Search results for ""Northwestern University Press""
Northwestern University Press Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life
Reads canonical works of modern drama in relation to the economic ideas of their era Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siÈcle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater.Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment.
£39.25
Northwestern University Press Cannibal Translation Volume 44: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America
A bold comparative study illustrating the creative potential of translations that embrace mutuality and resist assimilation Cannibal translators digest, recombine, transform, and trouble their source materials. Isabel C. Gómez makes the case for this model of literary production by excavating a network of translation projects in Latin America that includes canonical writers of the twentieth century, including Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Lispector, JosÉ Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and Angel RÁma. Building on the avant-garde reclaiming of cannibalism as an Indigenous practice meant to honorably incorporate the other into the self, these authors took up Brazilian theories of translation in Spanish to fashion a distinctly Latin American literary exchange, one that rejected normative and Anglocentric approaches to translation and developed collaborative techniques to bring about a new understanding of world literature. By shedding new light on the political and aesthetic pathways of translation movements beyond the Global North, Gómez offers an alternative conception of the theoretical and ethical challenges posed by this artistic practice. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America mobilizes a capacious archive of personal letters, publishers’ records, newspapers, and new media to illuminate inventive strategies of collectivity and process, such as untranslation, transcreation, intersectional autobiographical translation, and transpeaking. The book invites readers to find fresh meaning in other translational histories and question the practices that mediate literary circulation.
£41.24
Northwestern University Press The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness
Despite New Spain’s significant participation in the early transatlantic slave trade, the collective imagination of the Mexican nation evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand itself as devoid of a black presence. In The Nigrescent Beyond, Ricardo Wilson proposes a framework for understanding this psychic vanishing of blackness and thinks through how it can be used both to productively unsettle contemporary multicultural and postracial discourses within the United States and to further the interrogations of being and blackness within the larger field of black studies. Wilson models a practice of reading that honors the disruptive possibilities offered by an ever-present awareness of that which lies, irretrievable, beyond the horizon of vanishing itself. In doing so, he engages with historical accounts detailing maroon activities in early New Spain, contemporary coverage of the push to make legible Afro-Mexican identities, the electronic archives of the Obama presidency, and the work of Carlos de SigÜenza y GÓngora, Octavio Paz, Ivan Van Sertima, Miguel Covarrubias, Steven Spielberg, and Colson Whitehead, among others.
£41.79
Northwestern University Press Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives
Knowledge emerges from contexts, which are shaped by people’s experiences. The varied essays in Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives demonstrate that Southern identities, borders, and practices play an important but unacknowledged role in ethical, political, emotional, and global issues connected to knowledge production. Not merely one geographical region among others, the US South is sometimes a fantasy and other times a nightmare, but it is always a prominent component of the American national imaginary. In connection with the Global North and Global South, the US South provides a valuable perspective from which to explore race, class, gender, and other inter- and intra-American differences. The result is a fresh look at how identity is constituted; the role of place, ancestors, and belonging in identity formation; the impact of regional differences on what counts as political resistance; the ways that affect and emotional labor circulate; practices of boundary policing, deportation, and mourning; issues of disability and slowness; racial and other forms of suffering; and above all, the question of whether and how doing philosophy changes when done from Southern standpoints. Examining racist tropes, Indigenous land claims, Black Southern philosophical perspectives, migrant labor, and more, this incisive anthology makes clear that roots matter.
£41.24
Northwestern University Press Husserl and the Idea of Europe
Husserl and the Idea of Europe argues that Edmund Husserl’s late reflections on Europe should not be read either as departures from his early transcendental phenomenology or as simple exercises of cultural criticism but rather as systematic phenomenological reflections on generativity and historicity. Timo Miettinen shows that Husserl’s reflections on Europe contain his most compelling and radical interpretation on the intersubjective, communal, and historical dimensions of phenomenology.Husserl and his generation worked in the aftermath of World War I, as Europe struggled to redefine itself, and he penned his late writings as the clouds of World War II gathered. Decades later, the fall of the Soviet Union again altered the continent’s identity and its political and economic divisions. Miettinen writes as a European involved in the question of Europe, and many of the recent authors and critics he addresses in this work—such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben—likewise deeply engaged with this new problem of European identity.Husserl and the Idea of Europe interprets key concepts of Husserl’s late philosophy in new, compelling ways. The book illuminates the multifaceted problem of the idea of European rationality, and it defends novel conceptions of universalism and teleology as necessary components of radical philosophical reflection.
