NEW AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS from MLI
Empires of Love
Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity
Carmen Nocentelli
University of Pennsylvania Press
Spring 2013
"Compelling and filled with rich textual and historical details, Empires of Love will alter the ways we read the cross-cultural and domestic production of both race and desire."—Emily Bartels, Rutgers University
"Empires of Love makes important contributions to the multiple fields it embraces, from colonial studies to gender politics to comparative literature. Scholars working in all of the natinoal traditions presented here will find much to think about."—Josiah Blackmore, University of Toronto
Drawing on a wide range of Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sources, Carmen Nocentelli shows how the encounter with Asia contributed to the development of Europe's racial discourses while also shaping ideals of free marriage choice, erotic reciprocity, and monogamous affection.
Carmen Nocentelli is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico, where she also teaches comparative literature and cultural studies.
288 Pages, 10 illustrations
978-0-8122-4483-0, Cloth, $55.00
978-0-8122-0777-4, E-book, $55.00
World rights February 2013
Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China
Antje Richter
University of Washington Press
A China Program Book
Spring 2013
"Antje Richter's work presents fascinating material on a topic that holds a great deal of interest and importance for Chinese literary, cultural, and historical studies in general."—Xiaofei Tian, Harvard University
"Richter's treatment is well-rounded. She examines letters from the angle of material culture; looks at the status of letters as a literary genre in theoretical writings, the recognition of skilled letter writers, and prescriptions of ideal qualities of letters; discusses epistolary structures and topics and guides to letter writing."—Cynthia Chennault, University of Florida
Letters and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China is the first work to introduce the epistolary culture and literature of any period of Chinese history. For the first time, the practice of personal letter writing and the existing textual specimens from this period are available to China scholars and the already well-established epistolary research in other cultures.
While the earliest evidence of diplomatic correspondence in China dates from the seventh century
In addition to the translation and analysis of many representative letters, the book explores the material culture of letter writing (writing supports and utensils, envelopes and seals, the transportation of the finished letters) and letter-writing conventions (vocabulary, textual patterns, topicality, creativity).
Antje Richter is Assistant Professor of Chinese language and civilization at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
268 Pages, 10 illustrations
978-0-295-99278-5, Paper, $30.00
978-0-295-99277-8, Cloth, $70.00
E-book available
World rights March 2013
Icons of Danish Modernity
Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen
Julie K. Allen
University of Washington Press
New Directions in Scandinavian Studies
Fall 2012
"Allen weaves a compelling cultural analysis about national identity and its mores. The juxtaposition of the works of Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen is highly original and Allen's contribution offers a much-needed introduction to an English reading audience of these important cultural figures." — Karin Sanders, University of California, Berkeley
Julie Allen utilizes the lives and friendship of the Danish literary critic George Brandes (1842–1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881–1972) to explore questions of culture and national identity in early-twentieth-century Denmark. Danish culture and politics were influenced in this period by the country's deeply ambivalent relationship with Germany. Brandes and Nielsen, both of whom lived and worked in Germany for significant periods of time, were seen as dangerously cosmopolitan by the Danish public, even while they served as international cultural ambassadors for the very society that rejected them during their lifetimes. Allen argues that they were the prototypical representatives of a socially liberal and culturally modern "Danishness" (Danskhed) that Denmark itself only gradually (and later) grew into.
This lively study brings its central characters to life while offering an original, thought-provoking analysis of the origins and permutations of Danish modernism and Danish national identity—issues that continue to be significant in today's multi-ethnic Denmark. Icons of Danish Modernity is a book about the uneasy waves that arise when celebrities take on national symbolism, and about the beginnings of this formula in the early twentieth century.
Julie K. Allen is Assistant Professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
280 pages 12 illustrations
978-0-2959-9220-4, Cloth, $50.00
E-book available
World rights except UK, Eire, and Continental Europe December 2012
Untouchable Fictions
Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste
Toral Jatin Gajarawala
Fordham University Press
Fall 2012
Winner, William Rily Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA, for the chapter entitled “Some Time Between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature,” May 2011 issue of PMLA
“Gajarawala is among the most intellectually ambitious of the contemporary Anglophone literary critics of Dalit writing, and she nicely manages to retain a stereoscopic focus on Dalit literary production and Dalit aesthetic theory.”—Parama Roy, University of California, Davis
"Dalit writing has posed extremely serious and challenging questions to literary studies in India. This book presents a sustained, insightful, and original engagement with these questions as it maps the project of modern Dalit (primarily Hindi) fiction."—Simona Sawhney, University of Minnesota
Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism—progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental—in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit (“untouchable caste”) fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?
Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text and its radical critique with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Toral Jatin Gajarawala is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.
272 Pages
978-0-8232-4525-3, Paper, $24.00
978-0-8232-4524-6, Cloth, $85.00
E-book available
World rights November 2012
The Fear of French Negroes
Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas
Sara E. Johnson
University of California Press
Fall 2012
The Fear of French Negroes explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba.
Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of “competing inter-Americanisms” as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality, and profit.
Sara E. Johnson is Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego.
