Search results for ""Stanford University Press""
Stanford University Press Questions and Admissions: Reflections on 100,000 Admissions Decisions at Stanford
Written in a lively and accessible manner by a former Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Stanford University, this book will enlighten prospective college applicants and their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors about many of the practical, fundamental, philosophical, and ethical issues involved in the selection of any college freshman class.
£23.99
Stanford University Press The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons
This ecological history of peasant society in the Peruvian Andes focuses on the politics of irrigation and water management in three villages whose terraces and canal systems date back to Inca times. Set in a remote valley, the book tells a story of domination and resulting social decline, showing how basic changes in the use of land, water, and labor have been pivotal in transforming the indigenous way of life. The author carries out a comparison of contemporary practices in communities that vary systematically along certain dimensions. He analyzes the communities’ similarities and differences in hydraulic organization, landscaping, water use, and other variables. Strikingly diverse patterns appear in local practice, which prove to be the key to unraveling the area’s history. The book concludes by describing the recent intensification of a water conflict. This struggle between peasants and former landlords ultimately led villagers to rise up against the national government. The story culminates in the violent intrusion of the revolutionary group known as Shining Path.
£32.40
Stanford University Press Taking Our Pulse: The Health of America's Women
Taking Our Pulse is a book about women's health: what it is, why it is the way it is, and what needs to be done to improve it. It differs from many other books about the health of women by: integrating up-to-date medical research with practical information for use in daily lives; offering a way of looking at health issues affecting women that accentuates their living better rather than just longer; emphasizing a developmental approach by examining health issues at different stages of the life cycle; and using a lucid, almost conversational, style of presentation that makes complex medical conditions and procedures readily intelligible to lay readers. Furthermore, it is written by a woman who is a physician, an educator of future physicians, a medical researcher, and a student of feminism. Because the field of medicine has been traditionally dominated and controlled by men, male constructs have largely defined the causes and remedies of women's health problems. A host of myths has accumulated about women's health—the beliefs that most women's health problems are related to their reproductive function and that women tend to have more emotional diseases than physical ones. Even today, such simplistic and medically unsound views persist and are reflected in the amount of insufficient research conducted on the specific health needs of women. One of the major aims of this book is to expose these myths, in the process re-educating not only physicians but women themselves, who have been socialized to accept them unquestioningly. After four chapters that deal with life-span differences in women's health (childhood and adolescence, early adulthood, the perimenopausal years, and the older years), the book considers the following topics: sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy and its prevention, mental health, substance abuse, violence (including sexual and child abuse, rape, domestic violence, and elder abuse), nutrition, medical care, women as doctors, and choosing the right physician.
£36.00
Stanford University Press Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War
This book provides a compelling and vivid account of British involvement in the Spanish Civil War, examining the experience of the British volunteers in the International Brigades, and placing them in a broad intellectual, political, social, and cultural framework. Incorporating some familiar and many new voices of a turbulent decade, it analyzes the manner in which British men and women conceptualized their engagement with the political issues of their time—whether they were Oxbridge aesthetes or militants from the factories, the mines, and the ranks of the unemployed. The event that galvanized the volunteers and the many thousands who supported them in Great Britain was the rising of General Franco and his allies against the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936. As a counterpart to German and Italian intervention on behalf of the insurgents, the Soviet Union instructed the Comintern to recruit and organize an international volunteer army to come to the aid of the Republic. The International Brigades quickly achieved mythical status as the century's most conspicuous example of dedicated idealism, serving the cause of democracy in peril. The early "spontaneous" fighters and, later, the British Battalion in the XVth International Brigade, which included some 2,000 volunteers, fought in every major campaign of the war; about 85 percent of the Battalion's members were killed or wounded. The author is the first scholar to make systematic use of the recently opened archive of the International Brigades in Moscow, enabling him to take the measure of the nobility and tragedy of the British sacrifice in Spain. His study confirms popular mythology about the International Brigades in certain respects and sharply disputes it in others. Above all, Into the Heart of the Fire establishes the fact that the British volunteers were not social or neurotic misfits. Rather, they reflected in a distinctive way the political concerns of many of their generation.
£40.50
Stanford University Press Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho
Basho (1644-94) is perhaps the best known Japanese poet in both Japan and the West, and yet there has been remarkably little serious scholarship in English on his achievement. This book is intended to address that virtual void by establishing the ground for critical discussion and reading of a central figure in Japanese culture, placing the works of Basho and his disciples in the context of broader social change. Intended for both the general reader and the specialist, Traces of Dreams examines the issues of language, landscape, cultural memory, and social practice in early modern Japan through a fundamental reassessment of haikai—popular linked verse that eventually gave birth to modern haiku—particularly that of Basho and his disciples. The author analyzes haikai not only as a specific poetic genre but as a mode of discourse that emerged from the profound engagement between the new commoner culture that came to the fore in the seventeenth century cities and the earlier traditions, which haikai parodied, transformed, and translated into the vernacular. Traces of Dreams explores the manner in which haikai both appropriated and recast the established cultural and poetic associations embodied in nature, historical objects, and famous places—the landscape that preserved the cultural memory and that became the source of authority as well as the contested ground for haikai re-visioning and re-mapping.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley
Displaced to Italy by their politics and morals, Byron and Shelley wrote, between 1816 and 1823, a series of closet dramas that the author reveals as being deeply embedded in contemporary radical culture. Why did they write dramas in Italy that were to be published in England but not to be produced theatrically? Why do these dramas invoke and apparently oppose textual and theatrical versions of themselves? In answering these questions, this book addresses other questions about the historical invention of English literature, the relation between literature and drama, and the relation between literature and political culture. The plays are shown to acquiesce in, and yet also resist, subvert, and ironize by means of a parodic self-censorship, the political, theatrical, and ecclesiastical censorship of the post-Waterloo period. The author argues that they not only explore questions of political action in their plots but also reconstruct, by reconvening, a radical audience that had been virtually eliminated in England during the period of the counterrevolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Like the radical culture of the 1790's, Byron and Shelley's plays are informed by a "new" politics of language. Focusing on the discursive conditions of radical culture and the plays, and bringing the procedures of cultural materialism into contact with those of deconstruction, the author highlights the political and literary operation of the plays' language. In the process, he shows how the plays contributed to the recrudescence of a polite radicalism that sought to align itself with and establish control over its plebeian counterpart. Detailed discussion of individual plays—Manfred, Sardanapalus, Prometheus Unbound, Marino Faliero, Hellas, Cain, Heaven and Earth, The Two Foscari, and The Cenci—is supported by investigations into Romantic criticism of the drama, the dynamics of the reviewing journals, and the philosophical construct of the "closet" of reasoning and reading.
