The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres, including fiction, ­zuihitsu (essays), war diaries, poetry, travelogues, and children’s stories. In discussing his oeuvre, critics have circumscribed Hyakken to a private literary realm detached from the era in which he wrote.

Rachel DiNitto provides a critical corrective by locating in Hyakken’s simple yet powerful literary language a new way to appreciate the various literary reactions to the modernization of the early decades of the twentieth century and a means to open up a literary space of protest, an alternate intellectual response to the era of militarism.

This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time: a consumer-oriented print culture; the popular entertainment of film; the capitalist and cultural force of an emergent middle class; a planned, yet sprawling metropolis; and the war machine of an expanding Japanese ­empire. Emerging from this analysis is a writer who relied on the quotidian language of the everyday and the symbols of cultural modernism to counter the harsh realities of modernization and imperialism and to express sentiments contrary to the mainstream ideological rhetoric of the time.

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Whiteness revealed: an analysis of the destructive complacency of white self-consciousness​

White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take.

Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a “majority minority” population and the growing diversification of America’s political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives.

The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

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From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the geopolitical placement of Ukraine drew the attention of some of Europe’s most influential cartographers. Many of these maps, including ones of exceptional rarity, were collected by the Ukrainian scholar and journalist Bohdan Krawciw.

Krawciw traced the physical and aesthetic depiction of Ukraine across its changing borders as a means of self-recognition and as a cultural and political history of the contested nation and its peoples. Of special interest are his maps of Ukraine from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the crossroads of four empires: Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet.

As part of his personal archive, Krawciw’s maps were bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1975. This book serves as both a catalog of his collection and a description of how the maps he collected serve as an invaluable source for Ukraine’s history and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity. The book contains nearly 100 examples from the collection, many in full color, as well as indices listing maps by cartographer and by place name.

In Ukraine, War, Love, Olena Stiazhkina depicts day-to-day developments in and around her beloved hometown Donetsk during Russia’s 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city. An award-winning fiction writer, Stiazhkina chronicles an increasingly harrowing series of events with sarcasm, anger, humor, and love.

The diary opens on March 2, 2014, as the first wave of pro-Russian protest washes over eastern Ukraine in the wake of Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and it closes on August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees is deliberately slaughtered by Russian forces. Early on, Stiazhkina is captured by pro-Russian forces while she browses for books but is freed when one of her captors turns out to be a former student. Vignettes from her personal life intermingle with current events, and she examines ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We walk with local dogs and their owners; we meet a formidable apartment building manager who shames occupiers and dismantles their artillery from the roof of her building; we follow a family evacuated to Kyiv whose young son builds checkpoints out of Legos. Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is a fierce love letter to her country, her city, and her people.

In December 1994, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, having received assurances that its sovereignty would be respected and secured by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Based on original and heretofore unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

Kostenko presents an insider’s view on the issue of nuclear disarmament and raises the question of whether the complete and immediate dismantlement of the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal was strategically the right decision, especially in view of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, one of the guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty under denuclearization.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 jeopardizes the country's independence and its chances for Western-style development. However, the heroic attitude of the Ukrainian people, combined with a solidifying national identity, makes the domestic foundations for a western turn stronger than ever. After the invasion, building strong foundations of liberal democracy will be a top priority. In addition to alleviating immediate problems, the country must also address its post-communist legacy and address the constraints of patronalism.

The authors of this edited volume, leading Ukrainian scholars supplemented by colleagues from Hungary, examine the chances of an anti-patronal transformation after the war. The book provides an overview of the development of Ukraine's political-economic system: color revolutions in 2004 and 2014 brought democratic transformation, but no change in the patronage system The result was patronal regime cycles instead of the emergence of a Western-type liberal democracy in the country. Building on the conceptual framework of the editors' The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), the 12 chapters examine the impact of the war on patronal democracy, the relational economy, clientelist society, and the international environment in which Ukraine operates.