£107.11
Northwestern University Press At Home with André and Simone Weil
Translated from the French by Benjamin Ivry, Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century's most original philosopher-critics, and as a result her legacy has been claimed by many. This memoir by Weil's niece is strong-willed and incisive and as close as we are likely to get to the real Simone Weil. Born into a freethinking Jewish family, Weil contributed many articles to Socialist and Communist journals and was active in the Spanish Civil War until her health failed. In 1940 she became strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism and the Passion of Christ. Most of her works, published posthumously, continue to inform debates in ethics, philosophy, and spirituality surrounding questions of sacrifice, asceticism, and the virtues of manual labor. Massively influential, Weil's writings were widely praised by such readers as Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pope John XXIII, Czeslaw Milosz, and Susan Sontag. Sylvie Weil recovers the deeply Jewish nature of Simone's thinking and details how her preoccupations with charity and justice were fully in the tradition of tzedakah, the Jewish religious obligation toward these actions.Using previously unpublished family correspondence and conversations, Sylvie Weil offers a more authentically personal portrait of her aunt than previous biographers have provided. At Home with AndrÉ and Simone Weil illuminates Simone's relationship to her family, especially to her brother, the great Princeton mathematician AndrÉ Weil. A clear-eyed and uncompromising memoir of her family, At Home with AndrÉ and Simone Weil is a fresh look at the noted French philosopher,mystic, and social activist.
£29.27
Northwestern University Press Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form: Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters
Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky's indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that he wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, Dostoevsky anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today. Can reading novels make us more compassionate and sensitive to emotional nuance? Or is the act of reading, instead, a variety of voyeurism? By placing Dostoevsky in dialogue with thinkers such as Wayne Booth, Suzanne Keen, and Alex Woloch and providing a fresh assessment of Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, this book makes an important contribution not only to Dostoevsky studies but also to the field of narrative ethics.
£47.22
Northwestern University Press Essays on Music and History in Africa
This classic ethnomusicological survey provides as a valuable guide to African music. The essays review a broad swath of genres and topics, including court songs and music history, musical instruments in different traditions, and the connection between Islam and African music. Contributors are Lois Ann Anderson, John Blacking, Philip J. C. Dark, David M. Dixon, Akin Euba, John D. Fage, Matthew Hill, A. M. Jones, Percival R. Kirby, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Gilbert Rouget, David K. Rycroft, and Klaus P. Wachsmann.
£56.19
Northwestern University Press Ghost Voices: A Poem in Prayer
If we were all brave enough to resurrect the voices lost from our humanity, what would they say? Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe, spokesman for the humanizing forces of poetry, music, and art, parts the Atlantic and rattles the ground built on slavery with Ghost Voices: A Poem in Prayer.we are crossing, / we are / crossing, / we are crossing in big salt water, // we are crossing, // crossing under a sky of no guilt / we have left home // though we know we will go back / someday, / see our people / as we knew them . . .Troupe re-creates the history of lost voices between the waters of Africa, Cuba, and the United States. His daring poetics drenched in new forms-notably the seven-elevens-clench transformative narratives spurred on by a relentless, rhythmic language that mimics the foaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. His personae speak quantum litanies within one epic, sermonic-gospel to articulate our most ancient ways of storytelling and survival.
£22.29
Northwestern University Press Dulce: Poems
The poems in Dulce are at once confession and elegy that admit the speaker’s attempt and possible failure to reconcile intimacy toward another and toward the self. The collection asks: what’s the point in any of this?—meaning, what’s the use of longing beyond pleasure; what’s the use of looking for an origin if we already know the ending?Surreal and deeply imagistic, the poems map a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo invites the reader to confront and challenge the distinctions of borders and categories, and in doing so, he obscures and negates such divisions. He allows for the possibility of an and in a world of either/or.These poems enact a prescient anxiety of what is to come, “I want to say all of this is true / but we both know it isn’t. . . . We already know what’s at the other end of this.” Dulce is truly a lyrical force rife with the rich language of longing and regret that disturbs even the most serene quiet.
£14.31
Northwestern University Press A Boy in Terezin: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944-April 1945
Covers a year of Pavel Weiner's life in the Theresienstadt transit camp in the Czech town of Terezín from April 1944 until liberation in April 1945. A Boy in Terezín registers the young boy's insights, hopes, and fears and recounts a passage into maturity during the most horrifying of times.