312 pages
978-0-5202-71128, Paper, $49.95
World Rights
October 2012
Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature
Jörg Kreienbrock
Fordham University Press
Fall 2012
“Kreienbrock’s study moves with ease between literary theory, anthropology, epistemology, and psychology while never leaving the main thrust of his investigation from sight: the singular status of literature in articulating the pathos of the modern subject as seemingly overwhelmed and overcome by the world of things.”—Paul Fleming, Cornell University
Why do humans get angry with objects? Why is it that a malfunctioning computer, a broken tool, or a fallen glass causes an outbreak of fury? How is it possible to speak of an inanimate object’s recalcitrance, obstinacy, or even malice? When things assume a will of their own and seem to act out against human desires and wishes rather than disappear into automatic, unconscious functionality, the breakdown is experienced not as something neutral but affectively—as rage or as outbursts of laughter. Such emotions are always psychosocial: public, rhetorically performed, and therefore irreducible to a “private” feeling.
By investigating the minutest details of life among dysfunctional household items through the discourses of philosophy and science, as well as in literary works by Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Heimito von Doderer, Kreienbrock reconsiders the modern bourgeois poetics that render things the way we know and suffer them.
Jörg Kreienbrock is Assistant Professor of German at Northwestern University.
328 Pages
978-0-8232-4529-1, Paper, $26.00
978-0-8232-4528-4, Cloth, $85.00
World rights November 2012
Subversive Seduction
Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel
Travis Landry
University of Washington Press
A McClellan Book
Fall 2012
"A fascinating book. Landry's work is groundbreaking because he never leaves Darwin behind to explore Spanish literature outfitted merely with a couple of Darwinian catchphrases. Rather, he has read and reread The Descent of Man, and, much like Darwin working in nature, comes to see the workings of Darwinian principles as infusing ideas and practices in Spanish culture, far more deeply than has previously been shown."—Dale Pratt, Brigham Young University
"Travis Landry has an enviable gift for selecting the best quote to support an argument and it is truly a pleasure to read a book about canonical novels that has something new to say on every page."—Lou Charnon-Deutsch, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Male-male rivalry and female passive choice, the two principal tenets of Darwinian sexual selection, raise important ethical questions in The Descent of Man—and in the decades since—about the subjugation of women. If female choice is a key component of evolutionary success, what impact does the constraint of women's choices have on society? The elaborate courtship plots of nineteenth-century Spanish novels, with their fixation on suitors and selectors, rivalry, and seduction, were attempts to grapple with the question of female agency in a patriarchal society.
By reading Darwin through the lens of the Spanish realist novel and vice versa, Travis Landry brings new insights to our understanding of both: while Darwin's theories have often been seen as biologically deterministic, Landry asserts that Darwin's theory of sexual selection was characterized by an open-ended dynamic whose oxymoronic emphasis on "passive" female choice carries the potential for revolutionary change in the status of women.
Travis Landry is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.
336 pages
978-0-2959-9219-8, Paper, $30.00
978-0-2959-9218-1, Cloth, $70.00
E-book available
World rights November 2012
Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China
Transforming the Inner Chambers
Xiaorong Li
University of Washington Press
A China Program Book
Fall 2012
"A highly ambitious and thoughtful approach to a complex and intriguing subject. Li discusses convincingly how Ming-Qing women's literary discourse both relates and challenges the existing power (mainly male) structures in Chinese literature. A very important book."—Kang-I Sun Chang, coeditor of Women Writers of Traditional China and The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature
"Xiaorong Li's study is ambitious, comprehensive, and wide-ranging, presenting a multi-dimensional but ultimately coherent view of the seemingly simple notion of gui."—Beata Grant, author of Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China
This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (shi and ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well.
Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticize its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.
Xiaorong Li is Associate Professor of Chinese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
264 pages 4 illustrations
978-0-2959-9229-7, Paper, $30.00
978-0-2959-9205-1, Cloth, $70.00
E-book available
World rights September 2012
Marginal Modernity
The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce
Leonardo F. Lisi
Fordham University Press
Fall 2012
“. . . a superb work, extraordinarily learned, original, well-written, and of great importance.”—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
Two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have come down to us from the late eighteenth century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. In this revisionary study, Leonardo Lisi argues that these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form.
Lisi traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as his point of departure, Lisi examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce.
Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.
Leonardo Lisi is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University.
352 Pages
978-0-8232-4532-1, Cloth, $45.00
E-book available
World rights December 2012
Constellation
Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History
James McFarland
Fordham University Press
Fall 2012
"Not only does McFarland evince himself as an original and compelling interpreter of Nietzsche and Benjamin. He strings key passages together in such a way that his exegetical performance fans out toward both authors, configuring them in an inexorable interface of shared interpretation and critique."—Henry Sussman, Yale University
Constellation is the first extended exploration of the relationship between Walter Benjamin, the Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic, and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The affinity between these noncontemporaneous thinkers serves as a limit case manifesting the precariousness and potentials of cultural transmission in a disillusioned present.
The book presents the changing figure of Nietzsche as Benjamin encountered him: an inspiration to his student activism, an authority for his skeptical philology, a manifestation of his philosophical nihilism, a companion in his political exile, and ultimately a subversive collaborator in his efforts to think beyond the hopeless temporality—new and always the same—of the present moment in history.
