ALBERT

Description: Originally published in 1962. The rise of "metaphoric" criticism is a reaction against a previous critical preoccupation with psychology and time. Milton spatialized time, thoroughly mastering a metaphoric technique. The Metaphoric Structure of Paradise Lost, after discussing the influences that shaped Milton's aesthetic, systematically examines the structural components of Paradise Lost—light, darkness, and vertical movement—and finds that they imitate, metaphorically, the overall theme of the epic. To test further the implications of his hypothesis, Professor Cope turns to two unsettled points in Miltonic exegesis: Milton's muse and the dialogue in Heaven.

Description: This book reviews the course of NATO policy on German reunification from the perspective of West German preferences and Bonn's endeavors to have them respected in the diplomatic efforts of the major allies. With its accession to NATO, the West German government under Adenauer continued its policy of rehabilitating the German people in the eyes of the Western political community by playing a willing and sometimes leading role in joint ventures whose purpose was said to transcend the nation-state.

Description: The short story has been a staple of American literature since the nineteenth century, taught in virtually every high school and consistently popular among adult readers. But what makes a short story unique? In Reading for Storyness, Susan Lohafer, former president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story, argues that there is much more than length separating short stories from novels and other works of fiction. With its close readings of stories by Kate Chopin, Julio Cortázar, Katherine Mansfield, and others, this book challenges assumptions about the short story and effectively redefines the genre in a fresh and original way.In her analysis, Lohafer combines traditional literary theory with a more unconventional mode of research, monitoring the reactions of readers as they progress through a story—to establish a new poetics of the genre. Singling out the phenomenon of "imminent closure" as the genre's defining trait, she then proceeds to identify "preclosure points," or places where a given story could end, in order to access hidden layers of the reading experience. She expertly harnesses this theory of preclosure to explore interactions between pedagogy and theory, formalism and cultural studies, fiction and nonfiction. Returning to the roots of storyness, Lohafer illuminates the intricacies of classic short stories and experimental forms of surreal, postmodern, and minimalist fiction. She also discusses the impact of social constructions, such as gender, on the identification of preclosure points by individual readers. Reading for Storyness combines cognitive science with literary theory to present a compelling argument for the uniqueness of the short story.

Description: Originally published in 1974. Focusing on a set of Jewish communities, Robert Chazan tells how, by the eleventh century, French Jews had created for themselves a role as local merchants and moneylenders in adapting to the political, economic, and social limits imposed on them. French society, striving to become more powerful and civilized, was willing to extend aid and protection to the Jews in return for general stimulation of trade and urban life and for the immediate profit realized from taxation. While the authorities were relatively successful in protecting the Jews from others, there was no power to impose itself between the Jews and their protectors. The political and social well-being of the Jews was, therefore, dependent on the will of the governing authorities who taxed their holdings and regulated their activities. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the position of the Jews was constantly under attack by reform elements in the church concerned with Jewish moneylending and blasphemous materials in Jewish books; these reformers were eventually devoted to a serious missionizing effort within the Jewish community. The Jews' situation was further complicated by deep popular animosity, expressing itself in a damaging set of slanders and occasionally in physical violence. Despite the impressive achievements of the Jews in medieval northern France, by the thirteenth century their community was increasingly constricted; and in 1306, they were expelled from royal France by Philip IV. Overcoming the handicap of a lack of copious source material, Chazan analyzes the Jews' political status, their relations with key elements of Christian society, their demographic development, their economic outlets, their internal organization, and their attitudes toward the Christian environment. As it highlights aspects of French society from an unusual perspective, Medieval Jewry in Northern France should be of special interest to the historian of medieval France as well as to the student of Jewish history. This story is also significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.

Description: The Eve of Spain demonstrates how the telling and retelling of one of Spain’s founding myths played a central role in the formation of that country’s national identity. King Roderigo, the last Visigoth king of Spain, rapes (or possibly seduces) La Cava, the daughter of his friend and counselor, Count Julian. In revenge, the count travels to North Africa and conspires with its Berber rulers to send an invading army into Spain. So begins the Muslim conquest and the end of Visigothic rule. A few years later, in Northern Spain, Pelayo initiates a Christian resistance and starts a new line of kings to which the present-day Spanish monarchy traces its roots.Patricia E. Grieve follows the evolution of this story from the Middle Ages into the modern era, as shifts in religious tolerance and cultural acceptance influenced its retelling. She explains how increasing anti-Semitism came to be woven into the tale during the Christian conquest of the peninsula—in the form of traitorous Jewish conspirators. In the sixteenth century, the tale was linked to the looming threat of the Ottoman Turks. The story continued to resonate through the Enlightenment and into modern historiography, revealing the complex interactions of racial and religious conflict and evolving ideas of women’s sexuality.In following the story of La Cava, Rodrigo, and Pelayo, Grieve explains how foundational myths and popular legends articulate struggles for national identity. She explores how myths are developed around few historical facts, how they come to be written into history, and how they are exploited politically, as in the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 followed by that of the Moriscos in 1609. Finally, Grieve focuses on the misogynistic elements of the story and asks why the fall of Spain is figured as a cautionary tale about a woman’s sexuality.

Description: Chivalry denotes the ideals and practices considered suitable for a noble. The word itself is reminiscent of the aristocratic society of medieval France dominated by mounted warriors. As early as the eleventh century, several different views of chivalric standards and behavior had appeared. During the next four hundred years, these conceptions of the ideal nobleman were developed by and for the feudal ruling class. Sidney Painter studies chivalry from the perspectives of both social history and the history of ideas. The first chapter provides readers unfamiliar with medieval history the background required for understanding the chapters on chivalry.

Description: Lacking the warlike bluntness of his predecessor, Richard the Lionheart, John came to the throne of England at a time when economic forces in the realm were threatening to undermine the very basis of feudal power. His attempts to adjust a political system to cope with this threat and at the same time to assert the hegemony of the monarchy over its chief rivals—the barons and the church—made his reign one of particular importance and significance in English history.

Description: How the maternal image of the empress Julia Domna helped the Roman empire rule.Ancient authors emphasize dramatic moments in the life of Julia Domna, wife of Roman emperor Septimius Severus (193–211). They accuse her of ambition unforgivable in a woman, of instigating civil war to place her sons on the throne, and of resorting to incest to maintain her hold on power. In imperial propaganda, however, Julia Domna was honored with unprecedented titles that celebrated her maternity, whether it was in the role of mother to her two sons (both future emperors) or as the metaphorical mother to the empire. Imperial propaganda even equated her to the great mother goddess, Cybele, endowing her with a public prominence well beyond that of earlier imperial women. Her visage could be found gracing everything from state-commissioned art to privately owned ivory dolls. In Maternal Megalomania, Julie Langford unmasks the maternal titles and honors of Julia Domna as a campaign on the part of the administration to garner support for Severus and his sons. Langford looks to numismatic, literary, and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the propaganda surrounding the empress. She explores how her image was tailored toward different populations, including the military, the Senate, and the people of Rome, and how these populations responded to propaganda about the empress. She employs Julia Domna as a case study to explore the creation of ideology between the emperor and its subjects.