£34.25
Northwestern University Press The Black Seasons
When six-year-old Michal Glowinski first heard the adults around him speak of the ghetto, he understood only that the word was connected with moving-and conjured up a fantastical image of a many-storied carriage pulled through the streets by some umpteen horses. He was soon to learn that the ghetto was something else entirely. A half-century later, Glowinski, now an eminent Polish literary scholar, leads us haltingly into Nazi-occupied Poland. Scrupulously attentive to the distance between a child's experience and an adult's reflection, Glowinski revisits the images and episodes of his childhood: the emaciated violinist playing a Mendelssohn concerto on the ghetto streets; his game of chess with a Polish blackmailer threatening to deliver him to the Gestapo; and his eventual rescue by Catholic nuns in an impoverished, distant convent. In language at once spare and eloquent, Glowinski explores the horror of those years, the fragility of existence, and the fragmented nature of memory itself.
£24.28
Northwestern University Press Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During and After Nazi Occupation
£21.30
Northwestern University Press Heraclitus Seminar
In 1966-67 Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink conducted an extraordinary seminar on the fragments of Heraclitus. Heraclitus Seminar records those conversations, documenting the imaginative and experimental character of the multiplicity of interpretations offered and providing an invaluable portrait of Heidegger involved in active discussion and explication.Heidegger's remarks in this seminar illuminate his interpretations not only of pre-Socratic philosophy, but also of figures such as Hegel and Holderllin. At the same time, Heidegger clarifies many late developments in his own understanding of truth, Being, and understanding. Heidegger and Fink, both deeply rooted in the Freiburg phenomenological tradition, offer two competing approaches to the phenomenological reading of the ancient text-a kind of reading that, as Fink says, is "not so much concerned with the philological problematic ... as with advancing into the matter itself, that is, toward the matter that must have stood before Heraclitus's spiritual view.
£28.27
Northwestern University Press Eardrums: Literary Modernism as Sonic Warfare
In this innovative study, Tyler Whitney demonstrates how a transformation and militarization of the civilian soundscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left indelible traces on the literature that defined the period. Both formally and thematically, the modernist aesthetics of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Detlev von Liliencron, and Peter Altenberg drew on this blurring of martial and civilian soundscapes in traumatic and performative repetitions of war. At the same time, Richard Huelsenbeck assaulted audiences in Zurich with his “sound poems,” which combined references to World War I, colonialism, and violent encounters in urban spaces with nonsensical utterances and linguistic detritus—all accompanied by the relentless beating of a drum on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire.Eadrums is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between acoustical modernity and German modernism, charting a literary and cultural history written in and around the eardrum. The result is not only a new way of understanding the sonic impulses behind key literary texts from the period. It also outlines an entirely new approach to the study of literature as as the interaction of text and sonic practice, voice and noise, which will be of interest to scholars across literary studies, media theory, sound studies, and the history of science.
£31.46
Northwestern University Press Transoceanic Blackface
Tracing intertwined histories of racialized performance from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth century across the US and the British Empire, this study maps the circulations of blackface repertoires in theatrical spectacles, popular songs, visual materials, comic operas, closet dramas, dance forms, and Shakespearean burlesques.
£39.25
Northwestern University Press The Crooked Mirror: Plays from a Modernist Russian Cabaret
An anthology of plays from the Crooked Mirror, the leading Russian cabaret of the Silver Age “Don’t blame the mirror if your mug is crooked!” Parody dominated early twentieth-century Russian cabaret, but the Crooked Mirror extended its lampooning to theatrical practice itself. Eclectic in its targets, the Saint Petersburg theater mocked not only naturalism but also symbolism, futurism, and “Meyerholditis.” Its shows parodied both the stale conventions of melodrama and opera and the stylized trends in staging, wielding satire to provoke artistic and social reform. Though the theater was liquidated in 1931, many of its innovations would become standard techniques in cabaret repertoires and improv revues. As a cultural phenomenon of the Silver Age, the Crooked Mirror deserves critical attention, yet it has received only fleeting mention in histories of Russian theater and biographies of its major figures. This anthology fills a critical gap in our understanding of that heady era by bringing together key plays—most appearing in English here for the first time—together with short biographies of their authors and robust commentary and annotations. Laurence Senelick guides readers through the artistic and ideological evolution of the Crooked Mirror and provides performers with the material to bring its innovations back to the stage.
£29.27
Northwestern University Press Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era
In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950 and the possibility that the political pressures of the McCarthy era skewed the development of the discipline. Why was silence maintained for so long? And what happens, McCumber asks, when political events and pressures go beyond interfering with individual careers to influence the nature of a discipline itself?
£38.25
Northwestern University Press Quiet Armor: Poems
New poetry from Stevie Edwards, author of Sadness WorkshopQuiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women. Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?
