems. The implications of the findings for public policy are equally important, for there is increasing interest in the prevention, early detection, and management of developmental disabilities in children, as evidenced by such legislation as the Education for All Children Act. Strategies to minimize the problems of low birth weight children, with their potential for long-term savings through the prevention of disabilities and their attendant costs, could have significant repercussions in such governmental areas as medical care, education, and social welfare.

In this important new book, Hans-Georg Gadamer discusses the transformation in human self-understanding wrought by the scientific worldview, focusing in particular on the unparalleled achievements of modern medicine.

He explores the ethical and humanist issues raised by the technological successes of modern clinical practice, and relates them to the classical conception of "praxis" in the philosophical tradition.

In a series of lucid and engaging analyses, Gadamer eloquently defends the idea of medicine, not only as a "science of health, but as an "art" of hermeneutic relevance, requiring the exercise of practical judgment and personal interpretation. We should, he argues, recognize the limits of purely technical approach to healing, as well as the importance of a qualitative approach to medical treatment.

Written by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, this brilliant meditation on health, illness, and the art of healing will be of interest to general readers as well as students of philosophy and social thought.

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.

Pastoral Process draws a basic distinction between two aspects of the pastoral ideal: the Arcadian pastoral, which locates the unspoiled paradise in space, apart from the complexities of city and court, and finds it accessible for limited periods of recuperation and reorientation; and the Golden Age mode, which locates the ideal pastoral life in time gone by, always already lost as soon as it is apprehended as paradise.

The author's central aim is an archaeology of the nostalgia-based pastoral of the vanished Golden Age. On the surface level, her close readings of certain Renaissance poems and sequences—Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Marvell's Mower poems, and Milton's Lycidas—clarify "pastoral process": the dislocating transition from innocence to experience, from secure centeredness in a comfortable, self-mirroring world to a new condition of division, displacement, and alienation. The advent of individuation and sexual desire, and the internalization of undirectional time and universal death, transform the pastoral paradise into a wasteland or leave the newly self-conscious protagonist outside his former idyll, looking in.

Excavation beneath these initial readings uncovers the master myth of Eden that informs them, as well as parallel narratives of loss such as the various accounts of the Golden Age or the tale in Plato's Symposium of beings fallen from original wholeness into fragmentation and lack. Ramifications of the master myth include Christian and Jewish commentaries that helped shape traditional understandings of the story, and especially the subversive tradition that persisted, against the strong tide of orthodox interpretation, in reading the Fall of Man in terms of childhood wholeness breaking down in the wake of sexual knowledge and the burden of full, separated consciousness.

Below the poetic utterances and the shaping myths lies the deeper archaeological stratum of the unconscious and the mechanisms that construct, always retrospectively and often counterfactually, a blissful childhood. Beyond Freud's own theories, later offshoots and reworkings of his psychology are invoked to explore psychological experiences and needs that inform both myths and poems: Jung, the developmental psychologists, and especially Lacan. The study concludes by returning to the surface to consider the pastoral impulse in historical terms, as a defining moment in the careers of Spenser, Marvell, and Milton and as a special urgency in the early modern times they inhabited.

This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature.

The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Among the reactions are testimonies that Pushkin's works helped readers form their personalities, provided cathartic relief in times of stress, and aided them in releasing their suppressed emotions. In his analysis, the author draws on various psychological approaches, from studies of perception through developmental psychology to psychoanalysis.

Part Two exposes the extent to which individuals' aesthetic responses are conditioned by their social environment. Against the backdrop of Russian social history in the early nineteenth century, the author describes the dissemination of new aesthetic norms, notably the relations of the Russian literary elite to "lowbrow" and "middlebrow" groups. In this context, he analyzes a number of Pushkin imitations (with Pushkin's responses to them) and links Nikolai Gogol's development as a writer to the social groups surrounding Pushkin. Among the other topics discussed are the popularization of Pushkin on the stage and his inclusion in school textbooks and anthologies.