This collection is complemented by the book entitled Russia. Imperial Endeavor and Geopolitical Consequences.

Ukrainian nationalism made worldwide news after the Euromaidan revolution and the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014. Invoked by regional actors and international commentators, the “integral” Ukrainian nationalism of the 1930s has moved to the center of debates about Eastern Europe, but the history of this divisive ideology remains poorly understood.

This timely book by Trevor Erlacher is the first English-language biography of the doctrine’s founder, Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Organizing his research of the period around Dontsov’s life, Erlacher has written a global intellectual history of Ukrainian integral nationalism from late imperial Russia to postwar North America, with relevance for every student of the history of modern Europe and the diaspora.

Thanks to the circumstances of Dontsov’s itinerant, ninety-year life, this microhistorical approach allows for a geographically, chronologically, and thematically broad yet personal view on the topic. Dontsov shaped and embodied Ukrainian politics and culture as a journalist, diplomat, literary critic, publicist, and ideologue, progressing from heterodox Marxism, to avant-garde fascism, to theocratic traditionalism.

Drawing upon archival research in Ukraine, Poland, and Canada, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

In 1990, months before crowds in Moscow and other major cities dismantled their monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire inadvertently shaped this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

Lviv’s borderlands identity was defined by complicated relationships with its Polish neighbor, its imperial Soviet occupier, and the real and imagined West. The city’s intellectuals—working through compromise rather than overt opposition—strained the limits of censorship in order to achieve greater public use of Ukrainian language and literary expression, and challenged state-sanctioned histories with their collective memory of the recent past. Lviv’s post–Stalin-generation youth, to which Risch pays particular attention, forged alternative social spaces where their enthusiasm for high culture, politics, soccer, music, and film could be shared.

The Ukrainian West enriches our understanding not only of the Soviet Union’s postwar evolution but also of the role urban spaces, cosmopolitan identities, and border regions play in the development of nations and empires. And it calls into question many of our assumptions about the regional divisions that have characterized politics in Ukraine. Risch shines a bright light on the political, social, and cultural history that turned this once-peripheral city into a Soviet window on the West.

Drawing on quantitative data drawn from a range of trials Kateryna Dysa first describes the ideological background of the tribunals based on works written by priests and theologians that reflect attitudes toward the devil and witches. The main focus of her work, however, is the process leading to witchcraft accusations. From the stories of participants of the trials she shows what led people to enunciate first suspicions then accusations of witchcraft. Finally, she presents a microhistory from one Volhynian village, comparing attitudes toward two “female crimes” in the Ukrainian courts. 

The study is based on archival research including witch trials transcripts. Dysa approaches the trials as indications of belief and practice, attempting to understand the actors involved rather than dismiss or condemn them. She takes care to situate early modern Ukrainian witchcraft and its accompanying trials in a broader European context, with comparisons to some African cases as well.

A fresh batch of deliciously distinctive recipes from the Star Tribune’s beloved annual cookie contest—with even more recipes, enticing photographs, and bakers’ stories

Cold winters call for warm kitchens and cookie baking, especially around the holidays. The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book, a compendium of Minnesota’s rich baking traditions and innovative recipes, stirs up winning treats from twenty years of the Star Tribune’s popular holiday cookie contest.

Significantly expanding and updating its 2018 predecessor, The Great Minnesota Cookie Book, this collection features thirty-five new recipes, including Grasshoppers and Dark Chocolate Fig Rolls, Tiramisu Twists and Cardamom Cherry Buttons, Diablo Snowballs, Spumoni Squares, and Maple-Roasted Walnut Delights. This sweet-tooth treasure trove of cookie recipes will inspire bakers to discover how many ways flour, sugar, butter, and eggs (plus several unexpected ingredients) can be combined to create new favorites for the holidays—or any time of year.