£76.50
Stanford University Press Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature
Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers—Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition—fiction, poetry, critique—can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary. The types of feeling treated in Complex Pleasure include wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Hölderlin's "swift conceptual grasp," in which "the tempo of the process of thought is stressed"; "artistic imagination," mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche ("On Moods") and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novel The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight).
£25.19
Stanford University Press Against Coercion: Games Poets Play
"The inertia of language," declares Geoffrey Hill, is also "the coercive force of language." Good poets write against coercion, and Against Coercion is essentially about the power of words. Looking at our most highly organized form of words, poems, and how they work, it observes how that work speaks—always indirectly—to historical, ethical, and aesthetic questions, including matters of culture, identity, and feminism. It also demonstrates how to read poetry—how to go beyond an elementary (and usually boring) approach, thereby recovering the sheer pleasure of good poems and resisting the coercion of language, that power of words to do ill. A study in advanced poetics, Against Coercion pays close attention to the intricate workings of poems, building larger claims on specific evidence and enjoying the praxis of master writers. The focus is on modern poets, from the early moderns (Stevens, Eliot) through to mid-century (Bishop) and recent (Merrill, Hill). Some chapters reach back to Milton, Wordsworth, and Aristophanes, however, while two even widen to encompass prose fiction. The opening section centers on matters of empire, war, and nation. It includes chapters on Eliot, Keynes, and empire, and on Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop (with reflections on language and war). The second section moves to questions of culture and the uses of memory, notably in allusion to earlier writers. It examines what our collective memory chooses to retain and to forget. The range of reference here extends from the King James Bible through Milton and Wordsworth to A. R. Ammons. In the third section, poetry is seen at play, offering those happy occasions when work and play become one. Chapters treat the concept of play in Milton (including some feminist questions), the poetics of punning in Stevens and Bishop, riddles both large and small, in Stevens, a proposed typology of riddles, and a newly recovered Graeco-Latin pun in Alice in Wonderland. The final section moves to practical criticism and offers a new theory of ghost rhymes, a new suggestion of a formula in dream literature, a model for reading a poem, using John Hollander's "Owl" as an illustration, and, taking Stevens as an example, a pedagogical argument that emphasizes the importance of logic and thought in poetry.
£60.30
Stanford University Press Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory
Philosophy is often depicted as generically distinct from literature, myth, and history, as a discipline that eschews narration and relies exclusively on abstract reason. This book takes issue with that assumption, arguing instead that political philosophers have commonly presented their readers with a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. The book maintains that philosophical texts frequently persuade through the creation of a role that they invite their audience to inhabit. Political theory is most powerful not when it erects timeless principles, but when it alters readers' understanding of their own past and future. By this the author means that a theorist's account of history or of time itself is in many instances the center of (and not merely an addendum to) an account of human nature and politics; political theory seeks not so much to reform our morals as to reshape our memories. This book investigates the place of narrative in politics in two ways. It offers a hypothesis of a broad connection between political identity and narrative, and it analyzes three major figures in the history of political thought—Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche—to demonstrate that their work is best understood through the hypothesis. The author argues that each of these philosophers rewrites the past in an attempt to direct the future. For Locke, this involves replacing the patriarchal history of kingly authority with a more naturalistic past grounded in episodes of consent—an act that he believes will replace a tyrannical future with a free one. In contrast, Hegel's approach to the past is aesthetic, and each epoch of history is understood as a work of art. Despite the romantic overtones of this view, the frozenness of these images results, for Hegel, in a weakly imagined future. Nietzsche's narrative is at once the most open and the most gruesome, emphasizing the centrality of violence in human history but also holding out hope for a redemption of that history in a particular future. This redemptive approach to the past, the author argues, is superior to the alternatives in that it supports the strongest account of human freedom.
£25.19
Stanford University Press Parts of an Andrology: On Representations of Men’s Bodies
The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the representation of the female body. To look at the construction of this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent representation of the male body. Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Bel-Ami are flickering, episodic investigations into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human vulnerability. An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, Io e lui, as well as various manifestations of the male body's most salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics. Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers: Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth. In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body, ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Hervé Guibert, and Michel Foucault.
£97.20
Stanford University Press The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England
Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative, which has been frequently criticized but heretofore never adequately replaced. The author’s argument follows two main strands. First, he shows that commercial development, rather than being detrimental to religion, was necessary to sustain Puritan religious culture. It was costly to establish and maintain a vital Puritan church, for the needs were many, including educated ministers who commanded substantial salaries; public education so that the laity could be immersed in the Bible and devotional literature (substantial expenses in themselves); the building of meeting houses; and the furnishing of communion tables—all and more were required for the maintenance of Puritan piety. Second, the author analyzes how the Puritans gradually developed the evangelical impulse to broadcast the seeds of grace as widely as possible. The spread of Puritan churches throughout most of New England was fostered by the steady devotion of material resources to the maintenance of an intense and demanding religion, a devotion made possible by the belief that money sown to the spirit would reap divine rewards. In 1651, about 20,000 English colonists were settled in some 30 New England towns, each with a newly formed Puritan church. A century later, the population had grown to 350,000, and there were 500 meetinghouses for Puritan churches. This book tells the story of this remarkable century of growth and adaptation through intertwined histories of two Massachusetts churches, one in Boston and one in Westfield, a village on the remote western frontier, from their foundings in the 1660’s to the religious revivals of the 1740’s. In conclusion, the author argues that the Great Awakening was a product of the continuous cultivation of traditional religion, a cultural achievement built on New England’s economic development, rather than an indictment and rejection of its Puritan heritage.