By excavating this neglected relationship philologically and elaborating its philosophical implications in the surviving texts of both men, Constellation produces new and compelling readings of their works and through them triangulates a theoretical limit in the present, a fractured “now-time” suspended between madness and suicide, from which the collective future regains a measure of consequential and transformative vitality.
James McFarland is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at Vanderbilt University.
344 Pages
978-0-8232-4536-9, Cloth, $45.00
E-book available
World rights December 2012
Baroque Sovereignty
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico
Anna More
University of Pennsylvania Press
Fall 2012
“This book will become a landmark in the study of colonial Latin America, not just the literature but the entire culture, including most specially politics. More proves, with theoretical and scholarly authority, that a creole archive emerged in seventeenth-century Mexico, that it incorporated in complex ways the pre-Hispanic past, and that the chief keeper of the archive was Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.”—Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University
In the seventeenth century, even as the Spanish Habsburg monarchy entered its irreversible decline, the capital of its most important overseas territory was flourishing. Nexus of both Atlantic and Pacific trade routes and home to an ethnically diverse population, Mexico City produced a distinctive Baroque culture that combined local and European influences. In this context, the American-born descendants of European immigrants—or creoles, as they called themselves—began to envision a new society beyond the terms of Spanish imperialism, and the writings of the Mexican polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700) were instrumental in this process. Mathematician, antiquarian, poet, and secular priest, Sigüenza authored works on such topics as the 1680 comet, the defense of New Spain, pre-Columbian history, and the massive 1692 Mexico City riot. He wrote all of these, in his words, “out of love for my patria.”
Through readings of Sigüenza y Góngora’s diverse works, Baroque Sovereignty locates the colonial Baroque at the crossroads of a conflicted Spanish imperial rule and the political imaginary of an emergent local elite. Arguing that Spanish imperialism was founded on an ideal of Christian conversion no longer applicable at the end of the seventeenth century, More discovers in Sigüenza y Góngora’s works an alternative basis for local governance. The creole archive, understood as both the collection of local artifacts and their interpretation, solved the intractable problem of Spanish imperial sovereignty by establishing a material genealogy and authority for New Spain’s creole elite. In an analysis that contributes substantially to early modern colonial studies and theories of memory and knowledge, More posits the centrality of the creole archive for understanding how a local political imaginary emerged from the ruins of Spanish imperialism.
Anna More is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles.
448 pages 25 illustrations
978-0-8122-4469-4, Cloth, $65.00
978-0-8122-0655-5, E-book, $65.00
World Rights December 2012
The Sense of Semblance
Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art
Henry W. Pickford
Fordham University Press
Fall 2012
“. . . this wholly original study positions itself as nothing less than a systemic analysis of the first principles of aesthetic representation of catastrophic phenomena, and as such seems certain to make an enduring contribution to the field.”—R. Clifton Spargo, author of The Ethics of Mourning, Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death
“The Sense of Semblance is a work fully adequate to its demanding subject, an exemplary application of philosophical theory to artistic practice."—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
“What distinguishes Pickford’s excellent book from preceding studies is its rigorous, yet differentiated use of continental and analytic philosophy to address the challenging problems of representation, expression, performance, and historical veracity. . . . The author has greatly advanced our understanding of Holocaust art and its role in the public sphere through his persistent emphasis on the fundamental epistemological questions."—Peter Hohendahl, Cornell University
Holocaust artworks intuitively must fulfill at least two criteria: artistic (lest they be merely historical documents) and historical (lest they distort the Holocaust or become merely artworks). The Sense of Semblance locates this problematic within philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, and argues that Adorno’s dialectic of aesthetic semblance describes the normative demand that artworks maintain a dynamic tension between the two. The Sense of Semblance aims to move beyond familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of contemporary theories of meaning and understanding, including those from the analytic tradition. Pickford shows how the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, the analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image can help explicate how individual artworks fulfill artistic and historical desiderata.
In close readings of Celan’s poetry, Holocaust memorials in Berlin, the quotational artist Heimrad Bäcker, Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, Pickford offers interpretations that, in their precision, specificity, and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art.
Henry W. Pickford is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the editor and translator of Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.
296 Pages, 41 b/w illustrations
978-0-8232-4540-6, Cloth, $45.00
E-book available
World rights January 2013
Empire's Wake
Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form
Mark Quigley
Fordham University Press
Fall 2012
“A cogent, compelling, and significant intervention into the field of modern Irish literary studies on the one hand, and an intriguing account of the politics of so-called global or transnational modernism on the other. . . . Quigley writes with force and precision, never skirting issues that require patient excavation and consideration.”—Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania
Shedding new light on the rich intellectual and political milieux shaping the divergent legacies of Joyce and Yeats, Empire’s Wake traces how a distinct postcolonial modernism emerged within Irish literature in the late 1920s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that the high modernist literary canon was consolidating its influence and prestige.
By framing its explorations of postcolonial narrative form against the backdrop of distinct historical moments from the Irish Free State to the Celtic Tiger era, the book charts the different phases of twentieth-century postcoloniality in ways that clarify how the comparatively early emergence of the postcolonial in Ireland illuminates the formal shifts accompanying the transition from an age of empire to one of globalization.