£21.30
Northwestern University Press Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage
An updated paperback version of the book heralded as “a new benchmark in Marx scholarship” by the Los Angeles Times Before film made them international comedy legends, the Marx Brothers developed their comic skills on stage for twenty-five years. In Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, Robert S. Bader offers the first comprehensive history of the foursome’s hardscrabble early years honing their act in front of live audiences. From Groucho’s debut in 1905 to their final live performances of scenes from A Night in Casablanca in 1945, the brothers’ stage career shows how their characters and routines evolved before their arrival in Hollywood. Four of the Three Musketeers draws on an unmatched array of sources, many not referenced elsewhere. Bader’s detailed portrait of the struggling young actors both brings to vivid life a typical night on the road for the Marx Brothers and illuminates the inner workings of the vaudeville business, especially during its peak in the 1920s. As Bader traces the origins of the characters that would later come to be beloved by filmgoers, he also skillfully scrapes away the accretion of rumors and mythology perpetuated not only by fans and writers but by the Marx Brothers themselves. Revealing, vital, and entertaining, Four of the Three Musketeers has taken its place as an essential reference for this legendary American act. Now, the updated edition adds newly discovered performances—some submitted by readers—and additional information provided by descendants of long-departed vaudevillians mentioned in the book.
£40.24
Northwestern University Press Arendt, Kant, and the Enigma of Judgment
A nuanced extrapolation of Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment through her highly provocative reading of Immanuel Kant More than a half century after it was first published, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism rose to the top of best-seller lists as readers grappled with the triumph of Trumpism. Arendt, Kant, and the Enigma of Judgment directs our attention to her later thought, the posthumously published and highly provocative Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Martin Blumenthal-Barby puts this work in dialogue with Arendt’s other writings, including her notes on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, to outline her theory of judgment for the twentieth century. The idea that authentic judgment—for example, the ability to distinguish right from wrong—is incommensurable with abstract, automated processes lies at the center of Arendt’s late work and at the fore of our collective reckoning in an era of post-truths and artificial intelligence. Rather than presenting us with a fixed account, Blumenthal-Barby suggests, Arendt’s drawing and redrawing of conceptual distinctions is itself an enactment of judgment, a process that challenges and complicates what she says at every turn. In so doing, Arendt, in thoroughly Kantian fashion, establishes judgment as a performative category that can never be taught but only demonstrated. As sharp as it is timely, this incisive book reminds us why a shared reality matters in a time of intense political polarization and why the democratic project, vulnerable as it may appear today, crucially depends on it.
£37.26
Northwestern University Press Experience and Empiricism: Hegel, Hume, and the Early Deleuze
A clarifying examination of Gilles Deleuze’s first book shows how he would later transform the problem of immanence into the problem of difference Despite the wide reception Gilles Deleuze has received across the humanities, research on his early work has remained scant. Experience and Empiricism remedies that gap with a detailed study of Deleuze’s first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity, which is devoted to the philosophical project of David Hume. Russell Ford argues that this work is poorly understood when read simply as a standalone study on Hume. Its significance only becomes apparent within the context of a larger problematic that dominated, and continues to inform, modern European philosophy: the conceptual constitution of a purely immanent account of existence. While the importance of this debate is recognized in contemporary scholarship, its genealogy—including Deleuze’s place within it—has been underappreciated. This book shows how Deleuze directly engages in an ongoing debate between his teachers Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite over experience and empiricism, an intervention that restages the famous encounter between rationalism and empiricism that yielded Kant’s critical philosophy. What, Deleuze effectively asks, might have happened had Hume been the one roused from his empirical dogmatic slumber by the rationalist challenge of Kant?
£39.25
Northwestern University Press The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961
The Possibility of Philosophy presents the notes that Maurice Merleau‑Ponty prepared for three courses he taught at the CollÈge de France: “The Possibility of Philosophy Today,” given in the spring semester of 1959; and “Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today” and “Philosophy and Nonphilosophy since Hegel,” both given in the spring semester of 1961. The last two courses remain incomplete due to Merleau-Ponty’s unexpected death on May 3, 1961. Nonetheless, they provide indications of the new ontology that informed The Visible and the Invisible, a posthumously published work that was under way at the same time. These courses offer readers of Merleau‑Ponty’s late thought a wealth of references—to painting, literature, and psychoanalysis, and to the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—that fill in some of the missing pieces of The Visible and the Invisible, especially its often terse and sometimes cryptic working notes. We see more clearly how Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to bring forth a new ontology indicates a fundamental revision in what it means to think, an attempt to reimagine the possibility of philosophy.
£38.25
Northwestern University Press The Origins of Russian Literary Theory: Folklore, Philology, Form
Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II.The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.
