Search results for ""Stanford University Press""
Stanford University Press Magnificent Failure: A Portrait of the Western Homestead Era
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.
£44.10
Stanford University Press Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era
This is a richly imaginative study of machines for writing and reading at the end of the nineteenth century in America. Its aim is to explore writing and reading as culturally contingent experiences, and at the same time to broaden our view of the relationship between technology and textuality. At the book’s heart is the proposition that technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language. Whether they failed (like Thomas Edison’s “electric pen”) or succeeded (like typewriters), inscriptive technologies of the late nineteenth century were local, often competitive embodiments of the way people experienced writing and reading. Such a perspective cuts through the determinism of recent accounts while arguing for an interdisciplinary method for considering texts and textual production. Starting with the cacophonous promotion of shorthand alphabets in postbellum America, the author investigates the assumptions—social, psychic, semiotic—that lie behind varying inscriptive practices. The “grooves” in the book’s title are the delicate lines recorded and played by phonographs, and readers will find in these pages a surprising and complex genealogy of the phonograph, along with new readings of the history of the typewriter and of the earliest silent films. Modern categories of authorship, representation, and readerly consumption emerge here amid the un- or sub-literary interests of patent attorneys, would-be inventors, and record producers. Modern subjectivities emerge both in ongoing social constructions of literacy and in the unruly and seemingly unrelated practices of American spiritualism, “Coon” songs, and Rube Goldberg-type romanticism. Just as digital networks and hypertext have today made us more aware of printed books as knowledge structures, the development and dissemination of the phonograph and typewriter coincided with a transformed awareness of oral and inscribed communication. It was an awareness at once influential in the development of consumer culture, literary and artistic experiences of modernity, and the disciplinary definition of the “human” sciences, such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Recorded sound, typescripts, silent films, and other inscriptive media are memory devices, and in today’s terms the author offers a critical theory of ROM and RAM for the century before computers.
£25.19
Stanford University Press On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution
In order to grasp what it means to call Rousseau an "author" of the Revolution, as so many revolutionaries did, it is necessary to take full measure of the difficulties of literary interpretation to which Rousseau's work gives rise, particularly around such a charged term as "author." On Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows that Rousseau's texts consistently generate a division in their own reading, a division both designated and masked by the fiction of authorship. These divisions can occur successively—as in the narrative reversals and discontinuities characteristic of Rousseau's fictional and autobiographical works—or simultaneously, in the form of incompatible attempts to apply the lessons of a single text to an urgent historical moment. Given the structure of these texts, their "influence" can only occur in an equally paradoxical form. Rousseau's contribution to revolutionary thinking lies in his conceptualization of the constitutive function of misunderstanding and narrative discontinuity, in history and political action as well as in literature. Such misunderstandings and discontinuities are particularly well illustrated by the vicissitudes of the reading of Rousseau's texts during the revolutionary period, a moment when "readings" occurred as political programs. The Revolution enacted Rousseau precisely to the extent that revolutionaries could not agree on what action he called for. He is "one of the first authors of the Revolution" not because he was one of its causes, but because he provided the terms in which the logic of the revolutionary process becomes intelligible.
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale
The emergence of the fantastic tale in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflects a growing fascination with the supernatural, the marvelous, and the occult as the site for literary innovation. Taking Jacques Cazotte's prototypical The Devil in Love as a starting point, this book examines the genre's early development in the fantastic tales of the German romantics Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, and E. T. A. Hoffmann; the subsequent French rediscovery of the genre in works by Théophile Gautier and Prosper Mérimée; and Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to the new literary form. The literary innovation of the fantastic tale contributed to the production of a mode of subjectivity intrinsic to the history of sexuality. It arose at a moment in the history of communication when similarity and perfect openness were no longer considered the unquestioned basis of friendship or love, when the other's potentially dark secrets became seductive and fascinating.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume I: Theoretical Prerequisites
This is the first volume of a two-volume work that introduces a new and fundamentally different conception of language structure and linguistic investigation. The central claim of cognitive grammar is that grammar forms a continuum with lexicon and is fully describable in terms of symbolic units (i.e. form-meaning pairings). In contrast to current orthodoxy, the author argues that grammar is not autonomous with respect to semantics, but rather reduces to patterns for the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content.
£40.50
Stanford University Press Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History
This volume offers an illuminating overview of the work of a pioneering and highly distinguished scholar of early Latin American social and cultural history and philology. Known for the originality of his approach and the variety of his research interests, James Lockhart has gone from studying social history using career pattern methods to an ethnohistory emphasizing indigenous-language philology, all the while stressing general interpretation, synthesis, historiography, and the development of analytical concepts and categories. The present volume illustrates all these interests and activities within the covers of a single book; the reader can see not only common threads running through the individual essays, but also the close relationships between types of scholarship all too often seen as utterly distinct. The "old and new" of the subtitle is meant literally; the first piece was written in 1968, the last in 1998. Some are already well known, while others have appeared in quite obscure venues. Four of the twelve chapters are published here for the first time. They elucidate the reading of texts for social and cultural purposes, expound on aspects of Nahuatl historical linguistics, discuss the problematic nature of the concept of resistance in Western Hemisphere culture encounters, and review the author's experience with the scholarly disciplines, which involves a certain amount of intellectual autobiography. The tone of the volume is generally colloquial, for nine chapters originated as lectures and attempt to interpret for a wider audience the author's research as represented in his monographic books. Previously published pieces have been revised or expanded to a greater or lesser degree. Their subjects include the transition from encomienda to hacienda, the evolution of social history in Latin American studies, the economic rationality of Spanish procedures, the changing role of merchants in Spanish America, the editing of Nahuatl texts, the author's concept of Double Mistaken Identity, and the process of cultural contact in three major Latin American areas.