The aura surrounding the personality of an author is the subject of Part Three, in which the author shows how Pushkin's death in a duel with a foreigner contributed to his emergence as a symbol of the Russian nation, and how deep-seated anxiety about national identity gave rise to the Pushkin myth and to the canonization of the poet as martyr. The author also describes how the combined effect of the widespread reading of Pushkin's work and his legend as martyr allowed him to remain Russia's main mythic figure despite the Soviet Union's attempts to supplant him with Lenin. Throughout the book, theoretical arguments are buttressed by close readings of Pushkin's works, especially The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Eugene Onegin, Poltava, Egyptian Nights, and several lyric poems.

The grammar and rhetoric of Tudor and Stuart England prioritized words and word-like figures rather than sentences, a prioritizing that had significant consequences for linguistic representation. Among these was a heightened awareness of the equivocal “thingness” of language, whether verbal units like proverbs, inscriptions, and biblical quotations or individuated words such as lexical entries, Latin tags, and verbal icons. The author shows how the new or newly important technologies of printing and lexicography contributed substantially to this awareness.

As symptom and cause these technologies participated in a growing cultural emphasis on externalized expression and on the material world. Both perceptually and materially they engaged the contemporary epistemological shift from essence to meaning and from referential object to word.

“Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born in the twentieth century,” Freud said late in his career, “but it did not drop from the skies ready-made.” And in his speculative theories of modernism, Bruno Latour argued that “no science can exit from the network of its practice.” Deploying Latour’s model of scientific theory production, this book argues that the historical emergence of psychoanalysis depended on nineteenth-century scientific practices: laboratory experimentation, medical transmission of research findings along collegial or social networks, and medical representation of illness—including case studies, amphitheatrical demonstration of cases, hospital records of symptoms, and laboratory graphology and photography of patients.

The author shows how hysteria enabled Freud to appropriate medical and scientific concepts from neurology, sexology, gynecology, psychiatry, and existing rest cures and psychotherapies. His new model eschewed physiological determinism, linking unconscious ideation with counterwill and reproduced memory, psychosexual experience, and affect-laden images of object relations (usually with family members).

Constructing around himself a psychoanalytic circle and establishing training institutions, Freud translated this new psycho-physical body and hybrid subjectivity to other research sites. Just as in the 1890’s he had used the figure of the hysteric to mobilize theory production, by the 1920’s he had replaced the hysteric with a modernized figure, the homosexual. Freud used autobiography, summary, and outline to stabilize his concepts and control the dissemination of his new science. Psychoanalysis had successfully created new scientific “plausible bridges” between psyche and soma, nature and the social, to produce a modern theory of hybrid subjectivity that was rooted in yet conceptually separated from the body.

The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the "middle ranks" whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities—erotic, political, and literary—of real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation.

Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists' creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the author's negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing.

Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish.

The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its author's treatment of the thematics of "seeing and being seen" with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists' responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.

Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed and overwhelmed readers ever since it emerged mysteriously in medieval Spain toward the end of the thirteenth century. Written in a unique, lyrical Aramaic, this masterpiece of Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a normal book; it is virtually a body of literature, comprising over twenty discrete sections. The bulk of the Zohar consists of a running commentary on the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy.

This fifth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition opens in the middle of Exodus immediately following the revelation at Mount Sinai. The first chapter features a famous narrative about two rabbis and an old donkey-driver they encounter on the road. This old man seems like a complete ignoramus and pesters them with nonsensical riddles, but he turns out to be a sage and explains to them one of the most tightly guarded secrets of Kabbalah: the reincarnation of the soul. In the course of his exposition, the old man enthralls his two listeners with a romantic account of Torah as a maiden who reveals herself only to one who pursues her lovingly.

The rest of this volume consists mainly of the Zohar's commentary on the biblical description of the mishkan, the Dwelling (or Tabernacle) in the desert. The mishkan symbolizes Shekhinah, the feminine presence of God who "dwells" on earth. Since the Dwelling was the center of worship, the Zohar explores here the theme of prayer.

The volume concludes with one of the shortest yet most important sections of the Zohar—Sifra di-Tsni'uta (The Book of Concealment). This enigmatic and poetic composition contains a veiled description of God's body, focusing on the beard. Its few pages convey the central teachings of Kabbalah, including the balance between male and female energies, and how divine breath animates all that exists.