£43.23
Northwestern University Press New World Maker Volume 40: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes
In an ambitious reappraisal of Langston Hughes’s work and legacy, Ryan James Kernan reads Hughes’s political poetry in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora. Drawing on heretofore unearthed archival evidence, Kernan shows how Hughes mined his engagements with the poetics of Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, Regino Pedroso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico García Lorca, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as translations of his own poetry, to fashion a radical poetics that engaged Black left internationalist concerns. As he follows Hughes from Harlem to Havana, Moscow, Madrid, and finally to Dakar, Kernan reveals how the writer’s identity and aesthetic were translated within these leftist geographies and metropoles, by others but also collaboratively. As Kernan argues, we cannot know Hughes without knowing him in translation.Through original research and close readings alert to the foreign prosody underlying Hughes’s work, New World Maker recuperates his political writing, which had been widely maligned by Cold War detractors and adherents of New Criticism, and affirms his place as a progenitor of African diasporic literature and within the pantheon of US modernists. Demonstrating the integral part translation played in Hughes’s creative process, this book challenges a number of common assumptions about this canonical thinker and offers important insights for scholars of African diasporic literature, comparative literature, and American, Caribbean, and translation studies.
£47.22
Northwestern University Press Miracle Marks: Poems
In her third poetry collection, Miracle Marks, the indomitable Purvi Shah charts women’s status through pointed explorations of Hindu iconography and philosophy and powerful critiques of American racism. In these searing, revelatory poems, Shah reminds us that in some places, surviving birth as an infant girl is miraculous—as such, every girl is a miracle mark. Moreover, because education is often denied to girls, writing by women is also a miracle.In Miracle Marks, Shah probes belonging, devotion, and social inequity, delving into what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be. Through sound energy and white space, these poems chart multiple realities, including the miracles of women’s labors, commitments, and survivals. This collection lights a way for brown girls and women who relish in spirit, intellect, politics, and justice, and will spur dialogue across audiences and communities.
£18.95
Northwestern University Press Treasure Island: A Play
Enlivened by rum, mutiny, and buried treasure, Treasure Island is the classic pirates’ tale, widely regarded as the forerunner of this genre. After discovering a treasure map, young Jim Hawkins sets off to sea as cabin boy aboard the Hispaniola, where he encounters one of the most unforgettable characters in literary history—peg-legged buccaneer Long John Silver, a malicious mutineer and charismatic father figure.
£21.30
Northwestern University Press This Africa: Novels by West Africans in English and French
This Africa is both a literary history and a survey of the West African novel. Gleason explores seventeen novels in French and eight in English, developing a framework of literary criticism that includes the conqueror, the hero, city life, village life, and personal identity. Authors whose works are studied include Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Mongo Beti, and Camara Layer.
£56.19
Northwestern University Press Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory
Dark Conceit is the first book in English to treat allegory seriously in terms of literary creation and criticism. The study explores the methods and ideas that go into the making of allegory, discusses the misconceptions that have obscured the subject, and surveys the changing concept of allegory. The greater part of the book concerns the typical features of allegorical fiction, focusing on a group of Romantic and contemporary writers, including Melville, Hawthorne, and Kafka, who continue the allegorical tradition in literature. Such writers, along with Lawrence, James, and Joyce, are taken to be the modern counterparts to an earlier group of pastoral, evangelical, and satirical writers represented by Spenser, Bunyan, and Swift. Honig’s thesis is that literary allegory, while symbolic in method, is realistic in aim. Its very power lies in its giving proof to the physical and ethical realities of life objectively conceived.
£50.22
Northwestern University Press Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film
Films provide valuable spaces for aesthetic experimentation and analysis, for cinema's openness to other media has always allowed it to expand its own. In Aesthetic Spaces, Brigitte Peucker shows that when painterly or theatrical conventions are appropriated by the medium of film, the dissonant effects produced open it up to intermedial reflection and tell us a great deal about cinema itself. The films studied in these chapters include those by Abbas Kiarostami, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Carl Th. Dreyer, Peter Greenaway, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Lars von Trier, Spike Jonze, Éric Rohmer, Lech Majewski, and others. Where two media are in evidence in these films, there is usually a third, and often theater mediates between film and painting. Aesthetic Spaces interrogates issues of cinematic space and mise-en-scène from different but interconnected theoretical perspectives, organizing its chapters around some of the formal principles—space, spectator, frame, color and lighting, props, décor, and actor—that shape films.Drawing on the older arts to renew cinema, the films examined deploy paintings as material: Poussin and Bruegel, Rembrandt, Hals and Klimt, and medieval illustrations and modernist abstractions are used to expand our notions of cinematic space. Peucker shows that when different media come together in film, they create effects of dissonance out of which new modes of looking may arise.