£30.60
Stanford University Press The Entrepreneurship Dynamic: Origins of Entrepreneurship and the Evolution of Industries
Scholars and popular writers have written a great deal about entrepreneurs and the formation of new companies, but they have not succeeded in predicting when and where large numbers of new organizations will emerge. This volume attempts, from the viewpoint of the interdisciplinary field of organization studies, to answer two major questions about entrepreneurship: First, what are the conditions that prompt the founding of large numbers of new organizations or entirely new industries? Second, what are the real and significant effects of such entrepreneurial activities on existing industries, economies, and societies? The authors emphasize that new organizations do not emerge full blown from the idiosyncratic minds of individual entrepreneurs. Their ideas for new organizations, their ability to acquire capital and other essential resources, and their likelihood of survival as entrepreneurs derive from the contexts in which they live and work. At the same time, new organizations fundamentally and immediately transform their contexts. The first part of the book explores the mental models that founders of new companies bring with them from previous experiences, the ways in which their ideas come not only from the companies in which they work but from the surrounding organizational communities, and the importance of local and regional dynamics in nurturing innovative communities. Other papers in this section shift perspective from geographic communities to other contexts—the university, the knowledge industry, and the technology cycle. The second part of the book explores the role of entrepreneurial activity in the transformation of contexts and the evolution of industries, focusing on the processes and tools that entrepreneurs use to legitimate new organizational populations, and the collateral industries and communities that build up around new organizational populations, aiding in the development of new companies.
£44.10
Stanford University Press Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI. Revised and Expanded Edition
This book is a history of the complex relations between scientific advisors, primarily physicists, and U.S. presidents in their role as decision makers about nuclear weapons and military strategy. The story, unsurprisingly, is one of considerable tension between the "experts" and the politicians, as scientists seek to influence policy and presidents alternate between accepting their advice and resisting or even ignoring it. First published in 1992, the book has been brought up to date to include the experiences of science advisors to President Clinton. In addition, the texts of eleven crucial documents, from the Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt (1939) to the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative by President Reagan (1983), have been added as appendixes.
£32.40
Stanford University Press The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order
This book traces the rise of the modern state—a mode of organizing political power within a closed territory—in post-Enlightenment Europe and its spread to the remainder of the world, especially colonial and postcolonial societies. The result of a long process of evolution dating back to the Roman Empire, this new form of state was characterized by the coincidence of public power and public space and the legalization of political and social relations. Intimately linked to the transformation of Western European cultures at a time when their economic might allowed them to conquer many regions of the world, the modern state provided a model that was adopted in most countries. The book analyzes the different conditions in which the modern state was grafted onto different cultural realities: a metropolitan model adopted by settlers or imposed as an instrument of colonial domination, or a representation of modernity selected by non-Western leaders out of fascination for its alleged efficiency and rationality. The author shows that, from the beginning, various logics of importation led non-Western cultures to invent their own practices of the state, thereby transforming the original model. In many countries, notably in postcolonial societies, discrepancies appeared between political actions and political representations and principles on which the state was supposed to rest. This has often led to political crises and breakdowns of legality and legitimacy, and to the formation of new types of social relations in spaces the state cannot control. At the international level, a similar phenomenon can be seen: international networks, based on trade links, religion, and culture, are now able to bypass official interstate relations.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty
For commoners in the Qing dynasty, the most salient agents of the imperial state were not the emperor's appointed officials but rather the clerks and runners of the county yamen, the lowest level of functionaries in the Qing state's administrative hierarchy. Yet until now we have known very little about these critically important persons beyond the caricatured portrayals of corruption and venality left by Qing high officials and elites. Drawing from the rich archival records of Ba county, Sichuan, the author challenges the simplicity of these portrayals by taking us inside the county yamen to provide the first detailed look at local administrative practice from the perspective of those who actually carried it out. Who were the county clerks and runners? How were they recruited, organized, disciplined, and rewarded? What was the economic basis for a career in the yamen? How did clerks and runners view themselves as well as legitimize their role in Qing government? And what impact did their interests and practices have on symbolically laden elements of imperial government such as the magistrate's court? In addressing these questions, the author traverses the disjuncture between statutory regulations and the realities of daily administrative practice, uncovering a realm of informal, semiautonomous, yet highly structured and even rationalized procedures. Although frequently in violation of formal law, this extra-statutory system nevertheless remained an irreducible component of local government under the Qing. Recognizing the centrality of such informal practice to yamen administration forces us to rethink not only traditional assumptions concerning local corruption in the Qing, but also the ways in which we conceptualize the boundaries between state and society in late imperial China.
£60.30
Stanford University Press The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage
Drawing on Heidegger's corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an impensé—or unthought thought—that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology. Zarader argues forcefully that in his interpretation of Western thought and culture, Heidegger manages to recognize only two main lines of inheritance: the "Greek" line of philosophical thinking, and the Christian tradition of "faith." From this perspective, Heidegger systematically avoids any explicit or meaningful recognition of the contribution made by the Hebraic biblical and exegetical traditions to Western thought and culture. Zarader argues that this avoidance is significant, not simply because it involves an inexcusable historical oversight, but more importantly because Heidegger's own philosophical project draws on and develops themes that appear first, and fundamentally, within the very Hebraic traditions that he avoids, betraying an "unthought debt" to Hebraic tradition.
£23.39
Stanford University Press Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China after Mao
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.
£68.40
Stanford University Press Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present
This pathbreaking volume will force a reassessment of many common assumptions about the relationship between Christianity and modern China. The overall thrust of the twenty essays is that despite the conflicts and tension that often have characterized relations between Christianity and China, in fact Christianity has been, for the past two centuries or more, putting down roots within Chinese society, and it is still in the process of doing so. Thus Christianity is here interpreted not just as a Western religion that imposed itself on China, but one that was becoming a Chinese religion, as Buddhism did centuries ago. Eschewing the usual focus on foreign missionaries, as is customary, this research effort is China-centered, drawing on Chinese sources, including government and organizational documents, private papers, and interviews. The essays are organized into four major sections: Christianity’s role in Qing society, including local conflicts (6 essays); ethnicity (3 essays); women (5 essays); and indigenization of the Christian effort (6 essays). The editor has provided sectional introductions to highlight the major themes in each section, as well as a general Introduction.