£72.90
Stanford University Press Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter
Scarcely any theoretical discourse has had greater impact on literary and cultural studies than psychoanalysis, and yet hardly any theoretical discourse is more widely misunderstood and abused. In Psychoanalyzing, Serge Leclaire offers a thorough and lucid exposition of the psychoanalysis that has emerged from the French "return to Freud," unfolding and elaborating the often enigmatic pronouncements of Jacques Lacan and patiently working through the central tenets of the "Ecole freudienne." As a concise but nuanced introduction to the subject, Psychoanalyzing will prove indispensable to anyone interested in psychoanalysis, especially those curious about its Lacanian reconceptualization and the linguistic theory of the unconscious and its effects. Leclaire's study is particularly valuable for the way its author links theoretical issues to psychoanalytic practice. The opening chapter—on listening—highlights the necessity, and the impossibility, of the "floating attention" required from the analyst, while preparing the reader for the following chapters, which deal with such topics as unconscious desire, how to speak of the body, and the intrication of the object and the "letter" (i.e. the signifier, the "material support that concrete discourse borrows from language"). The final chapter—on transference—shows how the analytical dialogue differs from other dialogues. Despite the intricacy of its subject matter, the book takes very little for granted. It does not simplify the issues it presents, but does not assume a reader familiar with the concepts of psychoanalysis, let alone a reader acquainted with its French inflection. Each basic concept and term is carefully explained, so that the reader knows the meaning of "transference" or "primal scene" before proceeding to more advanced elements of psychoanalysis. Leclaire's text is not intended merely to be "user friendly"; its purpose is to clarify and advance, rather than to impress or convert.
£81.00
Stanford University Press Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production
This book explores Wordsworth's professionalization as a writer in relation to the cultural and economic ascendancy of the English middle class between 1740 and 1820. Its wide-ranging interpretations are coordinated by a single, albeit highly ramified, critical hypothesis: that Romanticism's aesthetic forms simultaneously afforded the middle classes an imaginary furlough from the impinging consciousness of their tenuous socio-economic status. Wordsworth's Profession analyzes and correlates changing paradigms of authorship, poetic genre, and tone with the demographic and spiritual aspects of middle-class life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first of three parts explores Wordsworth's early descriptive poetry (An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches, and "Tinturn Abbey") in relation to inherited and contiguous aesthetic forms and practices, such as the landscapes of Lorrain and Gainsborough, Kant's theory of aesthetic communities, and the institutions of domestic tourism and the Picturesque in late-eighteenth-century England. The second part addresses the construction of a distinctly middle-class paradigm of reading in Lyrical Ballads. It does so in relation to contemporary didactic fiction (Wollstonecraft), anti-didactic writing (Blake), speculative theories of education (Godwin, Coleridge, and Hegel), and the emergent so-called mutual tutor or "monitorial" systems of elementary schooling (Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster). The book's final part, on The Prelude, focuses on representations of middle-class moral and economic anxiety as mediated in the spirited debate about populousness and public morality. Seen in this context, Wordsworth's autobiography appears less a confession than an attempt to simulate poetic answers to questions lingering in the national unconscious, questions too vast and threatening to bear conscious asking.
£64.80
Stanford University Press The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature
In Soviet culture, the reader was never a “consumer of books” in the Western sense. According to the aesthetic doctrine at the heart of Socialist Realism, the reader was a subject of education, to be reforged and molded. Because of this, Soviet culture cannot be examined properly without taking into account the reading masses. This book is a history of the shaping of the reader of Soviet literature, a history of the “State appropriation of the reader.” The entire history of the formation and transformation of the institution of literature in the revolutionary and Soviet eras bears witness to the fact that literature was called upon to perform substantive political and ideological functions in the authorities’ overall system (which included the publishing business, the book trade, libraries, and schools) aimed at ultimately creating a new Soviet person. This book shows how people from various social classes, in a dynamic unknown in pre-Soviet history, not only consumed the products of a new culture but in fact created that culture. On its own, the sociology of reading is scarcely capable of uncovering the variety, dynamism, and multilayered structure of the process of reading, for the reader is a composite figure. Soviet society in the Stalin era was not only a State-hierarchy system, but also a mosaic that was always divided into definite cultural strata, each of which consumed its own culture, which performed a host of familiar functions—escapist, socializing, compensating, informative, recreational, prestige-enhancing, aesthetic, and emotional—in addition to the specifically Soviet tastes connected with propaganda and mobilization. If we superimpose on this spectrum the diverse characteristics of individual readers, the resulting picture is extraordinarily variegated. At the same time, there is a certain cultural space in which these factors intersect—the space the author defines as the “situation of reading.” In this book, he focuses on the basic lines of force that were at work in the Soviet reading space.
£68.40
Stanford University Press Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848-1911
The reigning view of literary historians has been that the May Fourth movement of 1919 marks the division between the traditional and the modern in Chinese literature. This book argues that signs of reform and innovation can be discerned long before May Fourth, and that as China entered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. It demonstrates that late Qing fiction nurtured a creative, innovative poetics, one that was spurned by the reformers of the May Fourth generation in favor of Western-style realism. The author recognizes that a full account of modern Chinese fiction needs to ask why so many genres, styles, themes, and figures found in late imperial fiction were repressed by "modern" Chinese literary discourse. He focuses on four genres of late Qing fiction that have been either rudely dismissed in pejorative terms or simply ignored: depravity romances, court-case and chivalric cycles, grotesque exposés, and scientific fantasies. The author shows that in spite of the realist orthodoxy that has dominated Chinese literature since the May Fourth movement, these unwelcome genres have continually found their way back into mainstream discourse, their influence being increasingly evident in recent decades. This first comprehensive study of late Qing fiction discusses more than sixty works, at least half of which have rarely or never been dealt with by Western or Chinese scholars. Richly informed by contemporary literary theory, this book constitutes a polemical rethinking of the nature of Chinese literary and cultural modernity.
£72.90
Stanford University Press The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity
Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of "the broader modernity", which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church. As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the perspective of the "subject," modernity has entailed a heightened sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological dogmas. Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with the Kantian notion of the artist as an "original genius," the author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity in which human beings were forced to define knowledge and establish authority according to their own devices. In the process, the author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, as well as Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Dürer, Mondrian, and Rothko. As a work of critical theory, The Aesthetic Contract posits an alternative model to Kant's "original genius." The author explores an understanding of art powered by the notion of the aesthetic contract, in which artists and intellectuals choose to operate within the parameters of certain explicit experiments until the contractual clauses that delimit these endeavors lose their currency or validity. As an intellectual analog to Rousseau's social contract, the aesthetic contract has allowed the modern artist to address issues of knowledge, authority, and experience once thought to fall within the domain of arbitrary, remote, and inaccessible agencies.