The best of the best, these contest-winning cookies are accompanied by beautiful photographs and baking tips, insights, and essays. Indulge in these delightful, mouth-watering recipes while Minnesota’s best bakers share stories of cherished holiday traditions, recall memorable cookie moments, and celebrate how baking brings us together.

As bad as they are, why aren't terrorists worse? With biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons at hand, they easily could be. And, as this chilling book suggests, they soon may well be. A former member of the National Security Council staff, Jessica Stern guides us expertly through a post-Cold War world in which the threat of all-out nuclear war, devastating but highly unlikely, is being replaced by the less costly but much more imminent threat of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

According to SternThe Ultimate Terrorists depicts a not-very-distant future in which both independent and state-sponsored terrorism using weapons of mass destruction could actually occur. But Stern also holds out hope for new technologies that might combat this trend, and for legal and political remedies that would improve public safety without compromising basic constitutional rights.

Once described by Trygve Lie as the "most impossible job on earth," the position of UN Secretary-General is as frustratingly constrained as it is prestigious. The Secretary-General's ability to influence global affairs often depends on how the international community regards his moral authority. In relation to such moral authority, past office-holders have drawn on their own ethics and religious backgrounds—as diverse as Lutheranism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Coptic Christianity—to guide the role that they played in addressing the UN's goals in the international arena, such as the maintenance of international peace and security and the promotion of human rights.

In The UN Secretary-General and Moral Authority, contributors provide case studies of all seven former secretaries-general, establishing a much-needed comparative survey of each office-holder's personal religious and moral values. From Trygve Lie's forbearance during the UN's turbulent formative years to the Nobel committee's awarding Kofi Annan and the United Nations the prize for peace in 2001, the case studies all follow the same format, first detailing the environmental and experiential factors that forged these men's ethical frameworks, then analyzing how their "inner code" engaged with the duties of office and the global events particular to their terms.

Balanced and unbiased in its approach, this study provides valuable insight into how religious and moral leadership functions in the realm of international relations, and how the promotion of ethical values works to diffuse international tensions and improve the quality of human life around the world.

Brian De Palma is perhaps best known as the director behind the gangster classic Scarface. Yet as ingrained as Scarface is in American popular culture, it is but one of a sizeable number of controversial films—many of which are consistently misread or ignored—directed by De Palma over his more than four-decade career.

“A summation of his beliefs about music as he looked into the final quarter of the 20th century...Bernstein’s talks still seem surprisingly fresh. But words were nearly as much Bernstein’s métier as music.”—New York Times

Six in-depth lessons on the language of music from the legendary, Grammy Award–winning conductor.

The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein’s musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, a special monument in Bernstein's legacy, also make fascinating reading. “Nobody anywhere presents this material so warmly, so sincerely, so skillfully,” says the composer Virgil Thomson. “As musical mind-openers they are first class; as pedagogy they are matchless.”

Bernstein considers genres ranging from folk and pop to Hindu ragas, along with symphonic works from Mozart and Ravel to Ives and Copland. Drawing on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory, he suggests that each has roots in a “worldwide, inborn musical grammar,” and explores how this grammar generates such a staggeringly diverse array of musical dialects. He also mines his own experience as a master composer and conductor to delve beneath music’s aesthetic surface, discovering the hidden acoustic transformations that create unconscious resonance for listeners. Finally, examining twentieth-century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bernstein discovers a new iteration of the deep poetry of musical expression—finding, even in the throes of experimentalism, echoes of all that had come before.

Armed with nearly one hundred notated examples and abundant charisma, Bernstein shows here that, in addition to being a consummate musical prodigy, he was also a master teacher. These talks remain among the composer’s greatest achievements.