Bringing together new perspectives on Beckett and Joyce with analyses of the critically neglected works of Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt, and the Blasket autobiographers, Empire’s Wake challenges the notion of a singular “global modernism” and argues for the importance of critically integrating the local and the international dimensions of modernist aesthetics.
Mark Quigley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.
264 Pages
978-0-8232-4544-4, Cloth, $45.00
E-book available
World rights November 2012
Conversion and Narrative
Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic
Ryan Szpiech
University of Pennsylvania Press
The Middle Ages Series
Fall 2012
“This impressive book bridges the fields of religious studies and comparative literature in order to produce close and sophisticated readings of conversion narratives from the later Middle Ages across a broad array of languages (Latin, Castilian/Catalan, Arabic, and Hebrew). Very few scholars can move so gracefully among these languages and areas of scholarship while offering insights from the minutiae of philological analysis to high literary theory, reflections on the nature of religion, and notions of the self.”—Jonathan Decter, Brandeis University
In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a “great man” who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness.
In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith.
Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is a comparative study of how and why conversion was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.
Ryan Szpiech teaches Spanish literature and Jewish studies at the University of Michigan.
328 pages
978-0-8122-4471-7, Cloth, $59.95
978-0-8122-0761-3, E-book, $59.95
World Rights November 2012
Cinepoetry
Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry
Christophe Wall-Romana
Fordham University Press
Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
Fall 2012
"This long-awaited book uncovers new territory for French literature and cultural studies, French film and intermedia, and poetics and new media, revealing the literary projects—cinematic avant la lettre—that shaped the early imagining of cinema and its French history."—Felicia McCarren, Tulane University
Cinepoetry analyzes how French poets have remapped poetry through the lens of cinema for more than a century. In showing how poets have drawn on mass culture, technology, and material images to incorporate the idea, technique, and experience of cinema into writing, Wall-Romana documents the long history of cross-media concepts and practices often thought to emerge with the digital.
In showing the cinematic consciousness of Mallarmé and Breton and calling for a reappraisal of the influential poetry theory of the early filmmaker Jean Epstein, Cinepoetry reevaluates the bases of literary modernism. The book also explores the crucial link between trauma and trans-medium experiments in the wake of two world wars and highlights the marginal identity of cinepoets, who were often Jewish, gay, foreign-born, or on the margins.
What results is a broad rethinking of the relationship between film and literature. The episteme of cinema, the book demonstates, reached the very core of its supposedly highbrow rival, while at the same time modern poetry cultivated the technocultural savvy that is found today in slams, e-poetry, and poetic-digital hybrids.
Christophe Wall-Romana is Associate Professor of French at the University of Minnesota.
512 Pages, 6 color and 51 b/w illustrations
978-0-8232-4548-2, Cloth, $55.00
E-book available
World rights January 2013
A Common Strangeness
Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature
Jacob Edmond
Fordham University Press
Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
Spring 2012
Honorable Mention, 2013 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association
“A Common Strangeness is unique among studies of contemporary poetics in being genuinely global in its perspective and its reach. At home in Russian and Chinese as well as American poetry and that of his native New Zealand, Jacob Edmond pinpoints the crucial relationships that exist between what are seemingly disparate poetic cultures. The Chinese poet Yang Lian, who lived in exile in Auckland, is read under the sign of Benjamin and Baudelaire. The American Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s important dialogue with the Russian avant-gardist Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is studied carefully, and Bei Dao, Dmitri Prigov, and Charles Bernstein are treated as representative figures of cross-cultural thinking in the age of globalism. Edmond’s is a provocative, exciting, and genuinely original study of the new poetics; we will all be learning from it!”—Marjorie Perloff, Professor of English Emerita, Stanford University, author of Unoriginal Genius and Wittgenstein’s Ladder
In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post–Cold War forms.
Jacob Edmond teaches English at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
256 pages, 19 b/w illustrations, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-4260-3, Paper, $26.00
978-0-8232-4259-7, Cloth, $70.00
E-book available
World Rights
March 2012
Disappearing Traces
Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics
Dorota Glowacka
University of Washington Press
Spring 2012
“This book is very profound. Every time Glowacka introduces a major thinker into her consideration of the questions at hand she adds a much deeper understanding not only of the question but also of the thinker. This is a must read for Holocaust scholars and teachers.”—David Patterson, Hillel Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas
“Dorota Glowacka’s impassioned and eloquent dialogue with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas makes a persuasive case for translating his ethics into a poetics (what she calls ‘poethics’) that powerfully illuminates post-Holocaust philosophy, literature, and visual art.”—Karyn Ball, author of Disciplining the Holocaust
In Disappearing Traces, Dorota Glowacka examines the tensions between the ethical and aesthetic imperatives in literary, artistic, and philosophical works about the Holocaust, in a search for new ways to understand the traumatic past and its impact on the present. She engages with the work of leading twentieth-century philosophers and theorists, including Levinas, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Derrida, to consider the role of language in the construction and transmission of traumatic memories; the relation between self-identity and the act of bearing witness; and the ethical implications of representing trauma.
Glowacka’s work draws on a wide range of discourses and disciplines, bringing into conversation various genres of writing and artistic production. It reveals the need to find innovative idioms and new means of engaging with the past, and to create alliances between different disciplines and modes of representing the past that transform and transcend existing paradigms of representation.