£44.10
Stanford University Press The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850
This pathbreaking work is a social and cultural history of the Maya peoples of the province of Yucatan in colonial Mexico, spanning the period from shortly after the Spanish conquest of the region to its incorporation as part of an independent Mexico. Instead of depending on the Spanish sources and perspectives that have formed the basis of previous scholarship on colonial Yucatan, the author aims to give a voice to the Maya themselves, basing his analysis entirely on his translations of hundreds of Yucatec Maya notarial documents—from libraries and archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States—most of which have never before received scholarly attention. These documents allow the author to reconstruct the social and cultural world of the Maya municipality, or cah, the self-governing community where most Mayas lived and which was the focus of Maya social and political identity. The first two parts of the book examine the ways in which Mayas were organized and differentiated from each other within the community, and the discussion covers such topics as individual and group identities, sociopolitical organization, political factionalism, career patterns, class structures, household and family patterns, inheritance, gender roles, sexuality, and religion. The third part explores the material environment of the cah, emphasizing the role played by the use and exchange of land, while the fourth part describes in detail the nature and significance of the source documentation, its genres and its language. Throughout the book, the author pays attention to the comparative contexts of changes over time and the similarities or differences between Maya patterns and those of other colonial-era Mesoamericans, notably the Nahuas of central Mexico.
£30.60
Stanford University Press Mixed Race Literature
This collection presents the first scholarly attempt to map the rapidly emerging field of mixed-race literature, defined as texts written by authors who represent multiple cultural and literary traditions—African-European, Native-European, Eurasian, African-Asian, and Native-African American. It not only allows scholars to engage a wide variety of mixed race literatures and critical approaches, but also to situate these literatures in relation to contemporary fields of literary inquiry. The editor’s introduction provides a historical context for the development of mixed-race identity and literature, summarizing existing scholarship on the subject, interrogating the social construction of race and mixed race, and arguing for a literary (rather than literal) inquiry into mixed-race texts. The essays examine such subjects as mythmaking and interpreting; the illustration of mixed-race texts; the mixed-race drama of Velina Hasu Houston; race, gender, and transnational spaces; the meaning and negotiation of identity; the theory of kin-aesthetic in Asian-Native American literatures; and Maori-Pakeha mixed-race writing in New Zealand. The editor’s conclusion argues that rather than following the tragic employment assigned to mulattos, octoroons, and half-bloods, the evolution of mixed-race texts has been from tragedy to trickster. The role of the tragic trickster facilitates a shift in which new and distinct literary strategies and forms emerge. These models represent critical sites from which to theorize the overall formation of American literature and to complicate its formation in ways that unfold our usual notions of race, gender, and culture.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism
This unorthodox scholarly work dissects the ghosts of history in order to analyze how the past—both recent and distant—haunts posterity, and in what ways the present disfigures the image of times gone by. The book presents a novel history of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the Fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory. Using a series of strange and darkly ironic stories, the subsequent chapters provide a close exploration of some of the essential objects of historical study: the name, the date, the dead, the relic, the pantheon, the court, the underworld, and the underground. The tension between vast distances, both in space and time, that Retroactive Justice covers, and the extremely focused analyses, provide an unexpected experience of writing and rewriting, visioning and revisioning history.
£25.19
Stanford University Press Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China
While the customary path to achievement in traditional China was through service to the state, from the earliest times certain individuals had been acclaimed for repudiating an official career. This book traces the formulation and portrayal of the practice of reclusion in China from the earliest times through the sixth century, by which time reclusion had taken on its enduring character. Those men who decided to withhold their service to state governance fit the dictum from the Book of Changes of a man who "does not serve a king or lord; he elevates in priority his own affairs." This characterization came to serve as a byword of individual and voluntary withdrawal, the image of the man whose lofty resolve could not be humbled for service to a temporal ruler. Men who eschewed official appointments in favor of pursuing their own personal ideals were known by such appellations as "hidden men" (yinshi), "disengaged persons" (yimin), "high-minded men" (gaoshi), and "scholars-at-home" (chushi). What distinguished these men was a particular strength of character that underlay their conduct: they received approbation for maintaining their resolve, their mettle, their integrity, and their moral and personal values in the face of adversity, threat, or temptation. This book reveals that those who opted for a life of reclusion had a variety of motivations for their decisions and conducted widely divergent ways of life. The lives of these men epitomize the distinctive nature of substantive reclusion, differentiating them from those of the intelligentsia who, on occasion, voiced their desire for disengagement or for retreat, but who nevertheless found or retained their places in government office. Throughout, the author places the recluse and reclusion within the social, political, intellectual, religious, and literary contexts of the times.
£68.40
Stanford University Press Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family
The disappearance behind the Iron Curtain of the American brothers Noel and Hermann Field in 1949, followed by that of Noel’s wife and their foster daughter, was one of the most publicized international mysteries of the Cold War. This dual memoir gives an intensely human dimension to that struggle, with Hermann narrating all that happened to him from the day he was abducted from the Warsaw airport to his release five years later, and Kate relating her unrelenting efforts to find her husband. Thousands of potential victims of Hitler’s dragnet were rescued in 1939 and during World War II through separate efforts of the Field brothers. Arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Noel was taken to Hungary and used as an example of American perfidy in show trials. Hermann went to Poland primarily to find out what had happened to his brother. After Hermann’s abduction, he was taken to the cellar of a secret Polish prison, where he was held for five years. He gives us a detailed account of his battle to survive, alternating despair and horror with mordant humor. Meanwhile, his family had no idea whether he was still alive and if so, where. This moving story, based on detailed notes made by the authors during and shortly after the events described, presents an inside-outside counterpoint, as Hermann’s chapters on his inward journey in his cellar world alternate with Kate’s efforts in London to find him by scrutinizing accounts of political events in Eastern Europe for clues and penetrating the diplomatic corridors of power in the West for help. Hermann had been arrested by a Polish security agent who later defected and became one of the West’s most important informants on Soviet operations in Eastern Europe. The search for the Field brothers was complicated by their history of leftist connections, for this tense period in the Cold War was also the era of McCarthyism in the United States. The book ends with an Epilogue that analyzes the events of fifty years ago in the light of what we know today, as the result of newly available archival material.