Praise for Marilyn Hacker:

"How piercing the duet we're offered between Marilyn Hacker and the reality principle. Reality saying, it’s impossible, something's always sacrificed: you can't be so merry and so raw; so learned and earthy; so gut-wrenching, so danceable at once. Can you? To which, steadily, the voice of Marilyn Hacker: Yes. Evidently; Evidently so."
---Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Epistemology of the Closet and Touching Feeling

"Hacker is one of our best singers---by turns elegiac and fierce, sweet and witty. With each new collection her voice grows richer, more resonant, sorrowing and lovely."
---Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

"Marilyn Hacker joins a marvelous facility with poetic forms to a shockingly intense sensuality. Not unlike Baudelaire, you might say, and indeed like him, she shares a taste for excess, drink, Paris, women, crowds. 'Enivrez-vous!' Baudelaire ordered his readers, and Marilyn Hacker has taken his advice seriously."
---Edmund White, author of Hotel de Dream, City Boy, and Le Flâneur

"Everything is thrilling and true, fast and witty, deep and wise; her vitality is the pulse of life itself."
---Derek Mahon, author of Harbour Lights and An Autumn Wind

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

For over twenty years, award-winning poet, translator, and editor Marilyn Hacker has been writing incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, poets of color, and any poets whose work she judged worthy of more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public.

Unauthorized Voices is Hacker’s first collection of critical prose, bringing together her essays on American, British, Irish, and French poets. It includes pieces on Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Harrison, Marilyn Nelson, and June Jordan; on French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Guy Goffette; on poetry and politics; and on the contemporary sonnet, all affirming Hacker as a lively, unabashedly opinionated American critical voice.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names and Essays on Departure, and of ten collections of poetry translated from the French, including Marie Étienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, recipient of the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has been the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the National Book Award for her own poetry and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

“How has unbelief come to dominate so many Western societies? The usual account invokes the advance of science and rational knowledge. Ryrie’s alternative, in which emotions are the driving force, offers new and interesting insights into our past and present.”
—Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age

Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, pointing to science and reason as the twin culprits, but in this lively, startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through the heart more than the mind.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, he shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. As Protestant radicals eroded time-honored certainties and ushered in an age of anger and anxiety, some defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics, setting in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious times.

“Well-researched and thought-provoking…Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.”
—Christianity Today

“A beautifully crafted history of early doubt…Unbelievers covers much ground in a short space with deep erudition and considerable wit.”
—The Spectator

“Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like…John Donne to grapple with church dogma.”
—New Yorker

Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept. Calling for renewed attention to the spaces, identities, and conflicts that remain understudied and excluded from our hemispheric knowledge of forced movement, the volume reveals a wider diversity of migratory realities and considers race, ethnicity, and class beyond the hegemonic formations that eclipse non-US histories. Through multidisciplinary and geographically expansive essays that draw from history, social anthropology, environmental studies, feminist studies, and lived experience, the volume examines diverse migratory flows from Chile and Argentina in the South to Georgia and New York in the North. Individually and collectively, the essays remap migratory movements other than through the most studied South-to-North trajectories and remove the US and US-based racial formations from the center of analysis. By tracking East-West flows, intraregional mobilities, and changing conceptions of racial identity, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America complicates the concepts of forced mobility and border crossing by highlighting alternative liminalities in sites of transit, destination, and return. Demanding engagement with the submerged histories of racism and the production of ethnoracial categories beyond the Black/white binary, the collection brings into focus identities, sites, and forces that have not yet occupied the foreground of global migration study.

A Financial Times Book of the Year

“The strongest documentation I have seen for the many ways in which inequality is harmful to economic growth.”
—Jason Furman

“A timely and very useful guide…Boushey assimilates a great deal of recent economic research and argues that it amounts to a paradigm shift.”
—New Yorker

Do we have to choose between equality and prosperity? Decisions made over the past fifty years have created underlying fragilities in our society that make our economy less effective in good times and less resilient to shocks, such as today’s coronavirus pandemic. Many think tackling inequality would require such heavy-handed interference that it would stifle economic growth. But a careful look at the data suggests nothing could be further from the truth—and that reducing inequality is in fact key to delivering future prosperity.