Description: Painter's Scourge of the Clergy is a biography of Peter of Dreux, who was the Count of Dreux from 1298 to 1345. This book engages in a conversation with specialists of medieval France and Brittany, given that Peter's career gives historians insight into the quarrels between church and state, the crusades of St. Louis, the struggles between French kings and vassals, and the rivalry of the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies.

Description: In the early development of the modern Italian state, individual orphanages were a reflection of the intertwining of politics and charity.Nearly half of the children who lived in the cities of the late Italian Renaissance were under fifteen years of age. Grinding poverty, unstable families, and the death of a parent could make caring for these young children a burden. Many were abandoned, others orphaned. At a time when political rulers fashioned themselves as the "fathers" of society, these cast-off children presented a very immediate challenge and opportunity.In Bologna and Florence, government and private institutions pioneered orphanages to care for the growing number of homeless children. Nicholas Terpstra discusses the founding and management of these institutions, the procedures for placing children into them, the children's daily routine and education, and finally their departure from these homes. He explores the role of the city-state and considers why Bologna and Florence took different paths in operating the orphanages. Terpstra finds that Bologna's orphanages were better run, looked after the children more effectively, and were more successful in returning their wards to society as productive members of the city's economy. Florence's orphanages were larger and harsher, and made little attempt to reintegrate children into society.Based on extensive archival research and individual stories, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance demonstrates how gender and class shaped individual orphanages in each city's network and how politics, charity, and economics intertwined in the development of the early modern state.

Description: Originally published in 1981. The meaning and objectives of literature, argues David Bleich, are created by the reader, who depends on community consensus to validate his or her judgements. Bleich proposes that the study of English be consciously reoriented from a knowledge-finding to a knowledge-making enterprise. This involves a new explanation of language acquisition in childhood, a psychologically disciplined concept of linguistic and literary response, and a recognition of the intellectual authority of pedagogical communities to originate and establish knowledge. Amplifying his theoretical model with subjective responses drawn from his own classroom experience, Bleich suggests ways in which the study of language and literature can become more fully integrated with each person's responsibility for what he or she knows.

Description: Originally published in 1933. As mediaeval society was dominated by the feudal caste, a biography that depicts the position, activities, manners, and thoughts of a member of that class might do much to elucidate the history of the period. This is what Sidney Painter had in mind when he wrote a William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England. The subject has proved a peculiarly fortunate one. The fourth son of John fitz Gilbert, marshal of the king's court, William for the first forty years of his life was a landless knight who devoted most of his time and energy to tournaments. In the year 1189 by his marriage to the daughter and heiress of Earl Richard of Pembroke, William became a great feudal lord with fiefs in Normandy, England, Wales, and Ireland. Thus his biography depicts the two extremes of feudal society—the landless knight and the rich baron. Finally in 1216 he was chosen regent of England for the young king, Henry III, and his biography becomes for three years the history of England.

Description: The long awaited conclusion to the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice.Originally published in 1997. In 1985 Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began. The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic location between East and West, Venice rapidly rose to a position of preeminence in Mediterranean trade. To keep trade moving from London to Constantinople and beyond, Venetian merchants and bankers created specialized financial institutions to serve private entrepreneurs and public administrators: deposit banks, foreign exchange banks, a grain office, and a bureau of the public debt. This new book clarifies Venice's pivotal role in Italian and international banking and finance. It also sets banking—and panics—in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

Description: At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry—including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.

Description: Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others.

Description: Despite achieving monumental reforms in the United States such as the eight-hour workday, a federal minimum wage, and workplace health and safety laws, organized labor’s record on much of its agenda has been mixed. Tracy Roof’s sweeping examination of labor unions and the American legislative process explains how this came to be and what it means for American workers.Tracing a 75-year arc in labor movement history, Roof discusses the complex interplay between unions and Congress, showing the effects of each on the other, how the relationship has evolved, and the resulting political outcomes. She analyzes labor’s success at passing legislation and pushing political reform in the face of legislative institutional barriers such as the Senate filibuster and an entrenched and powerful committee structure, looks at the roots and impact of the interdependent relationship between the Democratic Party and the labor movement, and assesses labor’s prospects for future progress in creating a comprehensive welfare state. Roof’s original investigation details the history, actions, and consequences of major policy battles over areas such as labor law reform and health care policy. In the process, she brings to light practical and existential questions for labor leaders, scholars, and policy makers.Although American labor remains a force within the political process, decades of steadily declining membership and hostile political forces pose real threats to the movement. Roof’s shrewd exploration of unions, Congress, and the political process challenges conventional explanations for organized labor’s political failings.

Description: Originally published in 1960. This is a regional study of the nobility of Toulouse in the eighteenth century. The complex notion of class and the peculiarities of each region in France during the Ancien Régime make it difficult for historians to render a general portrait of the provincial French aristocracy. This study describes the economic interests and investments of noblemen in Toulouse. Some of their activities follow the classic pattern of "seigniorial reaction" and thus illustrate ideas posed by Marc Bloch. Others suggest that the Toulousian gentlemen were conscientious landlords. The Toulousian noble was essentially a gentilhomme campagnard, a country gentleman, in regard to his source of revenue, his outlook, and his mode of living. This book should make clear the full meaning of this expression.

Description: Stefán Einarsson covers almost a thousand years of Icelandic literature in tracing the influence of the sagas and eddic poems. The book begins with background on Icelandic literature, outlining its literary roots in Scandinavia. Following this, Einarsson provides a thorough survey of Icelandic literature through the 1950s.

Description: Originally published in 1986. The ghastly fate of a drowned man brought to a lake's surface in Wordsworth's "Prelude" typifies a fundamental pattern in Romantic writing, argues Cynthia Chase. Disfiguration involves not only a departure from representation but a disruption of the logic of figure or form, a decomposition of the figures composing the text. Ultimately it manifests the conflict between a work's meaning and its mode of performance. By means of an intense engagement with texts in the romantic tradition, Decomposing Figures rearticulates and recasts crucial concepts in recent literary theory, including the notion of the self-referential or self-reflexive nature of the literary work. Chase's readings show that, far from implying a privileged status, the work's self-reflexive structure entails its opacity, its inability to read itself, and the necessity of its decomposition.