£89.10
Stanford University Press The Meaning of Yiddish
With a rare combination of erudition and insight, the author investigates the major aspects of Yiddish language and culture, showing where Yiddish came from and what it has to offer, even as it ceases to be a "living" language. Reviews "Harshav's book is a first-class study of Yiddish as both language and culture, rich with linguistic detail and historical insight, expert in its literary analysis and judgments. I recommend it enthusiastically." —Irving Howe, Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York "The Meaning of Yiddish is the most important contribution to the study of Yiddish language and literature in recent times." —Chana Kronfeld, University of California, Berkeley "The Meaning of Yiddish is explicitly intended for 'readers who bring to it no previous knowledge, only curiosity.' . . . 'My central question,' Harshav writes in the preface, 'is: Yiddish: what was it? What kind of world was it? How can we read the intersections of meaning its texts seem to provide? How did it lead in and out of Jewish history, moving between the internal Jewish world and the cultures of Christian Europe and America?' I know of no other single book in any language which could respond to these questions by conveying to the uninitiated . . . such a richly textured profile of the nature and dynamics of both the Yiddish language and its literature. It is a remarkable feat of high popularization, written with great flair and without a hint of pedantry, its examples always to the point and often memorable in themselves. . . . The book should be read by all who are interested in language, in literature, and in the modern Jewish experience." —Times Literary Supplement
£23.39
Stanford University Press Language in Time of Revolution
This book on culture and consciousness in history concerns the worldwide transformations of Jewish culture and society and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language following the waves of pogroms in Russia in 1881, when large numbers of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe redefined their identity as Jews in a new and baffling world. Reviews "With his customary versatility and lucidity Harshav has given us . . . a host of new and provocative insights into modern Jewish history. . . . This book is an outstanding attempt to juxtapose the revolution in Jewish life with that of the Hebrew language in such a way that each informs our understanding of the other." —Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University "It is no small component of Harshav's success in this altogether fascinating book to have made clear the family resemblance between what is still regularly called 'the almost miraculous revival of the Hebrew language' and the coterie movements of European high modernism in both politics and the arts." —Modernism/Modernity "A wise, original, and stimulating book on the shaping of modern Jewish culture. . . . Humane, deeply erudite, and very satisfying." —Steven Zipperstein, Stanford University "Israeli Hebrew, Angel Sáenz-Badillos has written, 'is not the result of natural evolution but of a process without parallel in the development of any other language.' The precise nature of the process is studied in illuminating detail in Language in Time of Revolution." —London Review of Books "The crisscrossing among the discourses of literature, ideology, history, and linguistics makes for a heady intellectual experience. . . . Harshav writes with great authority and verve. . . . His discussions are a model of clarity." —Alan Mintz, Brandeis University
£26.99
Stanford University Press Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis
“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.
£28.36
Stanford University Press Rereading Jack London
Jack London has long been recognized as one of the most colorful figures in American literature. He is America’s most widely translated author (into more than eighty languages), and although his works have been neglected until recently by academic critics in the United States, he is finally winning recognition as a major figure in American literary history. The breadth and depth of new critical study of London’s work in recent decades attest to his newfound respectability. London criticism has moved beyond a traditional concerns of realism and naturalism as well as beyond the timeworn biographical focus to engage such theoretical approaches as race, gender, class, post-structuralism, and new historicism. The range and intellectual energy of the essays collected here give the reader a new sense of London’s richness and variety, especially his treatment of diverse cultures. Having in the past focused more on London’s personal “world,” we are now afforded an opportunity to look more closely at his art and the numerous worlds it uncovers.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821
Traditional historiography describes the repartimiento de mercancías as a forced system of production and consumption in which officials of the Spanish crown compelled Mexican Indians to produce goods marketable in the Spanish economy and to purchase expensive and undesired Spanish products. The author challenges this conventional portrayal of Indian-Spanish economic relations by arguing that Indian market behavior was economically rational and voluntary. He further argues that the repartimiento was an institution designed to overcome market imperfections inherent in Mexico's colonial economy and to facilitate the extension of credit in a cross-cultural environment. Examining repartimiento production of cochineal, a dyestuff produced exclusively by Oaxacan Indians and representing Mexico's most valued export after silver, this study shows that Indians produced cochineal for the market voluntarily because it provided them with needed income. The primary role of the repartimiento was to provide Mexico's indigenous peasantry with credit, without which they could not have participated in the market as extensively as they did. Owing to the difficulty of collecting debts, credit provision was monopolized by agents of the Crown, the alcaldes mayores, who alone possessed the legal leverage needed to enforce the payment of debts. Though Spanish officials profited from the repartimiento, their economic gains were not so great as traditionally believed. Overall, the book demonstrates that Mexican Indians were much more actively engaged in the market than customarily imagined, and were adept at promoting their interests despite the discriminating policies of colonialism. The book rounds out its account of the repartimiento by examining the transatlantic trade in cochineal, especially in its late colonial decline.
£64.80
Stanford University Press Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History
Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of "imagination" in pre-romantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature. Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological—an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic aesthetics is, rather, critical—a reflective if problematic articulation of those conditions. The argument foregrounds the ways in which the aesthetics of romanticism inform its political and economic speculations. The book opens with an examination of mid-eighteenth-century debates about the role of superstition in the constitution of a national literary tradition. It considers, in particular, how Collins's odes figure Scotland as the site of a "superstitious" poetry that must be assimilated into British history even as Collins questions the very framework of assimilation. This ambiguous defense of superstition in the national polity is rewritten by romanticism as a defense of imagination. For the romantics, the concept of imagination involves an explicit theorization of how the mind's projections play a constitutive role in what appear to be social norms and economic facts. Hazlitt clarifies this position in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The Essay develops a rhetorical theory of imagination in order to deconstruct the entire metaphysical basis of self-interest on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy is based. Hazlitt's political pamphlets bring this argument to bear on his analysis of the economic interests fueling the Napleonic wars. Despite Hazlitt's enormous and widely acknowledged influence, his writings have been little studied on their own account. Romantic Returns underlies their centrality to the romantic articulation of aesthetics and politics. The final sections of the book engage Shelley's complex interrogation of the contradictions involved in just such articulations. In both his poetry and prose, Shelley turns to law and history as fields in which these contradictions can be negotiated or even resolved. But Shelley, who once called poets "unacknowledged legislators," suggests that violence may be unavoidable in any imaginative legislation that attempts to realize itself in properly "historical" action. The passage from poetry to politics cannot evade the problem of force. Tracing the crossings between "superstition," "imagination," and "history" in all three of these writers, Romantic Returns shows how difficult it is to maintain such crossings. In doing so, it shows, too, the continuing challenge of romanticism to contemporary historicism.