Dorota Glowacka is Professor of Humanities in the Contemporary Studies Program at the University of King’s College, Halifax, Canada. She is the coeditor of Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries and Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust.
304 pages, 19 illustrations, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-2959-9169-6, Paper, $30.00
978-0-2959-9168-9, Cloth, $70.00
July 2012
Art by the Book
Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China
J.P. Park
University of Washington Press
Spring 2012
“Art by the Book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the way taste, status, and a growing urban sphere changed the content of elite self-understanding in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century China. By constantly cross-cutting between social history and the content and style of the painting manuals, Park demonstrates how even those outside the literati orbit could begin to take on the aura of the highest elites.”—Katherine Carlitz, University of Pittsburgh
“The printed manuals are situated within the wider horizons of late Ming thought, literature, tastes, fashions, values, and lifestyles. Thus, in addition to students of late imperial Chinese art history, this book should appeal to those interested in later Chinese literary, social, and cultural history, to readers interested in the history of the book, and to students of early modern cultural and social theory in comparative context.”—Richard Vinograd, Stanford University
Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications.
Focusing on Zhou’s work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliché was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person’s command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital. Park builds on important recent research on social status, economic development, and print publishing in late imperial China to show how a world of social meaning is evident in the literary subgenre of painting manuals, and provides insight into the links between art history, print culture, and social history.
J. P. Park is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
336 pages, 101 b/w illustrations, 16 color illustrations
7 x 10 in.
978-0-2959-9176-4, Cloth, $50.00
World Rights
February 2012
Consuming Visions
Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro
Maite Conde
University of Virginia Press
Fall 2011
“Conde has astutely identified a gap in existing literature, namely, a study of the relationship between pre-modernist writers of ‘mass literature’ and film. Highly original and likely to prompt new ways of thinking about film culture.”—Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool
Consuming Visions explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early-twentiethcentury Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country’s broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women’s novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers’ encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city.
The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city’s modernization but also enabled new urban spectators—women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population—to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation’s cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena—popular theater, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines—reflected changes that not only modernized literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.
Maite Conde is a Research Fellow at the Brazil Institute at King’s College, University of London.
248 pages, 17 b/w illustrations, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8139-3213-2, Cloth, $49.50
978-0-8139-3214-9, Paper, $21.50
Ebook available
World Rights
November 2011
Rewriting Russia
Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama
Barbara J. Henry
University of Washington Press
Fall 2011
"Lucid and engaging, Rewriting Russia makes an important scholarly contribution to the fields of Yiddish culture, American Jewish history, and Russian Jewish history."—Tony Michels, author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York.
"This is a rare work that presents us with a mold-breaking study of literary history as well as a brilliant analysis of literary text."—Jeremy Dauber, author of In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern
Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian émigré. His most successful and scandalous dramas—The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan—were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land. Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.
Barbara Henry is associate professor of Russian literature and Jewish studies at the University of Washington.
276 pp., 4 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-2959-9133-7, $35.00 paper
World rights
December 2011
Shaken Wisdom
Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction
Gloria Nne Onyeoziri
University of Virginia Press
Fall 2011
“Shaken Wisdom is a delight to read. Onyeoziri’s mastery of African cultural practices and oral traditions, linguistic theory, and African literature is truly impressive. Well-written, well-argued, and well-researched, the book brings a very special set of insights to African fiction, linguistic theories about irony, and gender studies.”—Laura Rice, Oregon State University, author of Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa
In her focus on irony and meaning in postcolonial African fiction, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri refers to an internal subversion of the discourse of the wise and the powerful, a practice that has played multiple roles in the circulation of knowledge, authority, and opinion within African communities; in the interpretation of colonial and postcolonial experience; and in the ongoing resistance to tyrannies in African societies. But irony is always reversible and may be used to question the oppressed as well as the oppressor, shaking all presumptions of wisdom. Although the author cites numerous African writers, she selects six works by Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Calixthe Beyala for her primary analysis.
Gloria Nne Onyeoziri, Associate Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, is the author of La parole poétique d’Aimé Césaire: Essai de sémantique littéraire.
192 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth 978-0-8139-3186-9 $49.50
Paper 978-0-8139-3187-6 $21.50
Ebook available
World rights
September 2011
Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies
From Africa to the Antilles
Edgard Sankara
University of Virginia Press
Fall 2011
“This study is likely to incite much discussion and contribute to further studies on Francophone autobiographies nationally or in transnational comparative perspectives. Sankara’s book is exciting to read, and it renews and revitalizes interest in this important literature.”—Kandioura Dramé, University of Virginia, author of The Novel as Transformation Myth: A Study of the Novels of Mongo Beti and Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of autobiography, Edgard Sankara considers a cross-section of postcolonial Francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean in order to examine and compare for the first time their transnational reception. Sankara not only compares the ways in which a wide selection of autobiographies were received locally as well as in France but also juxtaposes reception by the colonized and the colonizer to show how different meanings were assigned to the works after publication. Sankara’s geographical and cultural coverage of Africa and its diaspora is rich, with separate chapters devoted to the autobiographies of Hampâté Bâ, Valentin Mudimbé, Kesso Barry, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Maryse Condé.