Presenting cutting-edge economics with verve, Heather Boushey shows how rising inequality is a drain on talent, ideas, and innovation, leading to a concentration of capital and a damaging under-investment in schools, infrastructure, and other public goods. We know inequality is fueling social unrest. Boushey shows persuasively that it is also a serious drag on growth.

“In this outstanding book, Heather Boushey…shows that, beyond a point, inequality damages the economy by limiting the quantity and quality of human capital and skills, blocking access to opportunity, underfunding public services, facilitating predatory rent-seeking, weakening aggregate demand, and increasing reliance on unsustainable credit.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

“Think rising levels of inequality are just an inevitable outcome of our market-driven economy? Then you should read Boushey’s well-argued, well-documented explanation of why you’re wrong.”
—David Rotman, MIT Technology Review

Unbroken Nostalgia: Haitian Kreyòl Poetry in Cuba is the first English translation and scholarly edition of the collection Nostalji san pwen ni vigil: pwezi kreyòl nan peyi Kiba (2016) by Hilario Batista Félix. A poet, journalist, and language activist, Batista (1955– ) embodies and expresses Cuba’s cultural and linguistic diversity as a descendant of Haitian migrant workers to Eastern Cuba during the mid-twentieth century; his poems bridge regions usually separated by language—the Spanish and Creolophone/Francophone Caribbean—and vividly depict the distinct heritage of Haitian Cubans and their shared dreams and challenges. A scholarly introduction by translator and editor Mariana F. Past provides biographical information about the author, situates his work within Haitian diasporic literature, and addresses patterns of Haitian migration to Cuba. Batista’s original poems appear alongside facing-page English translations with annotations that clarify historical figures and events, geographical features, and Haitian cultural and religious practices. Grounded in oral storytelling traditions, Unbroken Nostalgia brings to light the collective memory and complicated hybridity of the Haitian community in Cuba and upholds Haitian Kreyòl as a language of resistance.

In the early twentieth century, scholars around the world believed that “superstition” belonged to a bygone era. Yet despite their confident predictions, superstitious beliefs have endured. Perhaps nowhere has the history of superstition been more prolonged and tumultuous than in China. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, intellectuals and politicians have denigrated practices like divination, ancestor worship, and geomancy as unbefitting of a modern nation, and governing regimes have launched a succession of campaigns to replace superstitious thinking with science and rationality. Efforts to eliminate such practices from public life, however, have regularly encountered resistance from people who continue to find meaning in them.

Uncanny Beliefs seeks to understand what “superstition” has meant in modern China—and questions why superstitious thinking has remained such an urgent target of state intervention. Through a range of temporal and thematic perspectives, the chapters in this volume link the study of superstition to the histories of science, religion, gender, state building, and popular culture. In doing so, they collectively broaden our understanding of modern Chinese history by revealing the complex entanglements of superstition with religion, modernity, authority, and everyday life.

How the study of Shakespeare’s legacy, specifically in film and television, can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean

In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as “faithful” or “unfaithful” to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin challenges these critical orthodoxies. Instead, recognizing how a film or television series closely recalls Shakespeare’s drama encourages an interrogation of what we consider to be “Shakespeare” in the first place.

Drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s model of the uncanny—the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity—this book focuses on films and television series that were not marketed as adaptations of Shakespeare. Yet these works unexpectedly invoke lost, even troubling aspects of Shakespeare’s original playtexts, their performance history, or their reception. Broadening the scope of fidelity readings beyond familiar concerns like plot and language, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare’s afterlife can clarify both the historical context of his drama and its relevance for the current political moment. Engaging contemporary debates in literary and psychoanalytic theory, this book features provocative close readings of The Tempest, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale alongside recent films and television series, from art-house movies such as The Master and Manchester by the Sea to the cult favorites Brigsby Bear and Vice Principals. These works conjure widely overlooked qualities of Shakespeare’s drama by recalling the casting practices or the generic contexts of the early modern stage or by making a meaningful intervention in the plays’ critical reception. Closely examining these surprisingly faithful adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama helps us to articulate the original experience of the early modern stage and better consider its resonance in the present.