£60.30
Stanford University Press Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing
To what extent do newly available case records bear out our conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system? Is it true, for example, that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits—those concerned with disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance—as official Qing representations led us to believe? Is it true that decent people did not use the courts? And is it true that magistrates generally relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases? Based in large part on records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760’s to the 1900’s, this book reexamines those widely accepted Qing representations in the light of actual practice. The Qing state would have had us believe that civil disputes were so “minor” or “trivial” that they were left largely to local residents themselves to resolve. However, case records show that such disputes actually made up a major part of the caseloads of local courts. The Qing state held that lawsuits were the result of actions of immoral men, but ethnographic information and case records reveal that when community/kin mediation failed, many common peasants resorted to the courts to assert and protect their legitimate claims. The Qing state would have had us believe that local magistrates, when they did deal with civil disputes, did so as mediators rather than judges. Actual records reveal that magistrates almost never engaged in mediation but generally adjudicated according to stipulations in the Qing code.
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Practices of Painting in Japan, 1475-1500
This book attempts to expand the grounds and methodology of studying Japanese art history by focusing on the conditions, procedures, events, and social interplay that characterized the production of paintings in late-fifteenth-century Japan. Though the book’s ultimate concerns are art historical, its analysis also draws heavily from the insights of sociology and social history. At its core is a fresh examination of the major primary documents of the period in an attempt to liberate the study from assumptions long embedded in the historiography of late medieval Japanese painting history. Early chapters describe documents, methods, basic sites, and conditions of painting before turning to the main contribution of the book, painting considered as a body of social practices. The production of painting in the late fifteenth century was profoundly social, dynamically related to the circumstances of its agents. Painters, advisors, assistants, clients, and others did not exert themselves simply to bring paintings into existence. They sought advantages (such as wealth and prestige), met obligations, and satisfied the demands of custom. Surviving documents from the period present rich evidence of the involvement of such persons in the imperial court, the Ashikaya-Gozan community, the great temples of Nara, and the halls of local lords. The author takes into account the patterns of expectation that existed at the various sites but does not construe them as static and mechanically determined. Rather, he shows that expectations evolved in response to changed conditions. Although this study specifically addresses the last quarter of the fifteenth century, it can aid future research in Japanese painting practice in other eras by serving as a model of how new interpretations can emerge from close documentary investigation.
£60.30
Stanford University Press Property Rights and Economic Reform in China
China’s rapid economic growth during the past two decades has occurred without the systematic privatization programs once urged upon the former Communist regimes of Europe and the USSR. Some observers have argued that this shows that changes in property rights are not important in reforming a command economy; others insist that in China a façade of public ownership hides a variety of ownership forms that are essentially private in nature. This volume seeks to adjudicate these opposing views by clarifying conceptually and factually the pattern of property rights changes in the contemporary Chinese economy. The contributors to this volume, from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology, have all conducted fieldwork in China on specific economic sectors or enterprise types. Working with a common definitional framework derived from the work of the institutional economist Harold Demsetz, they seek to establish which actors exercise what kinds of rights in practice over what kinds of economic assets, documenting changes through time. Most of the essays examine the rural industrial economy—the fastest-growing sector—or the “spin-off” economic enterprises and activities of public enterprises and institutions. The research presented in this volume supports several specific conclusions. First, industrializing rural regions have emerged with diametrically opposed property rights regimes: in one kind of region public ownership only marginally different in form from that of the Mao years has predominated; in other regions wholly new forms of private household and foreign-funded enterprise have arisen. Second, the regimes of all the examined regions and sectors have evolved continually since the outset of reform, and in recent years change has accelerated because of the increased pressures of competitive markets. Third, in the evolution of property rights the distinction between public and private is not crucial in differentiating the key arrangements; instead, a more finely differentiated set of gradations from “public” to “private” prove central to the story of the Chinese economy.
£128.70
Stanford University Press The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840-1940
At the turn of the last century, as routinized industrial labor made a mockery of the gospel of work, Americans increasingly sought fulfillment not on the job but in their leisure activities. This book explores the multiple and, at times, contradictory tensions surrounding this turn to play and examines their impact on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. Arguing that American writers participated in the ongoing debates over labor and leisure more strenuously than is commonly understood, the author shows how literary narratives both responded to and helped shape the emerging gospel of play. Richly grounded in social, political, and economic history, this book demonstrates the ways that discussions of leisure engaged the most pressing issues of the age: immigration, women's rights, public health, race relations, mass culture, and perhaps most important, the nature and meaning of work itself. Where turn-of-the-century recreation reformers envisioned play as the revivifying alternative to modern labor's assault on the self, American writers from Henry David Thoreau to Zora Neale Hurston found that vision too deeply indebted to the very system it sought to repair. The fatal flaw of play theory, these writers insisted, was its commitment to an ideology of fair play and teamwork drawn not from the spirit of the playground but from the production- and profit-minded ethos of corporate capitalism. Broad in scope and method, and structured by a series of original and illuminating pairings of texts and authors—including Thoreau and Mark Twain, Abraham Cahan and Ole Rölvaag, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edna Ferber, James Weldon Johnson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, and William Faulkner and Hurston—this book offers an important new direction for the study of labor, leisure, and representation.
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Matter of the Facts: On Invention and Interpretation
This book questions the presupposition that "interpretation" is the basic problem of language and examines how assumptions about the constructed nature of the object of interpretation affect current discussions about interpretation in the humanities. The author is not taken by the universalizing claims of hermeneutics that everything is reducible to interpretation, but he is not interested in quarreling directly with those claims either. And with respect to the notion of invention—that things don't simply exist but are produced, made up—he likewise is interested neither in the objections usually brought against it nor in the strength of that notion in resisting them. Instead, he is interested in problematics that emerge from considering interpretation and invention together, as exemplified in close readings of three texts: Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, texts in which "in very different ways, a recognizable claim is made according to which 'the facts' (biographical in one case, historical in another case, and cognitive in a third case) are produced by their own descriptions and interpretations." The author sees Wilde's and Nietzsche's texts as inventions gone wrong: Wilde's attempt to invent his own life and Nietzsche's suggestion that one can make up the art of the future. He sees Kant's text as a theory of the roots of invention and discusses it in relation to the production of both facts and knowledge. The Critique of Pure Reason is therefore understood as the result of Kant's dissatisfaction with, and constant rediscription of, the problem of invention.