£38.25
Northwestern University Press Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist
Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist, originally published in 1951, makes the original argument that the renowned English critic Matthew Arnold contributed to the climate of “racialism” current during his lifetime. Frederic E. Faverty shows that in his essays on national character, Arnold used anthropological concepts of race and language, albeit inconsistently. Faverty’s critique of Arnold draws particular attention to the lack of a specifically cultural (rather than racial) analysis of the type pioneered by his contemporary Edward Burnett Tylor.
£56.19
Northwestern University Press The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815
The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815, explores the popularity of magazines in the nineteenth century and the ways that much of the published fiction of the time appeared serially in these publications. Robert D. Mayo's groundbreaking study remains important to scholars of the nineteenth century as one of the first books to examine in a systematic manner the impact of magazines on reading and the dissemination of fiction in nineteenth-century England.
£53.69
Northwestern University Press Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama
Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage.Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama.Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.
£112.09
Northwestern University Press Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo
A token of the world's instability and of human powerlessness, chance is inevitably a crucial literary theme. It also presents formal problems: Must the artist struggle against chance in pursuit of a flawless work? Or does chance have a place in the artistic process or product? This book examines the representation and staging of chance in literature through the study of a specific case - the work of the twentieth-century French writer Georges Perec (1936-82).In ""Constraining Chance"", James explores the ways in which Perec's texts exploit the possibilities of chance, by both tapping into its creative potential and controlling its operation. These works, she demonstrates, strive to capture essential aspects of human life: its 'considerable energy' (Perec's phrase), its boundless possibilities, but also the constraints and limitations that bind it. A member of the Ouvroir de litterature potentielle (known as Oulipo), Perec adopted the group's dictum that the literary work should be 'anti-chance' - a product of fully conscious creative processes. James shows how Perec gave this notion a twist, using Oulipian precepts both to explore the role of chance in human existence and to redefine the possibilities of literary form. Thus the investigation of chance links Perec's writing methods, which harness chance for creative purposes, to the thematic exploration of causality, chance, and fate in his writings.
£36.25
Northwestern University Press Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey, 1937-47
In the looming shadow of an oppressive dictatorship and imminent world war, George Seferis and George Katsimbalis, along with other poets and writers from Greece's fabled Generation of the 1930s, welcomed Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell to their homeland. Together, as they spent evenings in Athenian tavernas, explored the Peloponnese, swam off island beaches, and considered the meaning of Greek life, freedom and art, they seemed to be inventing paradise. In a lyrical blend of personal memoir, literary criticism, and interpretative storytelling, Edmund Keeley takes readers on a journey into the poetry, friendships and politics of this extraordinary time.
£27.28
Northwestern University Press From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival
When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Thomas Toivi Blatt was twelve years old. He and his family lived in the largely Jewish town of Izbica in the Lublin district of Poland - a district that was to become the site of three of the six major Nazi extermination camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek. Blatt's account of his childhood in Izbica provides a fascinating glimpse of Jewish life in Poland after the German invasion and during the periods of mass deportations of Jews to the camps. Blatt tells of the chilling events that led to his deportation to Sobibor, of his separation from his family, and of the six months he spent at Sobibor before taking part in the most successful uprising and mass breakout in any Nazi camp during World War II. Blatt's tale of escape, and of the five horrifying years spent eluding both the Nazis and later anti-Semitic Polish nationalists, is a firsthand account of one of the most terrifying and savage events of human history. From the Ashes of Sobibor also includes a moving interview with Karl Frenzel, a Nazi commandant from Sobibor.
£23.29
Northwestern University Press Sense and Non-Sense
Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought. They summarize his previous insights and exhibit their widest range of application-in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and the sciences of man. Each essay opens new perspectives to man's search for reason.The first part of Sense and Non-Sense, "Arts," is concerned with Merleau-Ponty's concepts of perception, which were advanced in his major philosophical treatise, Phenomenology of Perception. Here the analysis is focused and enriched in descriptions of the perceptual world of Cezanne, the encounter with the Other as expressed in the novels of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, and the gestalt quality of experience brought out in the film art form. In the second part, "Ideas," Merleau-Ponty shows how the categories of the phenomenology of perception can be understood as an outgrowth of the behavioral sciences and how a model of existence based on perception sensitizes us to the insights and limitations of previous philosophies and suggests constructive criticisms of contemporary philosophy. The third part, "Politics," clarifies the political dilemmas facing intellectuals in postwar France.
£36.25
Northwestern University Press Farewell, Mama Odessa: A Novel
Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people-dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black-marketers among them-as they bid farewell to their beloved home of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book's center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism during the twilight years of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's sclerotic rule. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, vulnerable, displaced, continually living out of a suitcase, he puts Russia in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they'd left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama Odessa describes the émigrés' attempts at adjustment to the free world.