This book will benefit students and scholars of Shakespeare on film and psychoanalytic theory. Yet Uncanny Fidelity will also be of interest to scholars of performance history, source studies, and early modern discourses of race and gender—as well as anyone interested in the unexpected connections between canonical literature and contemporary culture. By examining adaptation as an instance of uncanny return, Newlin demonstrates how the study of Shakespeare’s afterlife can radically challenge what we consider to be authentically Shakespearean.

“Now, for the first time, we can read the version that Wilde intended…Both the text and Nicholas Frankel’s introduction make for fascinating reading.” —Paris Review

More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores all of the material removed by the novel’s first editor.

Upon receipt of the typescript, Wilde’s editor panicked at what he saw. Contained within its pages was material he feared readers would find “offensive”—especially instances of graphic homosexual content. He proceeded to go through the typescript with his pencil, cleaning it up until he made it “acceptable to the most fastidious taste.” Wilde did not see these changes until his novel appeared in print. Wilde’s editor’s concern was well placed. Even in its redacted form, the novel caused public outcry. The British press condemned it as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.” When Wilde later enlarged the novel for publication in book form, he responded to his critics by further toning down its “immoral” elements.

Wilde famously said that The Picture of Dorian Gray “contains much of me”: Basil Hallward is “what I think I am,” Lord Henry “what the world thinks me,” and “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or Dorian Age, but also a forward-looking view to a more permissive time than his own repressive Victorian era. By implication, Wilde would have preferred we read today the uncensored version of his novel.

Uncertain Powers is an original and much-needed analysis of female leadership in medieval Japan. In challenging current scholarship by exploring the important political and economic roles of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japanese royal women, Sachiko Kawai questions the traditional view of the era as one dominated by male retired monarchs and a warrior government. Instead the author populates it with royal wives and daughters who held the title of premier royal lady (nyoin) and owned extensive estates across the Japanese archipelago. Nyoin, whose power varied according to marital status, networks, and age, used their wealth and human networks to build temples and organize their entourages as salons to assert religious, cultural, and political influence. Confronted with social factors and gender disparities, they were motivated to develop coping strategies, the workings of which Kawai masterfully teases out from the abundant primary sources.

Uncertain Powers presents a nuanced and groundbreaking study of the relationship between a nyoin’s authority (her acknowledged rights) and her actual power (the ability to enforce those rights), demonstrating how, as members of political factions, as landlords, and as religious and cultural patrons, nyoin struggled to transform authority into power by means of cooperation, persuasion, compromise, and coercion.

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine investigates the administrative revolution of China’s eighteenth-century Qing state. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century with what seemed, at the time, to be straightforward policies to clean up the bureaucracy: a regulation about deadlines here, a requirement about reporting standards there. Over the course of a hundred years, the central court continued to demand more information from the provinces about local administrative activities. By the middle of the eighteenth century, unprecedented amounts of data about local offices throughout the empire existed.

The result of this information coup was a growing discourse of crisis and decline. Gathering data to ensure that officials were doing their jobs properly, it turned out, repeatedly exposed new issues requiring new forms of scrutiny. Slowly but surely, the thicket of imperial routines and standards binding together local offices, provincial superiors, and central ministries shifted the very epistemological foundations of the state. A vicious cycle arose whereby reporting protocols implemented to solve problems uncovered more problems, necessitating the collection of more information. At the very moment that the Qing knew more about itself than ever before, the central court became certain that it had entered an age of decline.

A revisionist account of interwar Europe’s largest Jewish community that upends histories of Jewish agency to rediscover reckonings with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice.