£26.21
Stanford University Press Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy
First published in 1986, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft remains the only analysis of indigenous discourse about an African belief system undertaken from within the framework of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. Taking as its point of departure W. V. O. Quine's thesis about the indeterminacy of translation, the book investigates questions of Yoruba epistemology and of how knowledge is conceived in an oral culture.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1934-1945
A study of the Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary enterprise in northern Shaanxi during the 1934-45 period, this book argues that the “Yan’an Way,” long celebrated by the Party as the foundation and model for its success, was a product of quite special circumstances that were not replicable in most other parts of China. In late 1943, Mao Zedong hailed the rural cooperative movement in northern Shaanxi as the northwest base area’s “second revolution,” the first being the land reform of 1934-36. Based on newly available Chinese sources, the book studies the different styles and consequences of the Party’s efforts in two key subregions of northern Shaanxi, Yanshu (the home of the “Yan’an Way”) and Suide. The critical difference between the two subregions was an abundance of land in Yanshu and a severe scarcity of land in densely populated Suide. In Yanshu, the Party was able to ride a wave of farmer enthusiasm for farm building and development, whereas in Suide the task was to cull farming populations, resulting in resentment of cadre heavy-handedness. To show the variation in reform outcomes in the two subregions, the author examines the result of the Party’s major reconstruction initiatives: internal migration, tax reform and tax collection mobilizations, tenancy reform, and heightened agricultural goals. Predictably, because of the widely varying conditions in Yanshu and Suide, community building took radically different forms and had strikingly different consequences. Throughout, the book considers the evolution of peasant-Party relations in a period when the Party was consolidating its state-building and rural development strategies. It also studies the meaning of rural “democracy” in the Communist base area, the problem of “peasant consciousness” in relation to revolution and mobilization, the function of rural cooperatives, and the state-village nexus as it developed during a period of revolutionary upheaval.
£64.80
Stanford University Press Emerson and the Climates of History
This book brings together a wide range of materials from history, religion, philosophy, horticulture, and meteorology to argue that Emerson articulates his conception of history through the language of the weather. Focusing on Emerson's persistent use of climatic and meteorological metaphors, the book demonstrates that Emerson's reflections on the weather are inseparable from his preoccupation with the central historical and political issues of his day. The author suggests that Emerson's writings may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the governing rhetorics through which Americans of his day thought about the most important contemporary issues, and that what has often been seen as Emerson's retreat from the arena of history into the domain of spirit is in fact an effort to re-treat or rethink the nature of history in terms of questions of representation. What distinguishes this book from the work of other critics who are reassessing Emerson's relation to history is its attempt to think through the way in which the figures of Emerson's rhetoric—figures (like frost, snow, the auroras, and nature in general) which often seem to have nothing to do with either history or politics—are themselves traversed by the conflictual histories of slavery, race, destiny, revolution, and the meaning of America. It differs, that is, in proposing a textual model for reading Emerson that measures his engagement with changing historical and political relations in terms of the way he works to revise the language he inherits. There can be no reading of Emerson, the author suggests, that does not trace the movement of his figures and tropes as they become something else, as they open onto questions of history.
£23.39
Stanford University Press On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy
This book presents a series of illuminating studies which conclusively demonstrates that the prevailing conception of historical linguistics is deeply flawed. Most linguists today believe that there is no good evidence that the Indo-European family of languages is related to any other language family, or even any other language. In like manner, the New World is deemed to contain hundreds of language families, among which there are no apparent links. Furthermore, it is claimed, there are no known connections between the languages of the Old World and those of the Americas. And finally, the strongest belief of all is that there is no trace of genetic affinity—nor could there be—among the world’s language families. The author argues that all of these firmly entrenched—and vigorously defended—beliefs are false, that they are myths propagated by a small group of scholars who have failed to understand the true basis of genetic affinity. Twentieth-century Indo-Europeanists (though not their nineteenth-century forebears) have confused the issue of genetic affinity, which derives from classification, with such traditional concerns of historical linguistics as reconstruction and sound correspondences. Once it is recognized that taxonomy, or classification, must precede these traditional concerns, the apparent conflict between the traditional view and that of Joseph Greenberg and his followers is seen to be illusory. And finally, a comparison of all the world’s languages in this new perspective leaves little doubt that all extant human languages share a common origin.
£30.60
Stanford University Press One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U. S. Navy, 1890-1990
A navy is a state's main instrument of maritime force. What it should do, what doctrine it holds, what ships it deploys, and how it fights are determined by practical political and military choices in relation to national needs. Choices are made according to the state's goals, perceived threat, maritime opportunity, technological capabilities, practical experience, and, not the least, the way the sea service defines itself and its way of war. This book is a history of the modern U.S. Navy. It explains how the Navy, in the century after 1890, was formed and reformed in the interaction of purpose, experience, and doctrine.
£30.60
Stanford University Press Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube
In this powerful work of conceptual and analytical originality, the author argues for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology. In a post-Kuhnian move away from the hegemony of theory, he develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things. A central concern of the book is the basic question of how novelty is generated in the empirical sciences. In addressing this question, the author brings French poststructuralist thinking—notably Jacques Derrida’s concepts of “différance” and “historiality”—to bear on the construction of epistemic things. Historiographical perspective shifts from the actors’ minds to their objects of manipulation. These epistemological and historical issues are illuminated in a detailed case study of a particular laboratory, that of the oncologist and biochemist Paul C. Zamecnik and his colleagues, located in a specific setting—the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University at the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston. The author traces how, between 1945 and 1965, this group developed an experimental system for synthesizing proteins in the test tube that put Zamecnik’s research team at the forefront of those who led biochemistry into the era of molecular biology.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800
The genealogy and function of epigenesis—the theory that organisms generate themselves under the guidance of a formative drive—provides a unique means of understanding the profound changes in philosophy, philosophy of language, and literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book begins by describing how and why epigenesis came to replace the reigning model of biological origination, preformation—the theory that all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world. Contemporary with these developments, Kant used the figures of epigenesis and self-formation to illustrate his concepts of the origin of the categories, the possible success of practical reason, and the validity of aesthetic and teleological judgments. The author shows how Kant's figurative use of self-generation was turned into an indispensable determination by Fichte and his successors: philosophical knowledge can claim absolute certainty only if it can prove that it generates itself in logically accountable procedures. This self-generating philosophy—also known as Idealism—was in turn accompanied by a revaluation of the origin of language, notably by Herder and by Humboldt, who attempted to formulate self-generation as the philosophical foundation for a future Science of Language. The book concludes by demonstrating that the biological, philosophical, and linguistic problematic of self-generation is at the heart of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro.