Description: Originally published in 1976. Representing years of critical reflection, The Theory of Criticism attempts to construct a poetics of "presence." Within a wide range of critical terminology, Murray Krieger has sought to create a new vision. In language that is passionate and often dramatic, he looks at the multidimensionality of the poetic world through the lens of Western poetics. His work clearly addresses itself to post–New Critical questions: how to preserve the literary object as a thing to be perceived, valued, and enjoyed and yet to account for its presence in, and interaction with, our culture as a whole, always in danger of being dissolved into man's language-making and -forming activity in general. Our awareness of the poem as object must be modified by our awareness that it is an "intentional" object. Krieger develops his balanced vision in three parts. Part 1 defines the problem and defends the very activity of theorizing both in its own terms and in terms of the critic's function throughout the history of Western criticism. By asking at the outset whether criticism is vain or valuable, Krieger already confronts the basic tension between system and world and the need to account for both. By creating a heuristic system that examines the possibility of form, the critic serves also the world of history and thought as a whole. Part 2 pursues that history from the classical encounter with mimesis in Greek thought to the Romantic and post-Romantic elevation of consciousness as a main criterion of poetic art. Defining a "humanistic aesthetic" as it has been viewed since Aristotle, the author shows how, during and after the eighteenth century, form was opened up under the impact of a Kantian and post-Kantian view, epitomized finally by Coleridge's imagination and its consequences for recent theorists. Part 3 deals with the image of the world struggling against its enclosure within a poetic context. It expands our view of metaphor as a reflection of the dual nature of poetic language, simultaneously locked into the poem and referring to history and nature outside. Our reading of the poem, Krieger concludes, must be double: we must see the poem as a linear and chronological sequence reflecting real life, and we must read it as a circular, imitative, mutually implicative mode.

Description: Originally published in 1977. The Semantics of Metaphor presents a theory for the metaphoric construal of deviant sentences. The theory has two aspects. The first relates to metaphor considered as a productive process of language and describes the mechanisms that operate in its semantic interpretation .This part of the theory is presented in chapters III and IV. The second aspect bears on metaphor considered in the context of poetry and develops a conception of metaphoric truth. This part of the theory is presented in chapters VI and VII. The study is semantic in the sense of dealing with both meaning and truth as these properties pertain to metaphor. Of the remaining chapters, the first isolates certain problems of a pragmatic nature from the central semantic concern, chapter II follows with a survey of recent scholarship on the question of semantic deviance, and chapter V compares the theory expounded in chapters III and IV with three other accounts of metaphor.

Description: Originally published in 1965. In A Baronial Family in Medieval England: The Clares, 1217–1314, Michael Altschul studies the Clare family during the thirteenth century. The Clares spearheaded the struggle to enforce Magna Carta in the Barons' War. Historians prior to Altschul tended to neglect the Clares' history given the scattered nature of the archives documenting their time as a politically influential and powerful family. This book unfolds chronologically, outlining the Clares' rise to preeminence and describing how they administered their estates and income.

Description: Originally published in 1978. Josef Konvitz provides a broad comparative study of European port cities since the Renaissance by examining how they were built and rebuilt in the context of urban industrialization. Konvitz argues that as seafaring became more critical to Western civilization, intellectuals and rulers placed more importance on urban planning. Planning looked different, of course, in various European cities. In Paris, riverside planning was patched into the existing frame of the city, whereas Scandinavian towns on the Baltic were over-designed to accommodate a degree of maritime trade unsustainable for cities writ large. In the eighteenth century, city planning fell out of vogue, and new solutions were introduced to help solve the problems created by urban development. With a series of helpful maps, Konvitz's book is an important source for urban historians of early modern Europe.

Description: Originally published in 1970. Professor Callcott's analysis of the rise of historical consciousness in the United States from 1800 to 1860 offers a new dimension to American historiography. Other books have provided insight into the works of Bancroft, Parkman, and others, but Callcott goes beyond to explain the meaning of the past itself rather than the contributions of particular historians. As the anatomy of an idea, this is an important contribution to American intellectual history; and as a study of humans' need for the past and their use of it, it is an important contribution to American social history. The author begins by analyzing the European and Romantic background for American historical thought. He then explores the rise of historical themes in literature, education, the arts, and scholarship. By describing the type of historical subject matter, the methods of writing history, the interpretive themes historians used, and the standards by which critics judged history, Callcott offers a new understanding of the social and personal meaning that history had for Americans at the time. The American people were especially convinced of the utility of history—its social use in supporting accepted values, its personal utility in extending human experience, and its philosophical value in pointing people toward ultimate reality. The idea of history possessed a remarkable coherence that reflected the preoccupations and aspirations of the young nation. Callcott also demonstrates, however, that when basic historical assumptions were challenged by controversy, the entire edifice collapsed.

Description: In the 1990s, amid political upheaval and civil war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved into five successor states. The subsequent independence of Montenegro and Kosovo brought the total number to seven. Balkan scholar and diplomat to the region Mieczysław P. Boduszyński examines four of those states—Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—and traces their divergent paths toward democracy and Euro-Atlantic integration over the past two decades.Boduszyński argues that regime change in the Yugoslav successor states was powerfully shaped by both internal and external forces: the economic conditions on the eve of independence and transition and the incentives offered by the European Union and other Western actors to encourage economic and political liberalization. He shows how these factors contributed to differing formulations of democracy in each state.The author engages with the vexing problems of creating and sustaining democracy when circumstances are not entirely supportive of the effort. He employs innovative concepts to measure the quality of and prospects for democracy in the Balkan region, arguing that procedural indicators of democratization do not adequately describe the stability of liberalism in post-communist states. This unique perspective on developments in the region provides relevant lessons for regime change in the larger post-communist world. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers will find the book to be a compelling contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratization, and European integration.

Description: Originally published in 1959. This book examines the French Enlightenment by analyzing critical thought in eighteenth-centruy France. It examines the philosophes' views on evil, free will and determinism, and human nature. This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods.

Description: A thoughtful and original analysis of the writings of influential French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being. Kaufman argues that Deleuze's work is deeply concerned with these concepts, even when he advocates for the seemingly opposite notions of univocity, nonsense, and becoming. By drawing on scholastic thought and reading somewhat against the grain, Kaufman suggests that these often-maligned themes allow for a nuanced, even positive reflection on apparently negative states of being, such as extreme inertia. This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture.

Description: Originally published in 1975. This book fills a gap in the historical knowledge of wartime Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Chetnik movement provides a better understanding of the various ways that important segments of the population, including members of the Yugoslav officer corps and Serb civilians, perceived and responded to the occupation. The partisans' ultimate success does not conceal the fact that during the greater part of the war, several armed groups, owing at least some sort of allegiance to Mihailovic, chose very different courses of resistance. The overriding question for Milazzo is how a movement whose leadership was in no sense pro-Axis found itself progressively drawn into a hopelessly compromising set of relationships with the occupation authorities and the Quisling regime. What was it about the situation in occupied Yugoslavia and the Serb officers' response to that state of affairs that prevented them from carrying out serious anti-Axis activity or engaging in effective collaboration? The author attends to the emergence, organization, and failure of the Chetniks, the regional particularities of the movement, and Mihailovic's efforts to establish his own authority over the widely scattered non-Communist armed formations. The author also discusses the domestic opposition to Tito and the complex reality of the national and political civil war in Yugoslavia.