What did the future hold for interwar Europe’s largest Jewish community, the font of global Jewish hopes? When intrepid analysts asked these questions on the cusp of the 1930s, they discovered a Polish Jewry reckoning with “no tomorrow.” Assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalism’s collapse, some Polish Jews looked past progressive hopes or religious certainties to investigate what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities really possessed, and where a future might be found—and for whom.

The story of modern Jewry is often told as one of creativity and contestation. Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a late Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves—in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally.

Focusing not on ideals but on a search for realism, Moss recasts the history of modern Jewish political thought. Where much scholarship seeks Jewish agency over a collective future, An Unchosen People recovers a darker tradition characterized by painful tradeoffs amid a harrowing political reality, making Polish Jewry a paradigmatic example of the minority experience endemic to the nation-state.

The first English-language book to place the works of Elena Garro (1916–1998) and Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in dialogue with each other, Uncivil Wars evokes the lives of two celebrated literary figures who wrote about many of the same experiences and contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity but were judged quite differently, primarily because of gender.

While Paz’s privileged, prize-winning legacy has endured worldwide, Garro’s literary gifts garnered no international prizes and received less attention in Latin American literary circles. Restoring a dual perspective on these two dynamic writers and their world, Uncivil Wars chronicles a collective memory of wars that shaped Mexico, and in turn shaped Garro and Paz, from the Conquest period to the Mexican Revolution; the Spanish Civil War, which the couple witnessed while traveling abroad; and the student massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, which brought about social and political changes and further tensions in the battle of the sexes. The cultural contexts of machismo and ethnicity provide an equally rich ground for Sandra Cypess’s exploration of the tandem between the writers’ personal lives and their literary production. Uncivil Wars illuminates the complexities of Mexican society as seen through a tense marriage of two talented, often oppositional writers. The result is an alternative interpretation of the myths and realities that have shaped Mexican identity, and its literary soul, well into the twenty-first century.

Extraordinary rendition—the practice of abducting criminal suspects in locations around the world—has been criticized as an unprecedented expansion of U.S. police powers. But America’s aggressive pursuit of fugitives beyond its borders far predates the global war on terror. Uncle Sam’s Policemen investigates the history of international manhunts, arguing that the extension of U.S. law enforcement into foreign jurisdictions at the turn of the twentieth century forms an important chapter in the story of American empire.

In the late 1800s, expanding networks of railroads and steamships made it increasingly easy for criminals to evade justice. Recognizing that domestic law and order depended on projecting legal authority abroad, President Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1903 that the United States would “leave no place on earth” for criminals to hide. Charting the rapid growth of extradition law, Katherine Unterman shows that the United States had fifty-eight treaties with thirty-six nations by 1900—more than any other country. American diplomats put pressure on countries that served as extradition havens, particularly in Latin America, and cloak-and-dagger tactics such as the kidnapping of fugitives by Pinkerton detectives were fair game—a practice explicitly condoned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The most wanted fugitives of this period were not anarchists and political agitators but embezzlers and defrauders—criminals who threatened the emerging corporate capitalist order. By the early twentieth century, the long arm of American law stretched around the globe, creating an informal empire that complemented both military and economic might.

Surrounding this material are chapters that provide context about the disputes among researchers about whether batterer intervention programs work (only a small number of batterers renounce their abuse) and chapters that address the reactions of partners to these stories. "When the Man You Love is Abusive" is designed to caution women not to be manipulated by accounts of change and to outline the stages men need to pass through in the long process of becoming accountable. "The Last Word: Voices of Survivors" ends the book with a focus group discussion in which former abuse victims and advocates respond candidly to the men's stories.

This volume brings together twenty-nine pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appeared in Porter's collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Both fiction and essays are covered. All these pieces belong to Porter's apprenticeship as a creative writer. Thus, they offer new insights into her artistic development and her relationship with Mexico, a place that, as she later said, "influenced everything I did afterward."