£56.70
Stanford University Press Unfashionable Observations: Volume 2
This new translation is the first to be published in a twenty-volume English-language edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first complete, critical, and annotated translation of all of Nietzsche's work. The Stanford edition is based on the Colli-Montinari edition, which has received universal praise: "It has revolutionized our understanding of one of the greatest German thinkers"; "Scholars can be confident for the first time of having a trustworthy text." Under the title Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Nietzsche collected four essays published separately between 1873 and 1876: "David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," "Schopenhauer as Educator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." The title, newly translated as Unfashionable Observations, spells out the common impulse linking these essays: Nietzsche's inimical attitude toward his "time," understood broadly as all the mainstream and popular movements that constituted contemporary European, but especially German, "culture" in the wake of the Prussian military victory over the French in 1871. The Unfashionable Observations are foundational works for Nietzsche's entire philosophy, prefiguring both his characteristic philosophical style and many of the major ideas he would develop in his later writings. This is the first English translation to include Nietzsche's variants to the published text.
£25.19
Stanford University Press Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s Colonial Timber
For the most part, Brazil's forests were not harvested, but annihilated, and relatively little was extracted for the benefit of Brazilians, a tragedy perhaps worse than deforestation alone. Fruitless Trees aims to make sense of what at first glance appears to be the senseless destruction of Brazil's incomparable timber. The forests have always been Brazil's most striking natural resource, and the Portuguese colonists anticipated enormous returns from its harvest, since Brazilian timber was more abundant and superior in quality to anything known in Europe, North America, or even Portugal's East Indian possessions. This work investigates the relationship between Portugal's colonial forest policies and the successes of the colonial venture, showing how forest law shaped the fortunes of the timber sector and promoted or obstructed colonial development. Timber was the steel, oil, coal, and plastic of the early modern period, and the effectiveness of its extraction affected nearly every branch of the colonial economy. Challenging previous scholarship that simply ascribed the destruction of Brazil's remarkable forests to the Europeans' voracious greed and inherent hostility to the forest, the author argues that we must delineate the extent to which tropical timber was put to advantageous ends, and explore precisely why so large a proportion of Brazil's timber was incinerated rather than converted to colonial wealth. Although Brazil exported substantial quantities of timber to Europe, the total amount fell far below expectations. The author attributes this in part to several ecological and geographical factors including the lack of common stands, the preponderance of timbers too dense to be floated inexpensively downstream, and the dearth of safe ports and navigable rivers. But the most significant factor in timber's unexpectedly poor showing was the Crown's effort from 1652 to monopolize Brazil's best timbers. The Portuguese king's declaration that Brazil's best timbers belonged to him exclusively resulted in vast tracts of timber being resentfully set afire by Brazilians who had no incentive to harvest them.
£64.80
Stanford University Press The Crossing of the Visible
Painting, according to Jean-Luc Marion, is a central topic of concern for philosophy, particularly phenomenology. For the question of painting is, at its heart, a question of visibility—of appearance. As such, the painting is a privileged case of the phenomenon; the painting becomes an index for investigating the conditions of appearance—or what Marion describes as "phenomenality" in general. In The Crossing of the Visible, Marion takes up just such a project. The natural outgrowth of his earlier reflections on icons, these four studies carefully consider the history of painting—from classical to contemporary—as a fund for phenomenological reflection on the conditions of (in)visibility. Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, The Crossing of the Visible offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative. According to Marion, the proper response to the "nihilism" of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts that opens them to the invisible.
£20.99
Stanford University Press Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish
In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish "psycho-ostensives"—ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! ("Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose!"). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezúnt dir in yeder éyverl! ("A health to all your little body-parts!"). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off—or even to deceive the listener. Comments [1999] "I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff's outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields." —William Labov, University of Pennsylvania "Matisoff's book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty." —Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University
£81.00
Stanford University Press Cultural Politics in Colonial Tehuantepec: Community and State among the Isthmus Zapotec, 1500-1750
This book is a historical and archeological examination of the Isthmus Zapotec state, which was established at Tehuantepec in late prehispanic times through a campaign of conquest and colonization, and the responses that its descendant populations made to the complex political, economic, and cultural changes introduced by Spanish colonialism. Although the modern-day Isthmus Zapotecs are renowned in Mexico and among Latin Americanists for their vibrant cultural traditions and their legacy of political resistance, only isolated elements of the complex historical processes by which these patterns emerged have been studied previously. Using complementary archival and archeological sources, the book details the transformation of Isthmus Zapotec society under colonialism and the enduring structures through which its members redefined their political autonomy.
£68.40
Stanford University Press World Power Forsaken: Political Culture, International Institutions, and German Security Policy After Unification
What does German unification imply for international politics? Many commentators have speculated about how a united Germany will use its new found power and influence on the world stage, and for good reason. Because of its size, central location, and strong economy, Germany will inevitably exert considerable influence over developments in Europe, if not beyond. Drawing on interviews and other primary source materials, this comprehensive study examines in detail each of the central issues of Germany’s security policy since 1990: its promotion of political and economic reform in the former Soviet bloc, its efforts to maintain and strengthen European security institutions, the transformation of Germany’s armed forces, and its responses to international crises and conflicts, including the debate over German participation in foreign military actions. Rejecting claims that German policy is becoming nationalized and militarized, the author argues that Germany’s actions have in fact been characterized by considerable restraint and continuity with the past, notwithstanding its much greater potential freedom of action after the Cold War. In order to make sense of this record, the book presents a general framework of analysis that promises to be useful for explaining the security policies of a variety of states. It then shows how a variety of influences both in Germany’s external environment and within Germany itself have importantly shaped German security policy since unification. In sharp contrast to the realist approaches that have dominated security studies, the book highlights the roles played by international institutions and Germany’s distinct postwar political culture in molding German state behavior. In a final chapter, the author discusses the likely future course of German security policy and the implications of his analysis for the theoretical study of national security policy.