This book grapples with a wide range of contemporary ethical and religious issues through the lens of the reflections of Charles Péguy on his friend and mentor Bernard-Lazare. Both Péguy, a leading French Catholic poet and philosopher, and Bernard-Lazare, an iconoclastic Jewish intellectual, were passionately involved in the Dreyfus Affair, which forms the background of these reflections.

The book is in four parts. The first sets Péguy’s portrait of Bernard-Lazare in a series of contexts, analyzing it against the background of the rampant antisemitism of its time, situating it in relation to present-day discussions about the “Other,” and, especially, placing it within various twentieth-century attempts to rethink religion. Péguy’s great contribution in this area lies in redirecting our attention to the ways human beings respond to defeat, and to the ways the intellect is oriented by something outside itself, as keys to the discovery of the transcendent. His work reformulates the meaning of hope and incarnation.

The second part of the book presents Péguy’s portrait of Bernard-Lazare in a complete English translation. In the third part, the author shows the affinity of Péguy’s thought to that of two Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. All three, in rethinking the religious dimension, located it amidst the daily interactions between people. The final part explores the implications of this notion of transcendence for the task of interpretation in the social sciences and the humanities.

Simultaneously challenging conventional male-dominated thought and revisionist modern feminism, this book argues that gendered identities can best be conceived relationally, and thus that a fuller understanding of gender roles in the eighteenth century (and by extension in our own) must include an analysis of men’s place in the discourse of domesticity.

Examining the phenomenal rise of the social periodical at the end of the seventeenth century, the author theorizes the genre’s crucial contribution to the construction of a class-specific gender identity that succeeds as ideology not, as usually assumed, by separating the feminine private sphere from the masculine public one, but by delineating the private as an important locus of masculine control.

Marshalling social history, political theory, economics, and sociology in an attempt to account historically for the appearance of the sentimental family—controlled by the man who is at once lover and husband, father and brother—this book forcefully questions the validity of the doctrine of separate spheres and the ascription of gender roles connected to it.

The social periodical provides compelling evidence for understanding the relationship between gender construction and class values. By focusing on such topics as courtship, marriage, and parent-child relations, the genre configured the nuclear family as a locus where emotional and sexual gratification supported material gain. Periodical literature offered an ostensibly neutral forum for public debate about private issues where male editors, by instructing and reforming women, also learned to become the chaste husbands and watchful fathers of the bourgeois home.

In the process of demonstrating how social periodicals constructed new forms of masculine control still very much with us today, the book also shows how, by galvanizing an important new reading class, they contributed to the rise of the novel. Periodical literature exerted a transformative effect on English society by displaying a moral and cultural authority, not to mention a readership, that novels would struggle for many decades to achieve.

This book radically revises our understanding of the construction of symbolic power in the age of absolutism by examining the fictions that emerge from visual, narrative, and ceremonial representations of (and reactions to) the 1660 marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish infanta. Drawing on semiotics, the history of theater and spectacle, gender studies, and anthropology, the author reconsiders the nature of representation in absolutist political culture.

The book is not intended as a history of the marriage. Rather, the author analyzes in detail exemplary moments or scenes from the royal wedding, in particular uncovering the dialectic at the heart of nuptial fictions. Like the kinship exchange out of which they emerge, fictions of marriage manipulate antagonistic forces in the service of promoting the political culture of absolutism.

The nuptial fiction portrays a king who though central, is not yet absolute, and who depends on images and representational forms to become visible. His perceived power relies on appendages such as the queen and forms like print, fireworks, and drama. A calculus of addition, this dependence is invisible from within the models previously used to explore the representation of sovereignty, models based on rituals of substitution like the funeral rite.

Though the fictions generated during Louis XIV’s marriage are not the principal ones of his rule, they do affect the portrait of the king and provide insight into the making of an image scholars too frequently take for granted. Studying nuptial fictions invites us to reexamine clichés about the representation of absolutist power, generalizations that do not fully characterize the less monumental (but equally crucial) periods of Louis XIV’s kingship.