Description: Originally published in 1972. The Men of the First French Republic analyzes some of the well-established evidence concerning deputies of the French National Convention of 1792. It was assumed that this evidence supported accepted generalizations about the convention's character and outlook. Patrick's examination of the convention as a whole, rather than its various groups of deputies (Plain, Mountain, and Gironde), suggests that a number of these generalizations may need revising. Patrick looks first at parliamentary behavior, particularly in the tumultuous first eight months, and then analyzes this behavior in terms of the deputies' background.

Description: Originally published in 1982. Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the "possible articulation" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted relationship but not through a mere comparison of two distinct and inviolable entities. Instead, he looks at both with an eye to identifying their common elements and reweaving them into a new theory of political practice. To accomplish his task, Ryan undertakes a detailed comparison of deconstruction and Marxism, relating deconstruction to the dialectical tradition in philosophy and demonstrating how deconstruction can be used in the critique of ideology. He is a forceful critic of both the politics of deconstruction and the metaphysical aspect of Marxism (as seen from a deconstructionist perspective). Besides offering the first book-length study of Derrida in this context, Ryan makes the first methodic attempt by an American scholar to apply deconstruction to domains beyond literature. He proposes a deconstructive Marxism, one lacking the metaphysical underpinnings of conservative "scientific" Marxist theory and employing deconstructive analysis both for Marxist political criticism and to further current anti-metaphysical developments within Marxism. Marxism and Deconstruction is an innovative and controversial contribution to the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and political science.

Description: Originally published in 1962. This book is a study of relations between Britain and China. The first section surveys historical relations between the two nations and culminates with the Second World War. The second part examines British policy during the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Geneva Conference. The third part discusses what contemporary issues in British-Chinese relations were at the time the book was written.

Description: Originally published in 1987. Since Machiavelli, historians and political theorists have sought the sources of the stability that earned for Venice the appellation La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic. In Patricians and Popolani, Dennis Romano looks to the private lives of early Renaissance Venetians for an explanation. Fourteenth-century Venice escaped the tumultuous upheavals of the other Italian city-republics, Romano contends, because the patricians and common people of the city did not divide sharply along class or factional lines in their personal associations. Rather, Venetians of the era moved in a variety of intersecting social networks that were shaped and influenced by an overriding sense of civic community. Drawing on the private archives of Venice—notarial registers, collections of testaments, and records of estates maintained by the procurators of San Marco—Romano analyzes the primary social bonds in the lives of the city's inhabitants. In separate chapters, Patricians and Popolani examines the forms of association in everyday Venetian life: marriage and family structure; artisan workshops and relations among tradesmen; the role of the parish clergy and the "sacred networks" that formed around convents, hospitals, and confraternities; and neighborhood and patron–client ties. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Romano argues, all these networks of association had been transformed as a new hierarchical spirit took hold and overwhelmed the older, more freewheeling tendencies of Venetian society. The old sense of community yielded to a new and equally compelling sense of place, and La Serenissima remained stable throughout the later Renaissance.

Description: Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh out what the author sees as the definition most illuminating of modern literature and the modern mind. In order to do this, Krieger distinguishes between what he sees as the "tragic vision" and "tragedy"—tragedy, from his perspective, is an object's literary form, whereas tragic vision refers to a subject's psychology, the subject's view and version of reality. In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionary" than a "tragic hero."

Description: Originally published in 1989. In this companion volume to the acclaimed Pure Lives, Reed Whittemore probes the often-complex motives behind the relationships of modern biographers to their subjects. Whittemore's description of biography's uneven path toward comprehensive character study begins with Thomas Carlyle, whose biography of Frederick the Great broke with tradition by tracing the roots of its subject's character to childhood trauma. (A strict disciplinarian, Frederick's father once considered having his rebellious teenage son executed.) Whittemore examines the work of Leslie Stephen, the Dictionary of National Biography's first editor, who admired Carlyle but disliked his style—and was convinced that Carlyle disliked him. And in a chapter on Sigmund Freud, Whittemore traces the revolution in writing biography that began with Freud's speculations on the nature and origin of Leonardo da Vinci's homosexuality. Few have escaped Freud's influence. While Leon Edel argues that biographers should not psychoanalyze their subjects, his biography of Henry James does precisely that. Richard Ellman tempers his impulse for Freudian probing of Joyce, Yeats, and Oscar Wilde with the explication of their often difficult works. Kenneth Lynn's recent biography of Hemingway takes the opposite approach. "The Hemingway industry," Whittemore explains, "is like Marilyn Monroe's in having much of the sensational in it, including suicide, so that the problems of having to deal with Hemingway as a writer, good or bad, can always be put on the back burner for a few chapters while Hemingway the braggart and liar performs." Thomas Parton and Benjamin Franklin, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Erik Erikson and Martin Luther, biographers and their subjects continue to engage our attention. Whole Lives offers an informative—and refreshingly informal—look at one of the most enduringly popular genres.

Description: Originally published in 1968. In the pluralistic society of the medieval commune, informal and personal ties of obligation bound men together. In trecentro Florence this "gentle" communal structure gradually evolved into the stricter, more centralized organization characteristic of the modern state. A growing emphasis on law and order transformed the medieval commune of the early fourteenth century into the Renaissance territorial state of the latter half of the century. Professor Becker's subject is this metamorphosis. Following his study of the declining communal paideia in Volume One, the author examines in this second volume the growing vigor of public world, as well as the attendant depersonalization and repression. He is concerned primarily with two factors that he considers the major forces producing the Renaissance territorial state and encouraging the growth of imperial government and constitutionalism: the intrusion of new citizens (novi cives) into politics after 1343 and the skyrocketing of communal debt. Thus, the author disputes Burckhardt's idea of the state as a work of art, viewing it instead as a creation of socioeconomic mobility and deficit financing. Further, in examining art and literature as symptoms of developing public culture and reactions to it, Professor Becker interprets them as indications of increased public involvement of the Florentine citizens, thus providing a sharp refutation of Burkhardt's egoistic, violent Renaissance man. The author concludes his study with a detailed description of the territorial state itself, pointing out the new relationship between citizen and polis which emerged in the early fifteenth century. These two volumes provide a compelling and challenging interpretation of a crucial period in Western history.

Description: Originally published in 1987. The Origins of Agnosticism provides a reinterpretation of agnosticism and its relationship to science. Professor Lightman examines the epistemological basis of agnostics' learned ignorance, studying their core claim that "God is unknowable." To address this question, he reconstructs the theory of knowledge posited by Thomas Henry Huxley and his network of agnostics. In doing so, Lightman argues that agnosticism was constructed on an epistemological foundation laid by Christian thought. In addition to undermining the continuity in the intellectual history of religious thought, Lightman exposes the religious origins of agnosticism.