Edgard Sankara is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Delaware.
232 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth 978-0-8139-3171-5 $55.00
Paper 978-0-8139-3172-2 $24.50
Ebook available
World rights
August 2011
Genealogies of Fiction
Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the 'Orlando furioso'
Eleonora Stoppino
Fordham University Press
Fall 2011
“A groundbreaking study of Ariosto’s medieval sources that benefits from a vision that brings together gender criticism and source criticism in heretofore unseen ways.”—Dennis Looney, University of Pittsburgh
“Establishing contrasts and parallels with little-known works of the vernacular narrative romance tradition, Stoppino displays impressive erudition and performs a service for the critical discussion on Ariosto’s poem and on early modern narrative.”—Ronald Martinez, Brown University
Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso.
Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.
Eleonora Stoppino is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Illinois.
208 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-4037-1, Hardcover, $55.00
Ebook available
World rights
December 2011
Beyond the Mother Tongue
The Postmonolingual Condition
Yasemin Yildiz
Fordham University Press
Fall 2011
Winnter, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association
“A bold, ambitious, and timely evaluation of philosophical and literary imagination of language.”—B. Venkat Mani, author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk
“A welcome, necessary, and well-crafted addition to a variety of studies in the fields of German-Turkish and German-Jewish studies—studies that increasingly participate in the much broader discussion of modernity/modernism, postmodern identities, globalization, multiculturalism, and ethnicity studies.”—Amir Eshel, Stanford University
Monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.
Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture and charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as "postmonolingual".
Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the "mother tongue" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.
Yasemin Yildiz is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Illinois.
208 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-4130-9, Hardcover, $45.00
Ebook available
World rights
December 2011
Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment
Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier
University of Virginia Press
Spring 2011
"Once in a decade, a critical text surfaces that upends our run-of-the-mill reading of literature. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier’s book does just that for African francophone literature. By its breadth and depth, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment not only subsumes previous critical works on the subject, but also provides new grids for exploring the ever-expanding African francophone corpus."—Emmanuel Dongala, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, author of Johnny Mad Dog and Little Boys Come from the Stars
Within roughly the past fifty to sixty years, after most francophone African countries gained independence, the concept of “engagement” has been undergoing a change in both terminology and practice. The belief in the transformative power of both literature and the intellect, and the sense of writing as a mission, have given way in the past fifteen years to a less idealistic and dogmatic stance as writers shift to a more nuanced understanding and practice of African literatures. Recognizing that previous notions of engagement that dominated the effort to combat neocolonialism now seem exhausted, if not obsolete, contemporary francophone African writers are reaching for newer modes of commitment in their work. This book offers both an overview of this transition and an analysis of this writing today.
Working across genres but focusing on the novel, Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier take up the evolution of the concept of engagement to show how contemporary francophone African writers are expanding their forms of commitment to include aesthetics, in addition to politics, and to broaden their context to that of world literature. Among the topics they discuss are the processes of identifying with and belonging to Africa, the modes of resistance to the old notions of writing as art, the role of memory in a re-crafting of the heroic figure, current approaches to violence and immigration, and the impact of the publishing industry and the Internet. Their selected writers range from Mongo Beti, Ousmane Sembene, and Aminata Sow Fall to Boubacar Boris Diop, Véronique Tadjo, Alain Mabanckou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Léonora Miano, among others.
Odile Cazenave is Professor of French at Boston University. Patricia Célérier is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College.
256 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8139-3095-4, Paper, $24.50
978-0-8139-3096-1, Cloth, $55.00
Ebook available
World rights
February 2011
Poetry in Pieces
César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity
Michelle Clayton
University of California Press
FlashPoints series
Spring 2011
"This excellent study abounds with insights on an intriguing author." —Choice
Set against the cultural and political backdrop of inter-war Europe and the Americas, Poetry in Pieces is the first major study of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892–1938) to appear in English in more than thirty years. Vallejo lived and wrote in two distinct settings—Peru and Paris—which were continually crisscrossed by new developments in aesthetics, politics, and practices of everyday life; his poetry and prose therefore need to be read in connection with modernity in all its forms and spaces. Michelle Clayton combines close readings of Vallejo’s writings with cultural, historical, and theoretical analysis, connecting Vallejo—and Latin American poetry—to the broader panorama of international modernism and the avant-gardes, and to writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Georges Bataille, and Charlie Chaplin. Poetry in Pieces sheds new light on one of the key figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, exploring ways of rethinking the parameters of international lyric modernity.
Michelle Clayton is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles.