£56.70
Stanford University Press Postconquest Coyoacan: Nahua-Spanish Relations in Central Mexico, 1519-1650
This book studies Nahuas and Spaniards in the central Mexican jurisdiction of Coyoacan from the Spanish conquest until 1650, crafting a multidimensional portrait of their relations in both institutional and informal settings. Initially, the primary site of Nahua-Spaniard contact was institutional, as Spanish authorities attempted to reshape local practices to fit their own notions and needs, changing regional states into Spanish municipalities and Christian parishes, local ruling bodies into town councils, and tribute goods into standardized payments in coin. These efforts were never entirely successful, as Nahuas only partially adjusted their own practices when faced with the changes initiated by the Spaniards. The author explores the ways in which new forms of government and economic customs developed, drawing on both Nahua and Spanish traditions. Nahua-Spanish contact was not limited to formal political and economic settings. The author describes the development of Spanish estates and the market economy, which opened up a new arena of cultural contact in the countryside. A growing number of Nahuas found themselves working for a Spanish landowner, acquiring a horse for peddling fruit from a local Spaniard, or selling land to a newly-arrived Spaniard. The Spanish land market altered Nahua land tenure and led to the loss of much Nahua land. The author demonstrates how Nahua practices came into play as they resorted to indigenous concepts of land tenure to justify the sale of land or of legal process to formalize it. In bringing Nahuas and Spaniards together in this study, the book explores the changing contours of their relationship in Central Mexico, emphasizing informal interethnic contact in the making of both the Spanish colonial economy and postconquest Nahua society.
£68.40
Stanford University Press Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century
This first book-length study of gender relations in the Lower Yangzi region during the High Qing era (c. 1683-1839) challenges enduring late-nineteenth-century perspectives that emphasized the oppression and subjugation of Chinese women. Placing women at the center of the High Qing era shows how gender relations shaped the economic, political, social, and cultural changes of the age, and gives us a sense of what women felt and believed, and what they actually did, during this period. Most analyses of gender in High Qing times have focused on literature and on the writings of the elite; this book broadens the scope of inquiry to include women's work in the farm household, courtesan entertainment, and women’s participation in ritual observances and religion. In dealing with literature, it shows how women's poetry can serve the historian as well as the literary critic, drawing on one of the first anthologies of women's writing compiled by a woman to examine not only literary sensibilities and intimate emotions, but also political judgments, moral values, and social relations. After an introductory chapter that evaluates the historiography of Chinese women, the book surveys High Qing history, charts the female life course, and discusses women's place in writing and learning, in entertainment, at work, and in religious practice. The concluding chapter returns to broad historiographic questions about where women figure in space and time and why we can no longer write histories that ignore them.
£25.19
Stanford University Press Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century
This first book-length study of gender relations in the Lower Yangzi region during the High Qing era (c. 1683-1839) challenges enduring late-nineteenth-century perspectives that emphasized the oppression and subjugation of Chinese women. Placing women at the center of the High Qing era shows how gender relations shaped the economic, political, social, and cultural changes of the age, and gives us a sense of what women felt and believed, and what they actually did, during this period. Most analyses of gender in High Qing times have focused on literature and on the writings of the elite; this book broadens the scope of inquiry to include women's work in the farm household, courtesan entertainment, and women’s participation in ritual observances and religion. In dealing with literature, it shows how women's poetry can serve the historian as well as the literary critic, drawing on one of the first anthologies of women's writing compiled by a woman to examine not only literary sensibilities and intimate emotions, but also political judgments, moral values, and social relations. After an introductory chapter that evaluates the historiography of Chinese women, the book surveys High Qing history, charts the female life course, and discusses women's place in writing and learning, in entertainment, at work, and in religious practice. The concluding chapter returns to broad historiographic questions about where women figure in space and time and why we can no longer write histories that ignore them.
£104.40
Stanford University Press Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences
Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences—the relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences—the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international group of scholars—six from the social sciences, two from the natural sciences, and two from the humanities. The report first explores how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It then reveals the ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labor and have therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period. The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate. Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent debates.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Language and Relation: . . . that there is language
The most recent version of the “linguistic turn,” the revolution in language theory shaped by Saussure’s structural linguistics and realized in a sweeping revision of investigations throughout the humanities and social sciences, has rushed past the most basic “fact”: that there is language. What has been lost? Almost everything of what Heidegger tried to approach under the name of “ontology” until the word proved too laden by common misapprehension to be of use. Most immediately, this is everything of language that exceeds the order of signification, together with the subject’s engagement with this “excess” that is the (non)ground of history and the material site of all relationality, beginning with that unthought that is widely termed “culture.” Language and Relation returns to this site in close readings of meditations on language by Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Blanchot. It seeks to move with these authors beyond the order of signification and toward the an-archic grounds of relation (of all relations between self and other, and of relation in general), exploring the possibility for a strong link between issues in modern philosophy of language and contemporary socio-political concerns.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Zeami’s Style: The Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo
This is the first full-length study of Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), generally recognized as the greatest playwright of Japan's classical Noh theater. The book begins with a biography based on the known documents relating to Zeami's life. It then examines the documentary evidence for authorship and explains the various technical aspects of Noh. Subsequent chapters explore the role of the old man in noh (particularly in the play Takasago), as well as Zeami's plays about women and warriors, with primary attention to Izutsu and Tadanori. The book concludes with a general discussion of Zeami's style and the relationship between his dramatic theory and his plays.