£72.90
Stanford University Press Images of the Medieval Peasant
The medieval clergy, aristocracy, and commercial classes tended to regard peasants as objects of contempt and derision. In religious writings, satires, sermons, chronicles, and artistic representations peasants often appeared as dirty, foolish, dishonest, even as subhuman or bestial. Their lowliness was commonly regarded as a natural corollary of the drudgery of their agricultural toil. Yet, at the same time, the peasantry was not viewed as “other” in the manner of other condemned groups, such as Jews, lepers, Muslims, or the imagined “monstrous races” of the East. Several crucial characteristics of the peasantry rendered it less clearly alien from the elite perspective: peasants were not a minority, their work in the fields nourished all other social orders, and, most important, they were Christians. In other respects, peasants could be regarded as meritorious by virtue of their simple life, productive work, and unjust suffering at the hands of their exploitive social superiors. Their unrewarded sacrifice and piety were also sometimes thought to place them closest to God and more likely to win salvation. This book examines these conflicting images of peasants from the post-Carolingian period to the German Peasants’ War. It relates the representation of peasants to debates about how society should be organized (specifically, to how human equality at Creation led to subordination), how slavery and serfdom could be assailed or defended, and how peasants themselves structured and justified their demands. Though it was argued that peasants were legitimately subjugated by reason of nature or some primordial curse (such as that of Noah against his son Ham), there was also considerable unease about how the exploitation of those who were not completely alien—who were, after all, Christians—could be explained. Laments over peasant suffering as expressed in the literature might have a stylized quality, but this book shows how they were appropriated and shaped by peasants themselves, especially in the large-scale rebellions that characterized the late Middle Ages.
£128.70
Stanford University Press Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999
For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.
£89.10
Stanford University Press The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968
This book examines the development of France’s male and female homosexual communities and its gay liberation movements after 1968. The book focuses on the construction of social institutions, treating gay activist organizations and their relation to post-1968 French feminism, gay ghettos in French cities, the gay press, the impact of AIDS on political identity, and the renewed militancy of the 1990s. While acknowledging the influence of America’s gay liberation movement on the French situation, the author emphasizes the differences arising from the fact that homosexuality has not historically been criminalized in France as it has been in the United States. The book is divided into four parts. Part I, “The Revolution of Desire (1968-79),” which examines the activism of the early post-1968 gay liberation movement, is preceded by a historical summary that traces French cultural, political, and social attitudes toward homosexuality. It also explores the relations between the movements for gay and women’s liberation in their various incarnations. Part II, “The Time of Socialization (1979-84)” describes the development of gay ghettos and the dissemination of gay institutions (media, countercultural venues, bars, baths, and the like). The pivotal year is 1981, which saw the advent of François Mitterrand’s government, with its pro-gay policies, as well as the first tracking of AIDS in the United States. Part III, “End of the Carefree Life (1981-89),” deals with initial reactions in France to the AIDS epidemic, reactions that included the realization of its ubiquity, first with the death of Michel Foucault in 1984, and then with the media spectacle of Rock Hudson’s death in 1985. The author describes the French government’s response to the epidemic, the role of French medical researchers in searching for the causes of the infection, and the development of Aides (meaning helpers), a social, medical, and political-action group dedicated to raising public and personal awareness of AIDS. Part IV, “The Time of Contradictions (1989-96),” focuses on the changing social institutions of homosexuality in the 1990s: the development of ACT-UP, based on the American model, in France; the campaign to promote safer sex; the integration of seropositive individuals into the homosexual community; and the acceptance of homosexuality almost as a given. The book concludes with a thoughtful epilogue on the integration of minority communities into French society.
£30.60
Stanford University Press Love + Marriage = Death: And Other Essays on Representing Difference
The essays in this collection, written by a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, deal with the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes and the categories of difference as represented in texts—in high literature, in medical literature, in art—from the last fin-de-siècle to our own. Intensely engaged in the cultural politics of everyday life and conscious of how texts reflect and shape our social practices, they deal primarily with representations and self-representations of “Jews” in the past one hundred years and focus on the question of the constructions of the Jew’s body in art and literature. The title essay, “Love + Marriage = Death: STDs and AIDS in the Modern World,” however, studies the image of sexually transmitted disease from Shakespeare to Martin Amis. It sets the tone for an understanding of this collection as a book about Jews and their representation, but not as a special, isolated case. The first essay, the largely autobiographical “Ethnicities: Why I Write What I Write,” serves as an introduction to the collection. The other essays are: “Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud, and the Question of Conversion”; “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess’”; “Zwetschkenbaum’s Competence: Madness and the Discourse of the Jews”; “Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud: Race and Gender in the Shaping of Psychoanalysis”; “Sibling Incest, Madness, and the Jew”; “R. B. Kitaj’s ‘Good Bad’ Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art”; and “Who Is Jewish?: The Newest Jewish Writing in German and Daniel Goldhagen.”
£26.99
Stanford University Press Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830
Acts of Union explores the political relationship between Scotland and England as it was negotiated in the literary realm in the century after the 1707 Act of Union. It examines Britain, one of the precursors to the modern nation, not as a homogeneous, stable unit, but as a dynamic process, a dialogue between heterogeneous elements. Far from being constituted by a single Act of Union, the author contends, Britain was forged—in all the variant senses of that word—from multiple acts of union and dislocation over time. Accordingly, each of the first five chapters focuses on a discursive encounter between a Scottish and an English writer. Chapter 1 examines the political debate between Daniel Defoe and Lord Belhaven concerning the Act of Union. Chapter 2 considers how Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding used the novel form to highlight their concerns regarding the state of the nation after the 1745 rebellion. Chapter 3 analyzes the debate between James Macpherson and Samuel Johnson over the poems of Ossian and the origins of British culture, concluding with the crucial role played by James Boswell as a political and cultural mediator. Chapter 4 reads William Wordsworth's renegotiation of Robert Burns's work after the Scottish poet's death as illustrative of the contest for control of the British cultural realm at the end of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 argues that in his 1830 republication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Walter Scott imagines alternative histories of Britain and of English literature through his negotiations with Thomas Percy and his Scottish predecessors Macpherson and Burns. The concluding chapter considers the use made of the representation of Scottish national difference in the institutionalization of English literature. As well as plotting out specific moments during which writing served both to trouble and to renegotiate the Union of Great Britain, the book considers the articulation of British national identity within more general questions concerning postcolonial theories of the nation, and also sets itself within the current debate about the future of Scotland within Britain.