£17.95
Northwestern University Press Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning
An examination of the relation between concepts and experiencing. This work examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from non-language. In moving back and forth between what is already verbalized and what is as yet unarticulated, Eugene Gendlin shows how experiencing functions in the transitions between one formulation and the next. A whole array of more than logical ""characteristics"" enables us to examine as well as to employ this new kind of thinking which is not merely conceptual because it begins from the intricacy of felt meaning and returns to it again and again.
£33.26
Northwestern University Press Mother Tongues: Poems
Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize Tsitsi Ella Jaji's second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear.This is what we have done since before the border between wild and free was pinned The body politics of personal narratives embed into poems that collect the cycles of lives and languages that have shaped the wonders and worlds of Africa and America. Jaji's artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues speak the beginnings and present. The tongues that capture and claim the losses, ironies, and a poet's human evolution. How deep does your language go back? The language of your childhood, the language of our aging? How deeply do we wear and hear our fore-tongues? How close do we sometimes forget they are? Mother Tongues is the gift, a collection of language unto itself that translates directly to the heart.
£20.30
Northwestern University Press The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia
The Letters and the Law explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II's judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary scholars have typically interpreted these representations either as the common, cross?cultural critique of lawyerly unscrupulousness and greed or as an expression of Russian hostility toward Western legalism, seen as antithetical to traditional Russian values. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict in terms of the two professions' competition for cultural authority.Anna Schur combines historical research and literary analysis to argue that the first generations of Russian trial lawyers shaped their professional identity with an eye to the celebrated figure of the writer and that they considered their own activities to be a form of verbal art. A fuller understanding of writers' antipathy to the law, Schur contends, must take into account this overlooked cultural backdrop. Laced with the better?known critique of the lawyer's legalistic proclivities and lack of moral principle are the writer's reactions to a whole network of explicit and implicit claims of similarity between the two professions' goals, methods, and missions that were central to the lawyer's professional ideal. Viewed in this light, writers' critiques of the law and lawyers emerge as a concerted effort at protecting literature's exclusive cultural status in the context of modernization and the rapidly expanding public sphere.The study draws upon a mix of well-known and rarely studied nineteenth-century authors and texts—with particular attention paid to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin—and on a wide range of nonliterary sources, including courtroom speeches, guides to forensic oratory, legal treatises, and specialized press.
£43.23
Northwestern University Press Hegel's Energy: A Reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit has been one of the most important works of philosophy since the nineteenth century, while the question of energy has been crucial to life in the twenty-first century. In this book, Michael Marder integrates the two, narrating a story about the trials and tribulations of energy embedded in Hegel’s dialectics. Through an original interpretation of actuality (Wirklichkeit) as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the book provides an exciting lens for understanding the dialectical project and the energy-starved condition of our contemporaneity. To elaborate this theory, Marder undertakes a meticulous rereading of major parts of the Phenomenology, where the energy deficit of mere consciousness gives way to the energy surplus of self-consciousness and its self-delimitation in the domain of reason. In so doing, he denounces the current understanding of energy as pure potentiality, linking this mindset to pollution, profit-driven economies, and environmental crises. Surprising and deeply engaged with its contemporary implications, this book doesn’t simply illuminate aspects of The Phenomenology of Spirit — it provides an entirely new understanding of Hegel’s ideas.
£40.24
Northwestern University Press Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground
While Dostoevsky's relation to religion is well-trod ground, there exists no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky and Catholicism. Elizabeth Blake's ambitious and learned Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground fills this glaring omission in the scholarship. Previous commentators have traced a wide-ranging hostility in Dostoevsky's understanding of Catholicism to his Slavophilism. Blake depicts a far more nuanced picture. Her close reading demonstrates that he is repelled and fascinated by Catholicism in all its medieval, Reformation, and modern manifestations. Dostoevsky saw in Catholicism not just an inspirational source for the Grand Inquisitor but a political force, an ideological wellspring, a unique mode of intellectual inquiry, and a source of cultural production. Blake's insightful textual analysis is accompanied by an equally penetrating analysis of nineteenth-century European revolutionary history, from Paris to Siberia, that undoubtedly influenced the evolution of Dostoevsky's thought.