£26.99
Stanford University Press A History of the Byzantine State and Society
This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date history of Byzantium to appear in almost sixty years, and the first ever to cover both the Byzantine state and Byzantine society. It begins in A.D. 285, when the emperor Diocletian separated what became Byzantium from the western Roman Empire, and ends in 1461, when the last Byzantine outposts fell to the Ottoman Turks. Spanning twelve centuries and three continents, the Byzantine Empire linked the ancient and modern worlds, shaping and transmitting Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions—including the Greek classics, Roman law, and Christian theology—that remain vigorous today, not only in Eastern Europe and the Middle East but throughout Western civilization. Though in its politics Byzantium often resembled a third-world dictatorship, it has never yet been matched in maintaining a single state for so long, over a wide area inhabited by heterogeneous peoples. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and modern works, the author treats political and social developments as a single vivid story, told partly in detailed narrative and partly in essays that clarify long-term changes. He avoids stereotypes and rejects such old and new historical orthodoxies as the persistent weakness of the Byzantine economy and the pervasive importance of holy men in Late Antiquity. Without neglecting underlying social, cultural, and economic trends, the author shows the often crucial impact of nearly a hundred Byzantine emperors and empresses. What the emperor or empress did, or did not do, could rapidly confront ordinary Byzantines with economic ruin, new religious doctrines, or conquest by a foreign power. Much attention is paid to the complex life of the court and bureaucracy that has given us the adjective "byzantine." The major personalities include such famous names as Constantine, Justinian, Theodora, and Heraclius, along with lesser-known figures like Constans II, Irene, Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer, and Michael VIII Palaeologus. Byzantine civilization emerges as durable, creative, and realistic, overcoming repeated setbacks to remain prosperous almost to the end. With 221 illustrations and 18 maps that complement the text, A History of the Byzantine State and Society should long remain the standard history of Byzantium not just for students and scholars but for all readers.
£52.20
Stanford University Press An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past
The author traces the role of Russian literature over two hundred years in creating and sustaining the notion of the singularity of their own history and of its relationship to the history of the outside world.The author describes the development of this tradition through an analysis of major works including Karamzin's History of the Russian State, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. His analysis of this tradition has a dual purpose: to provide a window on the peculiarly Russian attitude toward history and to allow us to read some major works of Russian literature in a new light. The book will be of interest not only to Slavists, but to anyone concerned with the interaction between history and literature.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China
This book, the first work in English on the history of disease in China, traces an epidemic of bubonic plague that began in Yunnan province in the late eighteenth century, spread throughout much of southern China in the nineteenth century, and eventually exploded on the world scene as a global pandemic at the end of the century. The author finds the origins of the pandemic in Qing economic expansion, which brought new populations into contact with plague-bearing animals along China’s southwestern frontier. She shows how the geographic diffusion of the disease closely followed the growth of interregional trading networks, particularly the domestic trade in opium, during the nineteenth century. A discussion of foreign interventions during plague outbreaks along China’s southern coast links the history of plague to the political impact of imperialism on China, and to the ways in which European cultural representations of the Chinese influenced the theory and practice of colonial medicine.
£60.30
Stanford University Press The Russian Far East: A History
Wedged between China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, the Russian Far East has for centuries been a meeting ground for Eurasian and American peoples and cultures. Conventionally regarded as perimeter, it is in fact a collage of overlapping borderlands with a distinct historical identity. Based on a quarter-century of research by a leading authority on the area, this is a monumental survey of Pacific Siberia from prehistoric times to the present. Drawing from political, diplomatic, economic, geographical, social, and cultural evidence, the book reveals that this vast, rugged, and supposedly insular land has harbored vibrantly cosmopolitan lifestyles. For over a millennium, Chinese culture found expression in Tungus, Mongol, and Korean polities. Russian penetration in the seventeenth century eventually turned the region into a colony sustained by state subsidies, foreign enterprise, and a mosaic of Ukrainian, Estonian, Finnish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese communities. Tsarists and Soviet penal policies contributed to the diversity and volatility of Far Eastern society. Regional aspirations articulated by Siberian intellectuals, disingenuously institutionalized in a Far Eastern Republic (1920-22), survived lethal bouts of economic and demographic engineering to come to life again in the post-Soviet era. The Russian Far East today reverberates with autonomist rhetoric, but if the region is no longer an appanage, it is still far short of independence. For the time being, the robust tradition of cosmopolitanism is reinventing itself under the banner of capitalism. Reexamining twentieth-century history through a Far Eastern prism, the book offers fresh and often provocative perspectives on imperial rivalries, colonialism, revolution, civil war, and utopianism gone awry in Northeast Asia.
£30.60
Stanford University Press Outing Goethe & His Age
When Goethe christened the 1700's "the Century of Winckelmann" and Kant dubbed it "the Century of Frederick the Great," they invoked two notorious figures in gay history. This collection of twelve essays reclaims "the Age of Goethe"—To call upon a literary designation of roughly the same period - as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann's art treatises and Goethe's plays to Friedrich Schlegel's self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist's letters. This volume employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of male-male and female-female relationships in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany. The literature of this era bequeathed to us the cultural inventions of Romantic love, classical femininity, the marriage partnership, and the aesthetics of beauty - all, as this volume demonstrates, via and despite the ever-resurgent erotic desire for one's own sex. In the process, it offers radically new readings of canonical authors - including Wieland, Lenz, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, and Kleist — in light of the eroticized same-sex relations in their works.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao
This book reexamines the historical thinking of Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of the few modern Chinese thinkers and cultural critics whose appreciation of the question of modernity was based on first-hand experience of the world space in which China had to function as a nation-state. It seeks to demonstrate that Liang was not only a profoundly paradigmatic modern Chinese intellectual but also an imaginative thinker of worldwide significance. By tracing the changes in Liang's conception of history, the author shows that global space inspired both Liang's longing for modernity and his critical reconceptualization of modern history. Spatiality, or the mode of determining spatial organization and relationships, offers a new interpretive category for understanding the stages in Liang's historical thinking. Liang's historical thinking culminated in a global imaginary of difference, which became most evident in the shift from his earlier proposal for a uniform national history to one that mapped "cultural history." His reaffirmation of spatiality, a critical concept overshadowed by the modernist obsession with time and history, made it both necessary and possible for him to redesign the project of modernity. Finally, the author suggests that the reconciliation of anthropological space with historical time that Liang achieved makes him abundantly contemporary with our own time, both inextricably modern and postmodern.