320 pp., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-520-26229-4, Paper, $39.95tx, £27.95
Ebook available
World rights
January 2011
Art Without an Author
Vasari's Lives and Michelangelo's Death
Marco Ruffini
Fordham University Press
Spring 2011
Winner, Howard R. Marraro Prize for Italian Studies, Modern Language Association
"A concise and highly readable volume that considers an enormously important constellation of matters within Italian culture of the late Renaissance, touching on a broad range of matters artistic, literary, and social."—Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
"Ruffini lays the groundwork for better understanding the background for confusion behind claims to authorship in our own post-Enlightenment age. He also makes it possible for us to accommodate into the humanities the sort of corporate authorship and publishing collaborations that were common in the sixteenth century, but are practiced routinely today only in the sciences. He does this through an elegant, scholarly, and even gripping discussion of the academic project of producing Vasari’s Lives, and the functions that Michelangelo’s art and persona have performed in art and literary history."—Evelyn Lear, Brown University
Perhaps no other text has exerted such a formidable influence on the discipline of art history as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, republished 1568). Michelangelo figures centrally in the Lives and exemplifies art as an expression of the individual. Yet, as this book shows, the Lives fashions Michelangelo as the founder of a new, academic era in which art develops collectively as a discipline. Each of the five chapters of this book examines the notion of “art without an author,” whereby art is teachable and not the inimitable product of a genius, a corporate rather than an individualistic venture. By way of close study this book reaches new conclusions about the production and significance of Vasari’s Lives, Michelangelo, and the role “authorial” values play in Italian Renaissance culture.
Marco Ruffini is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Art History at Northwestern University.
208 pages, 46 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3456-1, Paper, $26.00 (01)
978-0-8232-3455-4, Cloth, $80.00 (06)
World rights
July 2011
English Heart, Hindi Heartland
The Political Life of Literature in India
Rashmi Sadana
University of California Press
Flashpoints Series
Spring 2011
English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions,
prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—
in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally
recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind
Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other
writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes
an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place,
language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so
doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics
of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates not only how the notion
of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic obscures larger questions
relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but also that the authenticity discourse itself
is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India’s complex
linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political
distinctions that Sadana calls “literary nationality.” Sadana argues that, as it is positioned
among the other Indian languages, English does not represent a fixed pole but rather serves
to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.
Rashmi Sadana is Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.
320 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-520-26957-6, Paper, $49.95tx
Ebook available
World Rights
January 2011
Apocalyptic Futures
Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee
Russell Samolsky
Fordham University Press
Spring 2011
"Apocalyptic Futures consists of a brilliant long theoretical introductory chapter followed by three long chapters, one each on Kafka (primarily In the Penal Colony), Conrad (primarily Heart of Darkness), and Coetzee (primarily Waiting for the Barbarians). Each of these chapters is a major contribution to the literature on its topic, strikingly original and persuasive. Samolsky writes with verve and remarkable clarity about difficult concepts and makes readings of great subtlety and penetration."—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
"Samolsky is a close reader with an impressive erudition in deconstruction and rhetorical reading. His account of Kafka’s uncanny gift for prognostication, whether the future of technology, communications, or twentieth-century political outcomes, is the most valuable currently available in the marketplace of cultural critique and literary exegesis."—Henry Sussman, Yale University
In this book, the author argues that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, he examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event into its future reception. He is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions.
Apocalyptic Futures also sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the author focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee.
Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, the author argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works’ apocalyptic futures in our own urgent and perilous situation.
Russell Samolsky is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
192 pp., 10 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3480-6, Paper, $24.00 (01)
978-0-8232-3479-0, Cloth, $65.00 (06)
Ebook available
World rights
August 2011
Standing by the Ruins
Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon
Ken Seigneurie
Fordham University Press
Spring 2011
"Fascinating, eloquent, and tightly argued, Standing by the Ruins offers a distinctive perspective on relations between cultural productions and politics in times of extreme duress. Across a range of fascinating examples, Seigneiurie shows the ways in which novelists and filmmakers offer alternative visions in a collapsing world that can set the stage for new ways of imagining the future."—David Damrosch, Harvard University
Since the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance to it.
Focusing on contemporary Lebanese fiction, film, and popular culture, this book shows how artists reappropriated the twin legacies of commitment literature and the ancient topos of “standing by the ruins” to form a new “elegiac humanism” during the tumultuous period of 1975 to 2005. It redirects attention to the critical role of culture in conditioning attitudes throughout society and is therefore relevant to other societies facing sectarian extremism.
Modern Arabic novels, feature films, and popular culture, far from being simply cultural imports, are hybrid forms deployed to respond to the challenges of contemporary Arab society. As such, they are cultural products that travel and intervene in the world.
Ken Seigneurie is Associate Professor of World Literature and Director of the Program in World Literature at Simon Fraser University, Surrey, British Columbia. He spent the first thirteen years of his scholarly career in Lebanon, where he edited Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative.
224 pages, 21 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3483-7, Paper, $26.00 (01)
978-0-8232-3482-0, Cloth, $80.00 (06)
Ebook available
World rights
July 2011
Disarming Words
Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt
Shaden M. Tageldin
University of California Press
FlashPoints series
Spring 2011
Honorable Mention, 2013 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association
Winner, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize for 2011, for the chapter entitled "Secularizing Islam: Carlyle, al-Siba'i, and the Translations of 'Religion' in British Egypt," January 2011 issue of PMLA
In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār; Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, ʿAlī Mubārak, Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Māzinī, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, and Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt; and Salāma Mūsā, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.
Shaden M. Tageldin is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
368 pp.