Description: Originally published in 1964. Jeffry Kaplow investigates the effects of the French Revolution on life in Elbeuf, a textile town in Normandy, through a social-historical lens. A careful study of local demographic, fiscal, and tax records allows him to reconstruct the social structure of Elbeuf's population on the eve of the French Revolution and to make claims about its economy, which was based on wool production. Somewhat unusually, there was no strong noble or clerical presence in Elbeuf, which was dominated by wool manufacturers. Despite the destabilizing effects of the Revolution, which included an economic downturn and an inflamed sense of grievance among less wealthy local constituencies, the bourgeoisie retained its grip on power in Elbeuf and its environs throughout this period. With the support of extensive archival evidence, Kaplow goes to great lengths to model the particular social and economic conditions that allowed this town to avoid succumbing to the tumult of the Revolution and to undergo, in fact, so little change compared with most municipalities of the country.

Description: Originally published in 1963. The English Landed Estate in the Nineteeth Century: Its Administration deals principally with the administration of large landed estates during the years from 1830 to 1870. The book also throws new light on the work of the Inclosure Commissioners, who, as a department of the central government, supervised agricultural improvements made by landowners who borrowed from the government and from land companies. Author David Spring argues that the British government intervened in agriculture much more than is commonly thought. In describing the hierarchy of estate management, Spring relies, wherever possible, on hitherto unused family papers and estate documents. Especially important is his material on the Dukes of Bedford and on the domestic economy and financial position of the Russell Family. The chapter titled "The Landowner," based on the seventh Duke of Bedford's correspondence with his agent, is a case study of a single estate and provides insight into the workings of a great landowner's mind. The remaining chapters, dealing with lawyers, land agents, and the Inclosure Commissioners, include other individual portraits. Among these are Christopher Haedy, the Duke of Bedford's chief agent; James Loch, king of estate agents in nineteenth-century England; Henry Morton, the Earl of Durham's land agent; and William Blamire and James Caird, two of the Inclosure Commissioners.

Description: Do indigenous peoples have an unassailable right to the land they have worked and lived on, or are those rights conferred and protected only when a powerful political authority exists? In the tradition of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who vigorously debated the thorny concept of property rights, Sara L. Maurer here looks at the question as it applied to British ideas about Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century. This book connects the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the landed estate to nineteenth-century debates about property, specifically as it played out in the English occupation of Ireland. Victorian writers were interested in the question of whether the Irish had rights to their land that could neither be bestowed nor taken away by England. In analyzing how these ideas were represented through a century of British and Irish fiction, journalism, and political theory, Maurer recovers the broad influence of Irish culture on the rest of the British Isles.By focusing on the ownership of land, The Dispossessed State challenges current scholarly tendencies to talk about Victorian property solely as a commodity. Maurer brings together canonical British novelists—Maria Edgeworth, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith—with the writings of major British political theorists—John Stuart Mill, Henry Sumner Maine, and William Gladstone—to illustrate Ireland’s central role in the literary imagination of Britain in the nineteenth century.The book addresses three key questions in Victorian studies—property, the state, and national identity—and will interest scholars of the period as well as those in Irish studies, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

Description: Otiginally published in 1976. This investigation focuses on the ideology of the radical press during the French Revolution. Events, individuals, and institutions were important, but they were reported in such a manner as to make them subordinate to ideas. In their descriptions of the people and institutions of the Revolution, radicals drew heavily on the stereotypes provided by their ideology. The author analyzes the radicals of 1789 to 1791 with respect to collective interests and concerns. For these radicals, ideology governed from 1789 through 1791. And, insofar as events had any impact on the radicals, occurrences of 1790 were important because they coincided with radical shifts in opinion. Subsequent and more famous events came too late to have much impact on radical views. The author reveals that Jacobin thought of 1792 and 1793 had definite origins dating from 1789. The similarity between radical thought and the ideology of Robespierre proves that Jacobinism was not a hasty doctrine of the moment but the direct product of positions assumed since 1789.

Description: Sidney Painter explores the Angevin and Plantagenet baronage by surveying the methods that barons used to increase their prestige. His book challenges the traditional view of the Hundred Years' War as pivotal to the transition from twelfth-century lords and vassals to the nobility of the fifteenth century; from Painter's perspective, the feudal structure of the military had dissipated by the thirteenth century.

Description: Originally published in 1965. This book is about the association between Britain and Africa. The book begins with the British entry into Africa and the Indian Ocean and the establishment of the principal foci of power before 1914. The book next treats the quarter century from the First World War until the outbreak of the Second. The book then discusses the period of the Second World War, its aftermath, and the time period contemporaneous with the book's publication. The author's personal experiences and observations shortly before and during the Second World War in different parts of Africa convinced him at the time that the years 1939–1945 marked a decisive watershed. After the historical chapters, the author examines the three major zones of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The final chapter considers the major international associations of which Britain is a member and with which it operates in African affairs in the aftermath of colonialism.

Description: James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America.Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time.Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.

Description: Originally published in 1966. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, based on three guest lectures given at Johns Hopkins University in 1965, explores the place of the individual in medieval European society. Looking at legal sources and political ideology of the era, Ullmann concludes that, for most of the Middle Ages, the individual was defined as a subject rather than a citizen, but the modern concept of citizenship gradually supplanted the subject model from the late Middle Ages onward. Ullmann lays out the theological basis of the political theory that cast the medieval individual as an inferior, abstract subject. The individual citizen who emerged during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by contrast, was an autonomous participant in affairs of state. Several intellectual trends made this humanistic conception of the individual possible, among them the rehabilitation of vernacular writing during the thirteenth century and the growing interest in nature, natural philosophy, and natural law. However, Ullmann points to feudalism as the single most important medieval institution that laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern citizen.

Description: Originally published in 1973. This book uses the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as a starting point to investigate Soviet-American relations in the Kruschev period. The book first chronicles the timeline of the succession of events during the Berlin Crisis and their interrelation. It then turns to the close interaction between Soviet and foreign policy before situating the event into the broader timeline of Soviet history.

Description: Orignally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.

Description: How did the idea of the imagination impact Romantic literature and science?2018 Winner, Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize, The International Conference on RomanticismRichard C. Sha argues that scientific understandings of the imagination indelibly shaped literary Romanticism. Challenging the idea that the imagination found a home only on the side of the literary, as a mental vehicle for transcending the worldly materials of the sciences, Sha shows how imagination helped to operationalize both scientific and literary discovery. Essentially, the imagination forced writers to consider the difference between what was possible and impossible while thinking about how that difference could be known. Sha examines how the imagination functioned within physics and chemistry in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, neurology in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas, physiology in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and obstetrics and embryology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He also demonstrates how the imagination was called upon to do aesthetic and scientific work using primary examples taken from the work of scientists and philosophers Davy, Dalton, Faraday, Priestley, Kant, Mary Somerville, Oersted, Marcet, Smellie, Swedenborg, Blumenbach, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Von Baer, among others. Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

Description: Originally published in 1977. Professor David Spring presents comparative histories of European landed elites in the nineteenth century, covering English, Prussian, Russian, Spanish, and French landed elites. European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century underscores the particularities of each case and underscores the differences between cases.