£47.22
Northwestern University Press The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis
The Virginal Mother in German Culture presents an innovative and thorough analysis of the contradictory obsession with female virginity and idealization of maternal nature in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Lauren Nossett explores how the complex social ideal of woman as both a sexless and maternal being led to the creation of a unique figure in German literature: the virginal mother. At the same time, she shows that the literary depictions of virginal mothers correspond to vilified biological mother figures, which point to a perceived threat in the long nineteenth century of the mother's procreative power.Examining the virginal mother in the first novel by a German woman (Sophie von La Roche), canonical texts by Goethe, nineteenth-century popular fiction, autobiographical works, and Thea von Harbou's novel Metropolis and Fritz Lang's film by the same name, this book highlights the virginal mother at pivotal moments in German history and cultural development: the entrance of women into the literary market, the Goethezeit, the foundation of the German Empire, and the volatile Weimar Republic. The Virginal Mother in German Culture will be of interest to students and scholars of German literature, history, cultural and social studies, and women's studies.
£31.46
Northwestern University Press The Price of Literature: The French Novel's Theoretical Turn
The Price of Literature examines the presence of theory in the nineteenth-century French novel, something Proust likened to leaving a price tag on a gift. Emerging after the French Revolution, what we now call literature was conceived as an art liberated from representational constraints. Patrick M. Bray shows how literature's freedom to represent anything at all has meant, paradoxically, that it cannot articulate a coherent theory of itself—unless this theory is a necessarily subversive literary representation, or “the novel's theoretical turn.”Literary thought, or the theory produced by the text, can only function by exploring what escapes dominant representations. The Price of Literature analyzes how certain iconic texts from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature's ability to transform the world it represents. The conclusion, “Distributions of Literature,” advances a new way of thinking about literary scholarship—one based on how literature redistributes ways of writing by lending form to thought.
£44.78
Northwestern University Press William Warner's Syrinx: or, A Sevenfold History
William Warner’s Syrinx, or a Sevenfold History, may be the first English novel. Unlike others of the time, though, Warner wrote a realistic novel whose ancestors include the adventure stories of Alexandrine romance, and focus not on the tales of an aristocratic class but on the lives of middle-class individuals. Wallace A. Bacon’s critical edition brings Warner’s important novel—with its young protagonists being dragged through many adventures, tried and tested by Fortune, with their tales being brought to a close by auspicious gods—to life, preserving it and introducing it to new generations of readers. Bacon’s critical apparatus, including an extensive introduction, provides significant context for Warner’s work, assessing its key role in the history of the novel and in the history of early modern literature.
£56.19
Northwestern University Press More Than Life: Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art
More Than Life: Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art is the first book to trace the philosophical relation between Georg Simmel and his one-time student Walter Benjamin, two of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century.Reading Simmel’s work, particularly his essays on Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, alongside Benjamin’s concept of Unscheinbarkeit (inconspicuousness) and his writings on Charlie Chaplin, More Than Life demonstrates that both Simmel and Benjamin conceive of art as the creation of something entirely new rather than as a mimetic reproduction of a given. The two thinkers diverge in that Simmel emphasizes the presence of a continuous movement of life, whereas Benjamin highlights the priority of discontinuous, interruptive moments.With the aim of further elucidating Simmel and Benjamin’s ideas on art, Stéphane Symons presents a number of in-depth analyses of specific artworks that were not discussed by these authors. Through an insightful examination of both the conceptual affinities and the philosophical differences between Simmel and Benjamin , Symons reconstructs a crucial episode in twentieth-century debates on art and aesthetics.
£38.25
Northwestern University Press The Book of Hours: Prayers to a Lowly God
This a complete translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's ""The Book of Hours"" that restores to the English-speaking reader a critical work in the development of a significant figure in 20th-century German poetry. Conveying an almost mystical conception of the relationship between God, the human being and nature, ""The Book of Hours"" (""Das Stundenbuch"", first published in 1905) is a series of intimate prayers written as if by a Russian monk turned painter - writings that bring to bear the profound influence of Rilke's journeys to Russia and Italy at the turn of the century. A tripartite work comprised of ""The Book of the Monkish Life"", ""The Book of Pilgrimage"", and ""The Book of Poverty and Death"", the book is published here in a bilingual format, with the original German and the English translation on facing pages. Annemarie S. Kidder's translation imitates Rilke's uncomplicated and melodic flow, his rhythm and, where possible, his rhyme, while remaining true to content. Each line closely reflects the thought of the original as it strives to preserve Rilke's simplicity of style, economy of words, and candour in addressing God. Kidder's introduction and commentary offer historical and interpretive background information, largely from Rilke's own diaries and correspondence, chronicling the influence of various geographical settings on the writing of ""The Book of Hours"" and illustrating his own spiritual quest. Also included are translated excerpts from an earlier manuscript of ""The Book of Hours"", along with prose inserts that interpret the reading of the poetry.
£26.28