£52.20
Stanford University Press In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory
Assuming the burden of reading imposed by the correlation of the order of language and the order of events, this book argues that the possibility of reading and writing history is tied to the endurance of traces of the past and their coming to legibility, allegorically, at a given time. Through attentive readings of a range of texts—including theoretical writings, diaries, newspaper reports, and "live" television broadcasts—In the Event elaborates the ways in which allegory disrupts our presumptions of continuity and simultaneity between the image (whatever its medium) and what we take it to represent. The author demonstrates that a theoretical corpus must be understood not merely as a discrete set of arguments, but as work that takes place in time and on which time itself is at work. Against the temptation to regard a text (including a text of philosophical aesthetics or critical linguistics) as explained or defined by a fixed temporal context, this book emphasizes the textual operation of time. This attention to temporality opens the possibility of reading the notoriously difficult and resistant text of television. The book's central chapters analyze the seductions of "live" broadcasting: an incisive account of news coverage of the Gulf War, for example, reveals how the unproblematic articulation of "live" television with the real has its impulse in a broader realist ideology that finds its opportunity in the failure to reflect on the distances of space and time that characterize the medium. The author also explores the very different punctuality of the journal in evocative readings of the diaries of Alice James and Derek Jarman, both "journals of survival" written at the uncertain boundary of life and death. Here, and throughout the book, the readings argue that what we take to be historical events are actually produced, even constituted, by an array of discursive technologies, including language itself.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625
This book is a study of the Anglican Church in the Jacobean period, a time of central importance in English religious and political history. By looking at official words instead of official deeds, the author challenges the recent revisionist position, made by both Anglican apologists and historians, that the reign of James I was an era of religious consensus and political moderation. Analyzing sermons preached and then ordered into print by the king, the book demonstrates that the Jacobean claim to "moderation" and the pursuit of a so-called via media were rhetorical strategies aimed at isolating Elizabethan-style Calvinist reformers and alienating their supporters. Utilizing sources drawn from history, literature, and religion, this interdisciplinary work combines rhetorical and historical analysis in discussing the major religious and political issues of the period: the union with Scotland, the Gunpowder Plot, the Oath of Allegiance controversy, and the forceful elaboration of anti-Puritanism and ceremonialism in the Church of England. Throughout, the author presents evidence for her claim that the discourse of government is the substance of government.
£64.80
Stanford University Press Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle's eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author's Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler's discourse analysis of the 1980's and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990's.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature
Web of Life weaves its suggestive interpretation of Jewish culture in the Palestine of late antiquity on the warp of a singular, breathtakingly tragic, and sublime rabbinic text, Lamentations Rabbah. The textual analyses that form the core of the book are informed by a range of theoretical paradigms rarely brought to bear on rabbinic literature: structural analysis of mythologies and folktales, performative approaches to textual production, feminist theory, psychoanalytical analysis of culture, cultural criticism, and folk narrative genre analysis. The concept of context as the hermeneutic basis for literary interpretation reactivates the written text and subverts the hierarchical structures with which it has been traditionally identified. This book reinterprets rabbinic culture as an arena of multiple dialogues that traverse traditional concepts of identity regarding gender, nation, religion, and territory. The author's approach is permeated by the idea that scholarly writing about ancient texts is invigorated by an existential hermeneutic rooted in the universality of human experience. She thus resorts to personal experience as an idiom of communication between author and reader and between human beings of our time and of the past. This research acknowledges the overlap of poetic and analytical language as well as the language of analysis and everyday life. In eliciting folk narrative discourses inside the rabbinic text, the book challenges traditional views about the social basis that engendered these texts. It suggests the subversive potential of the constitutive texts of Jewish culture from late antiquity to the present by pointing out the inherent multi-vocality of the text, adding to the conventionally acknowledged synagogue and academy the home, the marketplace, and other private and public socializing institutions.
£26.99
Stanford University Press All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison
This book is about culture and comparison. Starting with the history of the discipline of comparative literature and its forgotten relation to the positivist comparative method, it inquires into the idea of comparison in a postcolonial world. Comparison was Eurocentric by exclusion when it applied only to European literature, and Eurocentric by discrimination when it adapted evolutionary models to place European literature at the forefront of human development. This book argues that inclusiveness is not a sufficient response to postcolonial and multiculturalist challenges because it leaves the basis of equivalence unquestioned. The point is not simply to bring more objects under comparison, but rather to examine the process of comparison. The book offers a new approach to the either/or of relativism and universalism, in which comparison is either impossible or assimilatory, by focusing instead on various forms of “incommensurability”—comparisons in which there is a ground for comparison but no basis for equivalence. Each chapter develops a particular form of such cultural comparison from readings of important novelists (Joseph Conrad, Simone Schwartz-Bart), poets (Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott), and theorists (Edouard Glissant, Jean-Luc Nancy).
£23.39
Stanford University Press Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer’s representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress’s Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a sonorous landscape of flesh and bone, pleasure and pain, a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization that will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.
£120.60
Stanford University Press All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison
This book is about culture and comparison. Starting with the history of the discipline of comparative literature and its forgotten relation to the positivist comparative method, it inquires into the idea of comparison in a postcolonial world. Comparison was Eurocentric by exclusion when it applied only to European literature, and Eurocentric by discrimination when it adapted evolutionary models to place European literature at the forefront of human development. This book argues that inclusiveness is not a sufficient response to postcolonial and multiculturalist challenges because it leaves the basis of equivalence unquestioned. The point is not simply to bring more objects under comparison, but rather to examine the process of comparison. The book offers a new approach to the either/or of relativism and universalism, in which comparison is either impossible or assimilatory, by focusing instead on various forms of “incommensurability”—comparisons in which there is a ground for comparison but no basis for equivalence. Each chapter develops a particular form of such cultural comparison from readings of important novelists (Joseph Conrad, Simone Schwartz-Bart), poets (Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott), and theorists (Edouard Glissant, Jean-Luc Nancy).
£97.20
Stanford University Press Risk Taking and Decision Making: Foreign Military Intervention Decisions
Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences. The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker’s judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk taking behavior. The book’s theoretical approach is applied and tested in five historical case studies of foreign military interventions. The richly detailed empirical data on the case studies make them, metaphorically speaking, an ideal laboratory for applying a process-tracing approach in studying judgment and decision processes at varying risk levels. The case studies analyzed are: U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 (both low risk); Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (moderate risk): U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1964-68 (high risk); and Israel’s intervention in Lebanon in 1982-83 (high risk).
£36.00