Description: Originally published in 1975. Following the vein of French historiography, many twentieth-century scholars of the French Revolution believed that the middle class of lawyers played a crucial role in the Revolution. In The Barristers of Toulouse, Lenard Berlanstein contends with that notion in a case study examining the response of the Toulousian legal community to the French Revolution. Using tax rolls, marriage contracts, and court records as primary sources, Professor Berlanstein argues that class interests—such as a desire to preserve their status in the cultured, conservative urban elite—led many Toulousian judges and lawyers to reject the Revolution and to remain loyal to the aristocratic Parlement. In other words, those in the legal community of Toulouse conducted themselves in ways that were consistent with other members of their social and economic class. To supplement his argument, Berlanstein's integrates methods from the New Social History movement.

Description: William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it—including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays—bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines—though he frequently sold short stories to them.To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to—and involvement with—American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art. Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.

Description: Originally published in 1980. In 1973 the US president's Office of Science and Technology was eliminated, a victim of its own incongruity. It was not, as was popularly proclaimed at the time, simply because the Nixon administration was particularly hostile to the scientific and academic communities. It was eliminated, argues physician-scientist Edward J. Burger Jr., because the office had tried to do its job too well—and had become a political liability. Science at the White House takes a critical look at the role of science advisers to the president and recounts the many conflicts that occurred as science and politics converged. Burger draws on his own six years of experience in the White House Office of Science and Technology in the 1970s. His book is filled with firsthand descriptions of the government's handling of such issues as national health care, environmental regulation, population control, and biomedical research.

Description: Originally published in 1966. This book collects papers and essays written by historian Frederic C. Lane, who specialized in medieval Venetian history.

Description: Originally published in 1992. What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? Murray Krieger develops a systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates over meaning in language from Plato to the present. Krieger sees the modernist position as the logical outcome of these debates but argues that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the two-thousand-year tradition they claim to culminate. Krieger focuses on ekphrasis—the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary—a form at least as old as its most famous example, the shield of Achilles verbally invented in the Iliad. He argues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words. As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign."

Description: Originally published in 1975. The French Revolution generated a wave of popular piety and religious excitement in both France and England, where millenarians—prophets of the millennium—attempted to interpret the Revolution as the fulfillment of the predictions of Daniel and St. John the Divine. This study discusses the millenarian ideal in the context of the intellectual and religious attitudes of the time. Rejecting interpretations of millenarianism that chalk it up to class struggle or mass hysteria, Garrett stresses the interaction between politics and religion, viewing the phenomenon as the interpretation, by a varied assortment of individuals, of coincident political events in eschatological terms. Faced with a change as significant as the French Revolution, people found in the prophetic books of the Bible an understanding of what was happening to them. If the Revolution was God's will, if its development had been foretold, then surely the final outcome would be beneficial, at least for the faithful. Political events became eschatological events, and dangers and misfortunes became simply the chastisements that a fallen world must undergo before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can redeem it. Although some of the beliefs may now seem bizarre, Garrett shows that, at the time, they attracted many followers for whom these ideas were both reasonable and respectable. Focusing on the careers of three millenarians—Suzette Labrousse, Catherine Théot, and Richard Brothers—Garrett tries to understand these prophets as persons rather than dismiss them as fanatics. Their prominence resulted from their success in transmitting a new political consciousness through familiar religious imagery. While the Revolution gave urgency and tangible reality to millenarian convictions, Labrousse, Théot, and others were convinced, well before the Revolution, that they were the bearers of divine revelations and thus welcomed the Revolution as confirmation of their own missions.

Description: Universities were driving forces of change in late Renaissance Italy. The Gonzaga, the ruling family of Mantua, had long supported scholarship and dreamed of founding an institution of higher learning within the city. In the early seventeenth century they joined forces with the Jesuits, a powerful intellectual and religious force, to found one of the most innovative universities of the time.Paul F. Grendler provides the first book in any language about the Peaceful University of Mantua, its official name. He traces the efforts of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga, a prince savant who debated Galileo, as he made his family’s dream a reality. Ferdinando negotiated with the Jesuits, recruited professors, and financed the school. Grendler examines the motivations of the Gonzaga and the Jesuits in the establishment of a joint civic and Jesuit university.The University of Mantua lasted only six years, lost during the brutal sack of the city by German troops in 1630. Despite its short life, the university offered original scholarship and teaching. It had the first professorship of chemistry more than 100 years before any other Italian university. The leading professor of medicine identified the symptoms of angina pectoris 140 years before an English scholar named the disease. The star law professor advanced new legal theories while secretly spying for James I of England. The Jesuits taught humanities, philosophy, and theology in ways both similar to and different from lay professors.A superlative study of education, politics, and culture in seventeenth-century Italy, this book reconsiders a period in Italy’s history often characterized as one of feckless rulers and stagnant learning. Thanks to extensive archival research and a thorough examination of the published works of the university's professors, Grendler's history tells a new story.

Description: Originally published in 1971. In The House of Saulx-Tavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700–1830, Professor Robert Forster examines the noble family of Saulx-Tavanes from the reign of Louis XIV to the Restoration. He provides readers with an account of a single aristocratic family's relationship to the changing political culture of the eighteenth century. Forster explores how an old aristocratic family promoted itself in the royal court, how the Saulx-Tavanes managed their estate remotely from Paris, and how the family's relationship to its creditors changed over time. Forster examines the ambiguities of one noble family's transition from provincial independence to courtly dependence and, eventually, to revolution. This book is an account of how the Saulx-Tavanes—a family of émigré nobles—preserved their life, revenue, reputation, esteem, and place in a French society transformed by political change and revolution.