Song in an Age of Discord is a companion volume to the author's translation of The Journal of Socho, the travel diary and poetic memoir of Saiokuken Socho (1448-1532), the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet of his generation. The Journal—which records several journeys that Socho made between Kyoto and Suruga Province during the tumultuous Age of the Country at War—is unparalleled in the literature of the period for its range of commentary and freshness of detail, and for its impressive array of literary genres, including more than 600 poems.

The present volume opens with an overview of the author's life and times, and explores the relationships between politics, patronage, and the creative process in late medieval Japan. Raised in the service of a feudal lord in Suruga Province, Socho subsequently became the devoted student of the renga master Sogi and the iconoclastic Zen monk Ikkyu, a variety of influences clearly visible in his journal. Socho lived in an era in which established values and hierarchies were being questioned, and his journal reflects his own testing of traditional literary boundaries.

Subsequent chapters read the journal in terms of the standard norms of genres that Socho appropriated and reinterpreted in fashioning his own literary persona. The norms of medieval eremitic literature are presented via works by two other noted linked-verse poets, Shinkei and Shohaku, and those of travel literature are set forth in travel diaries by Socho's teacher Sogi, who also supplied the template for Socho's orthodox (ushin) poetry.

The comic and unorthodox haikai verse of Yamazaki Sokan serves as a point of comparison for Socho's frequent excursions into that genre. Unlike other orthodox renga masters, Socho maintained parallel interests in composing and preserving haikai poetry, and he contributed much to that evolving art form. Throughout, Song in an Age of Discord illustrates the dialogue Socho pursued with his literary and cultural heritage.

These letters tell the story of a young American woman of Japanese descent who, along with over 10,000 other Japanese Americans, was stranded in Japan during World War II.

Written in the context of a rejuvenated interest in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), the essays gathered in The Solid Letter offer the first consolidated attempt in English to set out the many facets of his oeuvre. Addressed not only to specialists in German studies but also to readers interested in modern poetry, philosophy, and aesthetics, the volume is wide in scope but succinct in nature, aiming to assert the relevance of Hölderlin for thinking about history, culture, and language today.

The Solid Letter not only reads Hölderlin's finished work, but also treats the processual character of his writing. By discussing interrelationships among unpublished variants, theoretical and poetic texts, and different conceptions of the distinction between theory and practice, the essays provide an opportunity to reassess the categories by which humanistic study presently is defined.

The volume addresses the implications of Hölderlin's notion of history, the stakes involved in certain of his key concepts, and the significance of seemingly auxiliary materials and kinds of texts not commonly considered intrinsic to an author's oeuvre (such as translations and letters). The essays are attuned to the complex resonances of Hölderlin's writerly practice, thereby contributing to our grasp of the political and historiographical implications of reading.

The volume concludes with a select bibliography of Hölderlin in English that lists all book-length translations of his literary writings, the more significant translations of his theoretical texts and letters, and most critical studies available in English devoted in part or whole to Hölderlin.

This collection of seventeen essays deals with the metaphysical, as opposed to the moral issues pertaining to death. For example, the authors investigate (among other things) the issue of what makes death a bad thing for an individual, if indeed death is a bad thing. This issue is more basic and abstract than such moral questions as the particular conditions under which euthanasia is justified, if it is ever justified.

Though there are important connections between the more abstract questions addressed in this book and many contemporary moral issues, such as euthanasia, suicide, and abortion, the primary focus of this book is on metaphysical issues concerning the nature of death: What is the nature of the harm or bad involved in death? (If it is not pain, wha is it, and how can it be bad?) Who is the subject of the harm or bad? (if the person is no longer alive, how can he be the subject of the bad? An if he is not the subject, who is? Can one have harm with no subject?) When does the harm take place? (Can a harm take place after its subject ceases to exist? If death harms a person, can the harm take place before the death occurs?) If death can be a bad thing, would immorality be a desirable alternative? This family of questions helps to fram ethe puzzle of why—and how—death is bad.

Other subjects addressed include the Epicurean view othat death is not a misfortune (for the person who dies); the nature of misfortune and benefit; the meaningulness and value of life; and the distinction between the life of a person and the life of a living creature who is not a person. There is an extensive bibiography that includes science-fiction treatments of death and immorality.