£56.70
Stanford University Press Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890-1940
The recent economic troubles of Mexico should have surprised no one, for the Mexican economy is an unhealthy one whose basic problems extend back to the nineteenth century - that is the major theme of this study of the formative years of industrialization in Mexico. The author focuses on the forces - economic, political, and technological - that have thwarted Mexican efforts to become a competitive member of the international economic community. Unlike most previous studies, which have relied on aggregate data published by the Mexican government that lump together all industries and all firms, this study is based almost entirely on new material concerning individual companies and individual entrepreneurs. This approach enables the author to examine a wide range of new questions. What were the social origins of Mexico's industrial entrepreneurs? What was their relation to the government of Porfirio Diaz? How profitable were the major manufacturing companies? What effects did the Revolution of 1910-1917 have on the nation's physical plant and on investor confidence? What strategies did firms follow to protect their markets and to prevent competition? The author argues that the roots of modern Mexican industrialization are not to be found in the restructuring of the Mexican economy associated with the Revolution (indeed he contends that the Revolution's effect on the economy has been exaggerated) or in the economic growth stemming from World War II. Rather, he sees the Porfiriato as the decisive era in Mexico's industrialization. By examining the economic constraints on large-scale industrialization during the Porfiriato, he explains the factors that led to an industrial sector marked by concentration of ownership, oligopoly and monopoly production, the inability to compete in international markets, and the need for constant government protection and subsidies.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Social Systems
A major challenge confronting contemporary theory is to overcome its fixation on written narratives and the culture of print. In this presentation of a general theory of systems, Germany's most prominent and controversial social thinker sets out a contribution to sociology that reworks our understanding of meaning and communication. Luhmann concedes that there is no longer a binding representation of society within society, but refuses to describe this situation as a loss of legitimation or a crisis of representation. Instead, he proposes that we search for new ways of coping with the enforced selectivity that marks any self-description under the conditions of functionally differentiated modern society. For Luhmann, the end of metanarratives does not mean the end of theory, but a challenge to theory, an invitation to open itself to theoretical developments in a number of disciplines that, for quite some time, have been successfully working with cybernetic models that no longer require the fiction of the external observer. Social Systems provides the foundation for a theory of modern society that would be congruent with this new understanding of the world. One of the most important contributions to social theory of recent decades, it has implications for many disciplines beyond sociology.
£32.40
Stanford University Press Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine
China's Great Leap Famine of 1959-61 resulted in 30 million deaths, making it easily the worst famine in human history. Yet unlike the Cultural Revolution - that other massive catastrophe of Mao's rule - the Great Leap Forward has received scant scholarly attention. This is partly because victims of the ensuing famine were inarticulate farmers and partly because many key players in that inglorious era are members of the current elite who tightly guard the archives. Despite these impediments, the author has marshalled an impressive array of historical documents to provide the first comprehensive treatment of the political causes and consequences of the Great Leap Famine. The Famine is important because it furnished the crucial historical motives for dismantling the rural collective institutional structure in post-Mao China two decades later and motivating tens of millions of ordinary Chinese to enact the reforms.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters
Informed by Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782).The author situates epistolary narratives in the contexts of eighteenth-century print culture: the rise of new models of readership and the newly influential role of the author; the model of contract derived from liberal political theory; and the techniques and aesthetics of mechanical reproduction. Epistolary authors used the genre to formulate a range of responses to a cultural anxiety about private energies and appetites, particularly those of women, as well as to legitimate their own authorial practices. Just as the social contract increasingly came to be seen as the organising instrument of public, civic relations in this period, the author argues that the epistolary novel serves to socialise and regulate the private subject as a citizen of the Republic of Letters.
£52.20
Stanford University Press Making Capitalism: The Social and Cultural Construction of a South Korean Conglomerate
This pathbreaking work extends the boundaries of contemporary anthropological research by presenting in one cohesive, meticulously researched work: an original theoretical perspective on the relationships between the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of a large modern business organization; the first anthropological work on South Korean management and its white-collar workers, in a case study of one of South Korea's "big four" conglomerates; and an innovative delineation of how modern business practices are enmeshed in past and present, structure and agency, and local and international systems." "Based largely on the author's nine months of participant-observation in the offices of one of South Korea's largest conglomerates (with annual sales of about $15 billion and approximately 80,000 employees), the book is also enriched by the author's previous fieldwork in rural Korea, where many of the conglomerate's white-collar personnel spent their formative years. These vantage points are used to explore constructions of "traditional" Korean culture and transformations of cultural knowledge prompted by new political-economic conditions, and how both inform practices prevailing in the large conglomerates - and ultimately shape South Korea's capitalism." "The work focuses on South Korea's new middle class. It explains how office workers' identities and often contradictory interests present them with choices between alternative interpretations and actions affecting both themselves and their conglomerates. Much attention is paid to ideological and more coercive means of controlling white-collar employees, to subordinates' strategies of resistance, and to ways in which cultural understandings and moral claims inform the assessment and pursuit of material advantage.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War
Uncertain partners tells for the first time the inside story of the creation of the Sino-Soviet alliance and the origins of the Korean War. Using major new documentary sources, including cables and letters between Mao Zedong and Stalin, and interviews with key Russian, Chinese, and Korean participants, the book focuses on the domestic and foreign policy decision-making in all three countries from 1945 through October 1950. The authors examine the complex relations between Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao during the last year of the Chinese civil war and the emergence of the Cold War. They show how the interplay of perceptions, national security policies, and personalities shaped those relations and were used by the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung to win backing for the invasion of South Korea. The authors also examine the Sino-Soviet alliance, drawing on hitherto unknown secret protocols and understandings and the records of high-level planning that led to the invasion and to the Chinese intervention in Korea. The book is illustrated with 42 photographs and two maps and is the fourth volume in the series, Studies in International Security and Arms Control, sponsored by the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University.