Description: Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. Winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies's Howard R. Marraro PrizeOriginally published in 1996. Historical writing on the Renaissance has usually focused on the social extremes that co-existed in the great metropolitan centers—on either elites or the underclass. As a result, the world of the middling families and provincial societies remains largely unexplored. Daily experiences in the lesser cities are, however, no less rich and revealing than those of Florence, Venice, and Milan. In addition, writes historian James Grubb, these experiences offer new perspectives from which to reassess familiar assumptions about domestic life in the fifteenth century. Based on memoirs and other records left by thirteen merchant families from the Veneto cities of Verona and Vincenza, Provincial Families of the Renaissance is an engrossing study of daily lives that have until now been overlooked by scholars. Grubb examines the attitudes and experiences of families undistinguished in their modest means and local ambitions from the majority of their compatriots, uncovering a detailed historical landscape rich in social obligations, commercial activities, and religious beliefs.Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. In reconstructing provincial life in the Veneto, Grubb discovers in his subjects an independence of mind that mediated their reception of metropolitan ideologies far more than the historiography of the Renaissance might suggest. These "unremarkable" provincials were agents of their own destiny, influenced in equal measures by prevailing attitudes, local customs, and personal convictions. "James Grubb is exploring new terrain in this book. Distinguished by its clarity and eloquence, this is a superior work of historical writing and analysis that merits comparison with the best monographs on the social history of Renaissance Italy."—Gene Brucker, University of California at Berkeley

Description: Originally published in 1967. With the waning of the Middle Ages, the life of the Italian polis underwent a gradual but unmistakable transformation. The leisurely decentralization of the medieval commune, which had its roots in feudalism, the code of chivalry, and religious faith, gave place to the tight despotism of the fourteenth century. This in turn yielded to democratized government and finally to a stricter legalistic and puritanical rule. Marvin Becker's two-volume study of Florence examines this metamorphosis and establishes its relationship to the emergence of the Renaissance state. Volume One traces the decline of the communal paideia in its political, social, and cultural aspects. Through an intensive examination of the fiscal and juridical records of the period and the documents of contemporary literature, Dr. Becker demonstrates the relationship between the death of communal ideals and the centralization of political power, and between the emergence of a strong middle class and a respect for public law. He shows the patricians discovering a community of interest with the burghers, and the vendetta being replaced by courts of law. Finally, he traces the growing ability of the Florentine citizenry to cope with crisis through the newly strengthened organs of the republic. Volume Two will discuss the establishment of Florence as a Renaissance city-state with particular emphasis on the continuum between the medieval commune of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and the centralized city of the mid-fourteenth century. A unique contribution of this volume lies in the use made of painstaking and detailed investigation of the voluminous archival resources of the Archivio di Stato of Florence—some of which have since been destroyed by the 1966 flood. In pursuit of what actually took place during communal council meetings, what legislation was passed and what rejected, Dr. Becker scrutinized tens of thousands of documents in a variety of categories, obtaining first-hand knowledge of the careers of those in power, and gaining illuminating insights into motivations and actions. Political, social, and cultural historians will find Florence in Transition, Volume One, a helpful elucidation of the dynamics of historical change and the birth of a state.

Description: Winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize given by the International Conference on RomanticismThis original study explores the new idea of theory that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Leon Chai sees in the Romantic age a significant movement across several broad fields of intellectual endeavor, from theoretical concepts to an attempt to understand how they arise. He contends that this movement led to a spatial treatment of concepts, the primacy of development over concepts, and the creation of metatheory, or the formal analysis of theory. Chai begins with P. B. Shelley on the need for conceptual framework, or theory. He then considers how Friedrich Wolf and Friedrich Schlegel shift from a preoccupation with antiquity to a heightened self-awareness of Romantic nostalgia for that lost past. He finds a similar reflexivity in Napoleon's battle plan at Jena and, subsequently, in Hegel's move from substance to subject. Chai then turns to the sciences: Xavier Bichat's rejection of the idea of a unitary vital principle for life as process; the chemical theory of matter developed by Humphry Davy; and the work of Évariste Galois, whose proof of the solvability of equations using radicals ushered in the age of metatheory. Chai concludes with reactions to theory: Coleridge's proposal of the conflict between reason and understanding as a model of theory, Mary Shelley's effort to replace theory with a different kind of relationship to external others, and Hölderlin's reflection on the limits of representation and the possibility of fulfillment beyond it.

Description: Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1988. In the decades after 1404, traditionally maritime Venice extended its control over much of northern Italy. Citizens of Vicenza, the first city to come under Venetian rule, proclaimed their city "firstborn of Venice" and a model for the Venetian Republic's dominions on the terraferma. In Firstborn of Venice James Grubb tests commonplace attributes of the Renaissance state through a rich case study of society and politics in fifteenth-century Vicenza. Looking at relations between Venetian and local governments and at the location of power in Vicentine society, Grubb reveals the structural limitations of Venetian authority and the mechanisms by which local patricians deflected the claims of the capital. Firstborn of Venice explores issues that are political in the broadest sense: legal institutions and administrative practices, fiscal politics, the consolidation of elites, ecclesiastical management, and the contrasting governing ideologies of ruler and subjects.

Description: Originally published in 1987. In Words about Words about Words, Murray Krieger advances his ongoing dialogue with the rich diversity of contemporary literary theory and elaborates on his own position as it grows out of an opposing relation to much of current criticism. Krieger examines the kinds of ideologies and ontologies smuggled into literary theory that purports to be anti-ideological and anti-ontological. He explores the extent to which critical fashions dictate the development of theory and the reasons why particular theories exclude certain kinds of literary works in favor of others. Under such circumstances, Krieger asks, What becomes of the critic's task of evaluation? Further, what is the relation of the idea of progress to criticism and the arts, and what is the effect of these notions on cultural and intellectual institutions? He seeks an alternative to the deterministic tendencies of the new historicism in viewing the relations of literature and literary criticism to society. Progressing from broad questions to more focused critical problems and close readings, Krieger reviews the aesthetic tradition as it has evolved from Kant. He engages in debate with deconstructionist critics about the role of symbol and allegory as descriptions of ways in which poems succeed or fail in constructing their verbal universe. And he argues that, for all its brilliance, deconstruction has not yet been able to fulfill the social or academic functions of the older, aesthetic-based disciplines that it set out to deconstruct.

Description: Originally published in 1995. In the early 1970s, largely as a result of the debilitating struggle in Vietnam, the United States began to reassess and redefine its basic approach to East-West relations. At the same time, the Soviet Union was awakening to the liabilities that a continuing and unregulated state of hostility would impose on its own internal and external agenda. Keith Nelson details the circumstances and traces the steps that led to the first significant accommodation and easing of tension between the superpowers during the Cold War. "In this important study, Keith Nelson explains the detente period in an imaginative, convincing, and impressively scholarly manner. Although there have been scores of books and memoirs on the subject, none have done the job quite like Nelson's. In particular, he has used post-glasnost Russian memoirs and monographs—and, especially, his own interviews with such key players as Dobrynin and Arbatov—to present one of the most intelligent Kremlinological studies I have ever seen." —Melvin Small, Wayne State University

Description: Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

Description: Originally published in 1984. In The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914, Lenard Berlanstein examines how technological advances, expanding industrialization, bureaucratization, and urban growth affected the lives of the working poor and near poor of one of the world's most influential cities during an era of intense social and cultural change. Berlanstein departs from other historians of the working classes in treating, in a parallel manner, not only craftsmen and factory laborers but also service workers and lower-level white-collar employees. Avoiding the fallacy of letting the city limits set the boundaries of an urban study, he deals also with the industrial suburbs, with their considerable concentration of workers, to examine the transformation of the work, leisure, and consumer experiences of the people who did not own property and who lived from one payday to the next during the Second Industrial Revolution.The Working People of Paris describes a cycle of adaptation and resistance to the forces of economic maturation. For several decades after 1871, Berlanstein argues, working people and employees preserved accommodations with management about reciprocal rights in the workplace. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, these forms of adaptation had broken down under new economic pressures. The result was a crisis of discipline in the workplace, as wage earners and modest clerks began to challenge managerial authority.Berlanstein's study confronts the widely accepted view that, during this period, workers became better integrated into a society of improving standards of living and mass leisure. Instead, he documents uneven patterns of material progress and growing conflict over work roles among all sorts of laboring people.