978-0-520-26552-3, Paper, $39.95tx, £27.95
Ebook available
World rights
June 2011
The Bad Taste of Others
Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France
Jennifer Tsien
University of Pennsylvania Press
Spring 2011
“The Bad Taste of Others is a systematic and thorough treatment of the difficult issue of taste, one that
departs from canonical frames of reference. Jennifer Tsien’s approach is original and innovative—many
valuable tomes have been produced on early modern aesthetics, but nobody has ever made it look so
entertaining, nor analyzed it with such lucid zest.”—Elena Russo, The Johns Hopkins University
An act of bad taste was more than a faux pas to French philosophers of the Enlightenment. To Montesquieu,
Voltaire, Diderot, and others, bad taste in the arts could be a sign of the decline of a civilization.
These intellectuals, faced with the potential chaos of an expanding literary market, created seals of disapproval
in order to shape the literary and cultural heritage of France in their image. In The Bad Taste
of Others, Jennifer Tsien examines the power of ridicule and exclusion to shape the period’s aesthetics.
Tsien reveals how the philosophes consecrated themselves as the protectors of true French culture
modeled on the classical, the rational, and the orderly. Their anxiety over the invasion of the Republic
of Letters by hordes of hacks caused them to devise standards that justified the marginalization
of worldy women, “barbarians,” and plebeians. Tsien’s study draws attention to long-disregarded
works of salon culture, such as the énigmes, and offers a new perspective on the critical legacy of
Voltaire. The philosophes’ open disdain for the undiscerning reading public challenges the belief
that the rise of aesthetics went hand in hand with Enlightenment ideas of equality and relativism.
Jennifer Tsien is Associate Professor of French at the University of Virginia.
208 pages, 46 b/w illustrations, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3456-1, Paper, $26.00
978-0-8232-3455-4, Cloth, $80.00
World Rights
July 2011
Accessories to Modernity
Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France
Susan Hiner
University of Pennsylvania Press
Spring 2010
Winner of the Costume Society of America's 2011 Millia Davenport Publication Award
"Susan Hiner's Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France breaks open . . . seemingly mute and trivial objects--shawls, parasols, fans, handbags, and the marriage baskets that contain them--to reveal the rich social meanings they harbor in their historical context. Drawing on a variety of sources, from the popular physiologies and fashion press to canonical novels, she makes these objects expand like Proust's Japanese paper flowers into meaningful and suggestive signs. . . . This book is a pleasure to read: extremely well-written, elegant, clear, fascinating, and witty. Hiner admirably weaves together disparate texts and illustrations into a coherent and cogent argument."—Dorothy Kelly, Boston University, reviewed in H-France
"Hiner avoids many of the pitfalls that plague literary scholars who venture into fashion history. Hers is one of those rare books that give interdisciplinarity a good name, advancing both fields without alienating non-specialist readers. By reclaiming accessories from the margins of the realist novel, Hiner has written the most ingenious kind of fashion history, documenting not the whats, whos, and whens, but the elusive hows and whys."—Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
Accessories to Modernity explores the ways that feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period.
As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman’s paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it.
Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the “accessory” status—in terms of both complicity and subordination—of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.
Susan Hiner is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College.
288 pp., 30 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8122-4259-1, Cloth, $47.50s, £31.00
World rights
June 2010
Dagur Kári's Nói the Albino
Björn Norðfjörð
University of Washington Press
Nordic Film Classics series
Spring 2010
Dagur Kári's Nói the Albino (Nói Albínói, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Nói the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and existential angst, while its setting in the Westfjords of Iceland provided an almost surreal backdrop whose particularities of place are uniquely Icelandic. Björn Norðfjörð's examination of the film integrates the broad context and history of Icelandic cinema into a close reading of Nói the Albino's themes, visual style, and key scenes. The book also includes an interview with the director, Dagur Kári.
Nói the Albino's successful negotiation of the tensions between the local and the global contribute to the film's status as a contemporary classic. Its place within the history of Icelandic cinema highlights the specific problems this small nation faces as it pursues its filmmaking ambitions, allowing us to appreciate the remarkable success of Kári's film in relation to the challenges of transnational filmmaking.
Björn Norðfjörð is Assistant Professor and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Iceland. His publications in both Icelandic and English focus equally on Icelandic national cinema and world cinema.
144 pp., 10 illus., 5.5 x 7.5 in.
978-0-295-99009-5, Paper, $24.95
World rights except UK and Continental Europe
May 2010
The Doppelgänger
Literature's Philosophy
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Fordham University Press
Spring 2010
"A bold and complex treatment of a classic literary figure that will make this book standard reference for years to come, both in what it contributes to modernist criticism and in how it reconceptualizes the terrain of contemporary literary theory."—Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
The Doppelgänger presents literature as the double of philosophy. This relation is historically rooted in the genesis of the doppelgänger as literature’s response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity: The term doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism’s assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality, and human agency. This critique prefigures late-twentieth-century extrapolations of the subject as decentered. From this perspective, the doppelgänger has a family resemblance to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity.
This is the first significant study of the doppelgänger’s influence on philosophical thought. Reading literature philosophically and philosophy as literature, Vardoulakis examines authors such as Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Alexandros Papadiamantes and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida to show how the doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy’s relation to literature.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is Lecturer in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Western Sydney. He is the editor of Spinoza Now and the co-editor of After Blanchot.
336 pp., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3299-4, Paper, $28.00 S
978-0-8232-3298-7, Cloth, $70.00 X
Ebook available
World rights
June 2010