In the spring of 1832, when the Indian warrior Black Hawk and a thousand followers marched into Illinois to reoccupy lands earlier ceded to American settlers, the U.S. Army turned to rival tribes for military support. Elements of the Menominee, Dakota, Potawatomi, and Ho Chunk tribes willingly allied themselves with the United States government against their fellow Native Americans in an uncommon defense of their diverse interests. As the Black Hawk War came only two years after the passage of the Indian Removal Act and is widely viewed as a land grab by ravenous settlers, the military participation of these tribes seems bizarre. What explains this alliance?

In order to grasp Indian motives, John Hall explores their alliances in earlier wars with colonial powers as well as in intertribal antagonisms and conflicts. In the crisis of 1832, Indians acted as they had traditionally, leveraging their relationship with a powerful ally to strike tribal enemies, fulfill important male warrior expectations, and pursue political advantage and material gain. However, times had changed and, although the Indians achieved short-term objectives, they helped create conditions that permanently changed their world.

Providing a rare view of Indian attitudes and strategies in war and peace, Hall deepens our understanding of Native Americans and the complex roles they played in the nation’s history. More broadly, he demonstrates the risks and lessons of small wars that entail an “uncommon defense” by unlikely allies in pursuit of diverse, even conflicting, goals.

Since Marcel Duchamp created his “readymades” a century ago—most famously christening a urinal as a fountain— the practice of incorporating commodity objects into art has become ever more pervasive. Uncommon Goods traces one particularly important aspect of that progression: the shift in artistic concern toward the hidden ethical dimensions of global commerce. Jaimey Hamilton Faris discusses the work of, among many others, Ai Weiwei, Cory Arcangel, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Santiago Sierra, reading their artistic explorations as overlapping with debates about how common goods hold us and our world in common. The use of readymade now registers concerns about international migrant labor, outsourced manufacturing, access to natural resources, intellectual copyright, and the commoditization of virtual space.

In each chapter, Hamilton Faris introduces artists who exemplify the focus of readymade aesthetics on aspects of global commodity culture, including consumption, marketing, bureaucracy, labor, and community. She explores how materially intensive, “uncommon” aesthetic situations can offer moments to meditate on the kinds of objects, experiences, and values we ostensibly share in the age of globalization. The resulting volume will be an important contribution to scholarship on readymade art as well as to the study of materiality, embodiment, and globalization.

An alternate selection of the History Book Club and Military Book Club

Cultural factions are an intrinsic part of the fabric of American politics. But does this mean that there is no room for compromise when groups hold radically different viewpoints on major issues? Not necessarily. For example, in a June 2003 Time/CNN poll, 49% of respondents identified themselves as pro-choice and 46% identified as pro-life. But in the same poll, 81% indicated that abortion should be "always legal" or "sometimes legal," suggesting that "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are not discrete positions but allow room for compromise.

How do legislators legislate policy conflicts that are defined in explicitly cultural terms such as abortion, gay marriage, and school prayer? American political institutions are frequently challenged by the significant conflict between those who embrace religious traditionalism and those who embrace progressive cultural norms. Uncompromising Positions: God, Sex, and the U.S. House of Representatives investigates the politics of that conflict as it is manifested in the proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives. Oldmixon traces the development of these two distinct cultures in contemporary American politics and discusses the decision-making and leadership tactics used by legislators to respond to this division of values. She argues that cultural conflict produces an absolutist politics that draws on religious values not amenable to compromise politics. One possible strategy to address the problem is to build bipartisan coalitions. Yet, interviews with House staffers and House members, as well as roll calls, all demonstrate that ideologically driven politicians sacrifice compromise and stability to achieve short-term political gain. Noting polls that show Americans tend to support compromise positions, Oldmixon calls on House members to put aside short-term political gain, take their direction from the example of the American public, and focus on finding viable solutions to public policy—not zealous ideology.