Description: Originally published in 1963. Between 1945 and 1951, Belgium faced a crisis in political leadership when its ruling monarch, King Leopold III, was accused of violating the Belgian Constitution during World War II. The "question" at hand refers to the uncertainty over whether King Leopold III could return to Belgium as king. This book documents the history of this political crisis, culminating with the abdication of King Leopold and the assumption of the crown by Baudouin, Leopold's son.

Description: Originally published in 1987. Lady Rachel Russell (1637–1723) was regarded as "one of the best women" by many of the most powerful people of her time. Wife of Lord William Russell, the prominent Whig opponent of King Charles II who was executed for treason in 1683, Lady Russell emerged as a political figure in her own right during the Glorious Revolution and throughout her forty-year widowhood. Award-winning historian Lois G. Schwoerer has written a biography that illuminates both the political life and the lives of women in late Stuart England. Lady Russell's interest in politics and religion blossomed during her marriage to Lord Russell and after his death: "as William became a Whig martyr, Rachel became a Whig saint." Her wealth, contacts, and role as her husband's surrogate gave her considerable influence to intercede in high government appointments, lend support in elections, and exchange favors with her friend Mary of Orange. In her domestic life she similarly took steps usually reserved to men, managing large estates in London and Hampshire and negotiating favorable marriage contracts for each of her three children. Although Lady Russell was unusual for her time, she was by no means unique. Other notable women shared her concerns and traits, although to differing degrees and effects. Schwoerer suggests that the horizons of women's lives in the seventeenth century may have extended farther than is often supposed.

Description: Originally published in 1973. Ultraroyalism in Toulouse examines in detail the origins of ultraroyal hostility to the social and political changes rendered by the French Revolution. France has produced a variety of theories of decline, corresponding to the nation's changing political fortunes in Europe and the world. The Revolution represented another, at least temporary, victory of the state apparatus over local community and privilege, and it stimulated the longing, apparent in all parts of the country after the fall of Napoleon, for a return to older forms of society and government that were essentially provincial and rural. The stevedores of Marseille, the fisherman of Brittany, and the peasants of the Auvergne saw plainly enough that the Revolution had not solved the problems of poverty and economic distress. Like the nobles, the ex-parlementarians, and the descendants of local oligarchies, they were hostile to the ascendancy of Paris. On all levels of French society were those who selectively remembered the best of the Old Regime, dwelt on the most obvious failures of the Revolution's religious and welfare policies, and blamed facile utilitarians who did not understand tradition for the destruction of the pre-1789 institutions. This book examines in depth the form that ultraroyalism took in Toulouse.

Description: Originally published in 1994. In The Institution of Theory, Murray Krieger examines, at once sympathetically and critically, the process by which theory has become institutionalized in the American academy and the consequences of theory as an academic institution. He traces the transformation of literary theory into critical theory and relates it to changes in the place of literature within questions about discourse at large. And he faces the costs as well as the gains of the recent denial of privilege to the literary. To support his view of the issues at stake in current theoretical debates, Krieger surveys both the history of American criticism and the general history of literary theory in the West. He sees divisions in each of them that foreshadow the current debates: in the first a conflict between the social and the aesthetic functions of literature, and in the second a conflict between the treatment of literature as a reflection of a culture's ideology and the treatment of literature as a subversion of that ideology. To what extent, he asks, are our debates new and to what extent are they merely refashioned versions of those we have always had?

Description: Originally published in 1984. In Applied Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer provides an extraordinary introduction to the third, "applied" phase of grammatology, the "science of writing," outlined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. Ulmer looks to the later experimental works of Derrida (beginning with Glas and continuing through Truth in Painting and The Post Card). In these, he discovers a critical methodology radically different from the deconstruction for which Derrida is known. At the same time, he finds the source of a new pedagogy for all the humanities, one based on grammatology and appropriate to the era of audiovisual communications in which we live. Detractors of Derrida often accuse him of superficial wordplay and of using images and puns as nonfunctional subversions of academic conventions. Ulmer argues that there is, in fact, a fully developed use of homonyms in Derrida's style, which produces its own distinctive knowledge and insight. Derrida's experiments with images, moreover—his expansion of descriptions of everyday objects such as umbrellas, matchboxes, and post cards into cognitive models—serve to reveal a simplicity underlying intellectual discourse, which could be used to eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies. Comparing the stylistic innovations of Derrida with Jacques Lacan's use of puns and diagrams, with the German performance artist Joseph Beuys's demonstration of models, and with the "montage writing" of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Ulmer explores the possibility of deriving a postmodernist pedagogy from Derrida's texts. The first study to suggest the full potential of the program available in Derrida's writings, Applied Grammatology is also the first outline of a Derridean alternative to deconstructionism. With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

Description: Adapting fiction into film is, as author Cristina Della Coletta asserts, a transformative encounter that takes place not just across media but across different cultures. In this book, Della Coletta explores what it means when the translation of fiction into film involves writers, directors, and audiences who belong to national, historical, and cultural formations different from that of the adapted work. In particular, Della Coletta examines narratives and films belonging to Italian, North American, French, and Argentine cultures. These include Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Federico Fellini’s version of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” Alain Corneau’s film based on Antonio Tabucchi’s Notturno indiano, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s take on Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tema del traidor y del héroe.” In her framework for analyzing these cross-cultural film adaptations, Della Coletta borrows from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and calls for a “hermeneutics of estrangement,” a practice of mediation and adaptation that defines cultures, nations, selfhoods, and their aesthetic achievements in terms of their transformative encounters. Stories travel to unexpected and interesting places when adapted into film by people of diverse cultures. While the intended meaning of the author may not be perfectly reproduced, it still holds, Della Coletta argues, an equally valid and important intellectual claim upon its interpreters. With a firm grasp on the latest developments in adaptation theory, Della Coletta invites scholars of media studies, cultural history, comparative literature, and adaptation studies to deepen their understanding of this critical encounter between texts, writers, readers, and cultural movements.