£30.60
Stanford University Press The Work of Fire
Since the middle of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. Blanchot early developed a distinctive, limpid firm of essay writing, and, apart from his fiction, his main work has appeared as collections of essays. His essays, in form and substance, unmistakably left their imprint on the work of the most inluential of French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot, and, indeed, all three have generously paid tribute to him. Published in French in 1949, The Work of Fire is a collection of 22 essays originally issued as review essays in literary journals. Certain themes return again and again: the relation of literature and language to death; the sigificance of repetition; the historical, personal, and social function of literature; and perhaps most important, simply the question, What is at stake in the fact that something such as art or literature exists? Within each essay, Blanchot raises anew these central themes in the context of a particular work or a particular author. He has read, it appears, practically everything, and an essay on a given writer or work will bristle with apposite references to other authors and works. Among the authors discussed in The Work of Fire are Kafka, Mallarme, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Gide, Pascal, Valery, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and such lesser figures as Benjamin Constant and Jean Paulhan. The essays demonstrate Blanchot's ability to pose the most lucid questions about the essence of literature while saying something new and probing about the author or work in question.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel
This study of the Chinese novel in the eighteenth century, arguably one of the greatest periods of the genre, focuses on the autobiographical features of three important works: The Dream of the Red Chamber, or The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng), The Scholars (Rulin waishi), and the relatively neglected The Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou puyan). The author seeks for answers to the question of why the Chinese novel was becoming increasingly autobiographical during the eighteenth century, even as explicitly autobiographical writing was in a decline. He suggests that several new trends in the development of the genre (such as the accelerated "literatization" process) and the changing status of literati contributed to the rise of this new feature of the novel. As office-holding became increasingly unavailable to many literati, new roles and new identities that allowed them to retain a claim to membership in the elite had to be found. The novel, with its ability to distance an author from himself, facilitated the exploration of alternative roles and identities. Through close readings of the three texts, the author examines various autobiographical strategies employed by the authors, among which "masking as other"—How the authorial self is re/presented as an other - stands out as the most significant. The book links the authors' obsession with masks both to an increasingly ambiguous sense of self-identity experienced by many literati and to the larger issue of literati self-representation. Throughout, the readings do not confine themselves to purely literary matters; they also analyze the three works as a complex artifact typical of literati "self" culture and situate them in the larger intellectual history of the period.
£56.70
Stanford University Press Early American Railroads: Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner’s ‘Die innern Communicationen’1842-1843
This is the first English translation of a monumental account of American railroads (and canals) in the years 1838-1839. Its author, Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, was Europe's leading authority on railroad construction, and he conducted his study at the behest of the Russian government, which rightly felt that the United States would provide a more suitable model for the construction of a Russian railroad system than England. For a century and a half, Gerstner's Die innern Communicationen has been recognized as by far the most comprehensive and detailed work on the development, construction, finance, and operation of early American railroads and canals, enriched by accounts of the pioneering men who were involved in the enterprise that was to transform the century. Most of the technological data presented is to be found nowhere else; for example, virtually every technique for constructing the various kinds of track is explained and illustrated by line drawings. Gerstner supplemented his first-hand observations of every railroad in the United States with data from transportation companies and government documents, including the amounts, dimensions, and kinds of rolling stock, personnel, funds dispersed, revenues collected, ton-miles of freight, and seat-miles of passengers. Throughout, Gerstner's insights and commentary reflect his vast experience and knowledge of railroads (he built what is often called the first railroad on the European continent and the first Russian railroad). Gerstner went beyond technology to examine the management and organization of railroads and canals and to review the structures and responsibilities of state boards for the oversight of transportation firms. In addition, he included vivid accounts of many aspects of American culture, such as early "Jim Crowism," with blacks traveling in baggage cars rather than coaches, and the horrific working conditions of both free laborers and slaves (the highly profitable Tallahassee Railroad owned its own slaves for working on the line). All in all, the publication in English of Gerstner's encyclopedic work is a major event in the economic and transportation history of the United States.
£144.90
Stanford University Press Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking
Our current intellectual system provides us with a far more complete and accurate understanding of nature and ourselves than was available in any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen from two sources: the use of the 'scientific method', and the breaking up of our intellectual enterprise into increasingly narrower disciplines and research programs. However, we have failed to keep these narrow specialities connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole. The author demonstrates that this causes a number of difficulties. We have no viewpoint from which we can understand the relationships between the disciplines and lack a forum for adjudicating situations where different disciplines give conflicting answers to the same problem. We seriously underestimate the differences in methodology and in the nature of principles in the various branches of science. This provocative and wide-ranging book provides a detailed analysis and possible solutions for dealing with this problem.
£64.80
Stanford University Press Caring for Patients: A Critique of the Medical Model
"See your patient as a person, not a disease." This is the essential message of an experienced and compassionate physician who questions the prevailing medical model of patient care - that every illness has a physical cause that can be identified and treated medically - and who argues for the necessity of taking the psychological and social circumstances of the patient into account in the process of diagnosis and treatment.
£144.90
Stanford University Press Making and Remaking Asian America
In 1882, Congress enacted immigration legislation excluding "idiots," "lunatics," and "Chinese laborers." Eventually, a series of laws restricted the entry of every Asian group, though over a period of decades these laws were repealed one by one. The most dramatic change in immigration law came in 1965. Though designed to encourage European immigration, the unintended result of changes in the selection system was that the Asian immigrant population jumped from one million in 1965 to seven million in 1990. This is the first comprehensive study of how U.S. immigration policies have shaped - demographically, economically, and socially - the six largest Asian American communities: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Asian Indian. For each group, the book offers detailed information, much of it previously unknown or too scattered to be useful, on gender ratios, age distributions, foreign- versus American-born ratios, geographic settlement, employment profiles, income, and poverty. The author also focuses on the impact immigration policies have had on three important areas of Asian American life experience - educational performance, political participation, and self-identity. He simply questions the validity of the images of Asian Americans as academic "whiz kids," their communities as relatively lacking in strong political interests, and the presence of a unified Asian American identity. Throughout, the author counters the frequent lumping together of Asian Americans by demonstrating their tremendous diversity of background, history, motivation, and achievement. As their numbers have grown, the visibility of Asian Americans has prompted policymakers, scholars, journalists, community organizers, activists, and, of course, restrictionists to take Asian Americans more seriously. At the same time, they have sometimes become the target of racist hostility, which is occasionally physical but more often sociopolitical and economic, such as the recent concerns over the disproportionate number of Asian Americans admitted to prestigious colleges and universities. Serious gaps in fundamental information about Asian America persist, leading to serious distortions. This pioneering work of research and analysis is intended as a step toward a better understanding of relationships and experiences that few have bothered to study.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776
This book examines republicanism in an Anglo-American and European context from the execution Charles I to the publication of Tom Paine's Common Sense. t gives weight not only to the thought of the theorists of republicanism but also the practical experience of republican governments in England, Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice. The first six chapters of the book, along with David Wootton's Introduction, consider the meaning of republicanism and its historiography. From its theoretical conception to its historical development, contributors examine how thinkers the likes of Hobbes and Montesquieu discussed the key issues of virtue, commerce, and liberty in conjunction with republicanism, and to what extent republicanism was an inheritor of or departure from classical ideals. In the latter chapters of the book, contributors turn their attention from theory to application, turning to look at the experiences of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republics such as Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.
£76.50
