When Adorned in Dreams was first published in 1985, Angela Carter described the book as "the best I have read on the subject, bar none." From haute couture to haberdashery, "deviant" dress to Dior, Elizabeth Wilson traces the social and cultural history of fashion and its complex relationship to modernity. She also discusses fashion's vociferous opponents, from the "dress reform" movement to certain strands of feminism. Wilson delights in the power of fashion to mark out identity or subvert it. This brand new edition of her book follows recent developments to bring the story of fashionable dress up to date, exploring the grunge look inspired by bands like Nirvana, the "boho chic" of the mid 90's, retro-dressing, and the meanings of dress from the veil to soccer player David Beckham's pink-varnished toenails.

Since the early nineteenth century, the bohemian has been the protagonist of the story the West has wanted to hear about its artists-a story of genius, glamour, and doom. The bohemian takes on many guises: the artist dying in poverty like Modigliani or an outrageous entertainer like Josephine Baker. Elizabeth Wilson's enjoyable book is a quest for the many shifting meanings that constitute the bohemian and bohemia.

She tells unforgettable stories of the artists, intellectuals, radicals, and hangers-on who populated the salons, bars, and cafs of Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, including Djuna Barnes, Juliette Greco, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock. Bohemians also follows the women who contributed to the myth, including the wives and mistresses, the muses, lesbians, and independent artists. Wilson explores the bohemians' eccentric use of dress, the role of sex and erotic love, the bohemian search for excess, and the intransigent politics of many.

As a new millennium begins, Wilson shows how notions of bohemianism remain at the core of heated cultural debates about the role of art and artists in an increasingly commodified and technological world.

In Gut Feminism Elizabeth A. Wilson urges feminists to rethink their resistance to biological and pharmaceutical data. Turning her attention to the gut and depression, she asks what conceptual and methodological innovations become possible when feminist theory isn’t so instinctively antibiological. She examines research on anti-depressants, placebos, transference, phantasy, eating disorders and suicidality with two goals in mind: to show how pharmaceutical data can be useful for feminist theory, and to address the necessary role of aggression in feminist politics. Gut Feminism’s provocative challenge to feminist theory is that it would be more powerful if it could attend to biological data and tolerate its own capacity for harm.

Tennis has never been played better than it is today. To watch Rafael Nadal spin a forehand at 4000 rpm, Maria Sharapova arabesque out of a serve, Serena Williams utterly destroy a short ball, or Roger Federer touch a volley into an impossibly angled winner is to watch not only the best players with the best coaching hitting with the best racquets, it is to watch the culmination of an entire history. Love Game is different from most tennis books—it isn’t a ghostwritten biography, and it won’t teach you how to slice your serve. It’s a book about tennis’s grand culture, one that unveils the sport’s long history as it lives and breathes (or grunts) in the modern game.
           
No one is better equipped to tell this story than novelist and historian Elizabeth Wilson. With a penchant for tennis’s inherent drama, she finds its core: a psychological face off between flamboyant personalities navigating the ebbs and flows of fortune in the confines of a 78 x 36–foot box—whether of clay, grass, or DecoTurf. Walking the finely kempt lawns of Victorian England, she shows how tennis’s early role as a social pastime that included both men and women—and thus, lots of sexual tension—set it apart from most other sports and their dominant masculine appeal. Even today, when power and endurance are more important than ever, tennis still demands that the body behave gracefully and with finesse. In this way, Wilson shows, tennis has retained the vibrant spectacle of human drama and beauty that have always made it special, not just to sports fans but to popular culture.
           
Telling the stories of all the greats, from the Renshaw brothers to Novak Djokovic, and of all the advances, from wooden racquets to network television schedules, Wilson offers a tennis book like no other, keeping the court square in our sights as history is illuminated around it.    

How can scientific theories contribute to contemporary accounts of embodiment in the humanities and social sciences? In particular, how does neuroscientific research facilitate new approaches to theories of mind and body? Feminists have frequently criticized the neurosciences for biological reductionism, yet, Elizabeth A. Wilson argues, neurological theories—especially certain accounts of depression, sexuality, and emotion—are useful to feminist theories of the body. Rather than pointing toward the conventionalizing tendencies of the neurosciences, Wilson emphasizes their capacity for reinvention and transformation. Focusing on the details of neuronal connections, subcortical pathways, and reflex actions, she suggests that the central and peripheral nervous systems are powerfully allied with sexuality, the affects, emotional states, cognitive appetites, and other organs and bodies in ways not fully appreciated in the feminist literature. Whether reflecting on Simon LeVay’s hypothesis about the brains of gay men, Peter Kramer’s model of depression, or Charles Darwin’s account of trembling and blushing, Wilson is able to show how the neurosciences can be used to reinvigorate feminist theories of the body.

The tyrannies of sexual normativity have been widely denounced in queer theory. Heteronormativity, homonormativity, family values, marriage, and monogamy have all been objects of sustained queer critique, most often in purely oppositional form: as antinormativity. The contributors to this special issue ask a seemingly simple question of this critical code: can queer theory proceed without a primary allegiance to antinormativity? These essays offer an affirmative answer either by rethinking normativity or eschewing it altogether in order to redirect the intellectual and political energies of the field. 

An accessible guide to the work of American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins

 

The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook makes his theories portable across a range of interdisciplinary contexts and accessible to a wide variety of contemporary scholars and students of affect. 

A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion. In addition to clarifying his affect theory, the Handbook emphasizes Tomkins’s other significant contributions, from his broad theories of imagery and consciousness to more focused concepts of scenes and scripts. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins’s work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies.