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Bodleian Library Souvenir Guide
Geoffrey Tyack
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
One of the oldest libraries in Britain, the Bodleian Library has been in continuous use since its founding in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley. This richly illustrated guidebook is perfect for architectural aficionados or those planning a trip. A short introduction that gives the story of the library’s founding is followed by a succinct guide to the buildings found there, from Duke Humfrey’s Library to the Divinity School, Convocation House, Schools Quadrangle, Clarendon Building, and Radcliffe Camera.
           
Bodleian Library Souvenir Guide covers more than four centuries of the library’s most celebrated architecture, taking a look back at the contributions of famous architects like Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. In addition to the buildings themselves, the book illustrates some of the Bodleian’s most exquisite stonemasonry and statuary found there. It also provides translations to the intriguing Latin inscriptions that adorn many of the buildings and mark key moments in the library’s history. The book is brought up-to-date with a description of subsequent renovations, including the addition of the state-of-the-art Weston Library to house the library’s special collections.
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Bodleian Library Treasures
David Vaisey
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
Since its founding, the Bodleian Library has become home to treasures from throughout history and every corner of the globe. From among this remarkable and historically rich collection, David Vaisey has selected nearly one hundred treasures with a particularly fascinating story to tell.

Rare books, music, manuscripts, ephemera, and maps, many of the treasures photographed and described for this lavish volume are well-loved around the world, from Jane Austen’s manuscript of The Watsons to notebooks created by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a map of Narnia drawn by C. S. Lewis, and the original manuscript of the renowned children’s work The Wind in the Willows. Others are known for their beauty or historical significance, including the Gutenberg Bible, Magna Carta, and the extraordinary medieval manuscript the Douce Apocalypse. Still others hold poignant stories like the small handwritten book presented as a New Year’s present in 1545 to Katherine Parr by an eleven-year-old stepdaughter who would later become Queen Elizabeth I. Vaisey brings these and other treasures together in chronological order, showcasing the Bodleian Library’s renowned collections.

 
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Bodleianalia
Curious Facts about Britain's Oldest University Library
Claire Cock-Starkey and Violet Moller
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
Which is the smallest book in the Bodleian Library? How many miles of shelving are there in its Book Storage Facility? What is fasciculing? Who complained when their secret pen name was revealed in the library’s catalog? Why did the library refuse to lend a book to King Charles I? The answers to these questions are just a few of the remarkable bits of bibliophile trivia uncovered by Claire Cock-Starkey and Violet Moller in this intriguing collection of curious facts about one of Britain’s oldest university library.       
           
With more than twelve million items and many priceless treasures, including the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, five thirteenth-century copies of Magna Carta, and Tolkien’s original watercolors for The Hobbit, the Bodleian also boasts many strange events and eccentric characters through the ages that contributed to its world-class renown today. From deep within the archives, Cock-Starkey and Moller have compiled a great many lesser-known facts about the Bodleian Library’s fascinating history, organizing them into easily browsable lists, factoids, and statistics.
 
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The Body Aesthetic
From Fine Art to Body Modification
Tobin Siebers, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The last thirty years of cultural theory have seen a vigorous analytic focus on the human body both as the subject of cultural representations and as an escape from their repressive influence. Rare is the account that focuses on the most obvious fact about the body: it is the stuff out of which human beings are made.
Generously and variously illustrated, this volume gathers together the work of literary critics and artists, classicists, art historians, and specialists on the history of the body, who survey the strangeness and variety with which the body has given human beings form. Richard Leppert traces how the representation of little girls responds directly to the cultural anxieties of modernity. René Girard plots how starvation becomes an art form, while Eric Gans surveys the contemporary phenomenon of body modification. Sander Gilman explores aesthetic surgery as a response to human unhappiness. Simon Goldhill discovers in the Roman empire the initial stirrings of institutions that focus on the spectacle of the body, and Cynthia S. Greig provides a glimpse of what the history of photography would look like if male nudes replaced female ones. Marion Jackson details how the different physical existence of the Inuit guides the way they make art. Joseph Grigely transforms aesthetics as usual by focusing on the disabled body, while Tobin Siebers describes the traumatic appeal in both fine art and the media of wounded flesh, whether human or animal.
The Body Aesthetic is a broad exercise in cultural studies and will address a variety of readers, from those interested in detailed, theoretical accounts of the body, to those interested in belles lettres, to those interested in fine art.
Tobin Siebers is Professor of English, University of Michigan.
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Body Against Soul
Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory
Masha Raskolnikov
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender, and power in the Middle Ages. Neither theological nor medical in nature, works of sowlehele (“soul-heal”) described the self to itself in everyday language—moderns might call this kind of writing “self-help.” Bringing together contemporary feminist and queer theory along with medieval psychological thought, Body Against Soul examines Piers Plowman, the “Katherine Group,” and the history of psychological allegory and debate. In so doing, it rewrites the history of the Body to include its recently neglected fellow, the Soul.

The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists—how “my” body relates to “me.” In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like “Will” or “Reason” any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving sowlehele is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the self’s inner powers.
 
 
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The Body Alone
A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain
Nina Lohman
University of Iowa Press, 2024
The Body Alone is an inquiry into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain. It is a personal hybrid account incorporating research, scholarship, and memoir to examine chronic pain through the multi-lens of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Broken bodies tell broken stories. Nina Lohman’s pain experience is portrayed through a cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues—fractured not for the sake of experimentation but because the story itself demands it.

In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women’s access to fair and equal healthcare. This is more than an illness narrative, it is a battle cry demanding change.
 
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Body and Brain
A Trophic Theory of Neural Connections
Dale Purves
Harvard University Press, 1988

The major goal of developmental neurobiology is to understand how the nervous system is put together. A central theme that has emerged from research in this field over the last several decades is the crucial role of trophic interactions in neural assembly, and indeed throughout an animal's life. Trophic—which means nutritive—refers to long-term interdependencies between nerve cells and the cells they innervate.

The theory of trophic effects presented in this book offers an explanation of how the vertebrate nervous system is related to—and regulated by—the body it serves. The theory rationalizes the nervous system's accommodation, throughout life, to the changing size and form of the body it tenants, indicating the way connections between nerve cells change in response to stimuli as diverse as growth, injury, experience, and natural selection.

Dale Purves, a leading neurobiologist best known for his work on the formation and maintenance of synaptic connections, presents this theory within the historical setting of earlier ideas about neural organization—from Weiss's theory of functional reorganization to the chemoaffinity theory championed by Sperry. In addition to illuminating eighty years of work on trophic interactions, this book asks its own compelling questions: Are trophic interactions characteristic of all animals or only of those with complex nervous systems? Are trophic interactions related to learning? What does the trophic theory of neural connections imply about the currently fashionable view that the nervous system operates according to Darwinian principles?

Purves lays the theoretical foundation for practical exploration of trophic interactions as they apply to neural connections, a pursuit that will help us understand how our own nervous systems generate change. The ideas in this book not only enrich neurobiology but also convey the profound relevance of neuroscience to other fields of life science.

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Body and Enhancement Technology
Eunjeong Ma, editor
Duke University Press, 2016
A special issue of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal

This issue explores the practice of applying science and technology to expand our cognitive and physical capacities. Covering global Asia, these articles investigate enhancement in relation to aesthetics, genetics, cognition, and musculature and consider enhancement’s ethical and societal implications. The contributors address a range of topics—from elite sports to the socioeconomics of plastic surgery in South Korea to memory devices in Blade Runner—and problematize increasing efforts to engineer and augment human bodily functions. This issue illustrates how the emergence of new technologies and their merging with the body will challenge our perception of normal human conditions: our physical strength, our appearance, and our cognitive capabilities.

Contributors
Eduardo Zachary Albrecht, Masato Fukushima, Jaehwan Hyun, So Yeon Leem, Eunjeong Ma

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Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture
Hung Wu
Harvard University Press, 2005

Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity.

The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

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Body and Mind in Motion
Dance and Neuroscience in Conversation
Glenna Batson with Margaret Wilson
Intellect Books, 2014
Western contemporary dance and body-mind education have engaged in a pas de deux for more than four decades. The rich interchange of somatics and dance has altered both fields, but scholarship that substantiates these ideas through the findings of twentieth-century scientific advances has been missing. This book fills that gap and brings to light contemporary discoveries of neuroscience and somatic education as they relate to dance. Drawing from the burgeoning field of “embodiment”—itself an idea at the intersection of the sciences, humanities, arts, and technologies—Body and Mind in Motion highlights the relevance of somatic education within dance education, dance science, and body-mind studies.
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Body and Nation
The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century
Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Body and Nation interrogates the connections among the body, the nation, and the world in twentieth-century U.S. history. The idea that bodies and bodily characteristics are heavily freighted with values that are often linked to political and social spheres remains underdeveloped in the histories of America's relations with the rest of the world. Attentive to diverse state and nonstate actors, the contributors provide historically grounded insights into the transnational dimensions of biopolitics. Their subjects range from the regulation of prostitution in the Philippines by the U.S. Army to Cold War ideals of American feminine beauty, and from "body counts" as metrics of military success to cultural representations of Mexican migrants in the United States as public health threats. By considering bodies as complex, fluctuating, and interrelated sites of meaning, the contributors to this collection offer new insights into the workings of both soft and hard power.

Contributors. Frank Costigliola, Janet M. Davis, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Paul A. Kramer, Shirley Jennifer Lim, Mary Ting Yi Lui, Natalia Molina, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Emily S. Rosenberg, Kristina Shull, Annessa C. Stagner, Marilyn B. Young
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The Body and Physical Difference
Discourses of Disability
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1997
For years the subject of human disability has engaged those in the biological, social and cognitive sciences, while at the same time, it has been curiously neglected within the humanities. The Body and Physical Difference seeks to introduce the field of disability studies into the humanities by exploring the fantasies and fictions that have crystallized around conceptions of physical and cognitive difference. Based on the premise that the significance of disabilities in culture and the arts has been culturally vexed as well as historically erased, the collection probes our society's pathological investment in human variability and "aberrancy." The contributors demonstrate how definitions of disability underpin fundamental concepts such as normalcy, health, bodily integrity, individuality, citizenship, and morality--all terms that define the very essence of what it means to be human.
The book provides a provocative range of topics and perspectives: the absence of physical "otherness" in Ancient Greece, the depiction of the female invalid in Victorian literature, the production of tragic innocence in British and American telethons, the reconstruction of Civil War amputees, and disability as the aesthetic basis for definitions of expendable life within the modern eugenics movement. With this new, secure anchoring in the humanities, disability studies now emerges as a significant strain in contemporary theories of identity and social marginality.
Moving beyond the oversimplication that disabled people are marginalized and made invisible by able-ist assumptions and practices, the contributors demonstrate that representation is founded upon the perpetual exhibition of human anomalies. In this sense, all art can be said to migrate toward the "freakish" and the "grotesque." Such a project paradoxically makes disability the exception and the rule of the desire to represent that which has been traditionally out-of-bounds in polite discourse.
The Body and Physical Difference has relevance across a wide range of academic specialties such as cultural studies, the sociology of medicine, history, literature and medicine, the allied health professions, rehabilitation, aesthetics, philosophical discourses of the body, literary and film studies, and narrative theory.
David T. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English, Northern Michigan University. Sharon L. Snyder teaches film and literature at Northern Michigan University.
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Body and Soul
Essays on Poetry
Mark Jarman
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Mark Jarman, author of the narrative poem Iris and the lyric sequence Unholy Sonnets, is a poet associated with the revival of narrative and traditional form in contemporary American poetry. In Body and Soul he considers poetry from the Renaissance to the present in essays that touch on the importance of religion, place, and personal experience to poetry and reflect Jarman's particular interests. His focus is on the relationship between lyric and narrative, song and story, in poems of all kinds. He considers the poem as a record of both body and soul, and examines his own life, in an extended autobiographical essay, as a source for the stories he has told in his poetry.
The essays "Where Poems Take Place" and "A Shared Humanity" consider the relation between setting or situation and representation. The psychological roots of narrative are considered in "The Primal Storyteller." But the main interest of these essays is how and why narrative is used as a form. The influence of Robinson Jeffers's style of narrative is argued in "Slip, Shift, and Speed Up: The Influence of Robinson Jeffers's Narrative Syntax." In "The Trace of a Story Line" an argument is made that the poets Philip Levine and Charles Wright employ narration or storytelling in their poetry as a mode of meaning. Other essays consider Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Herbert Lomas, Louis Simpson, Lyn Hejinian, Tess Gallagher, and Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Mark Jarman's poetry has appeared in many publications, including the American Poetry Review and the New Yorker. He has won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize of the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim fellowship, and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Professor of English, Vanderbilt University.
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The Body and the Song
Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics
Marilyn May Lombardi
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

In this original contribution to Elizabeth Bishop studies, Marilyn May Lombardi uses previously unpublished materials (letters, diaries, notebooks, and unfinished poems) to shed new light on the poet’s published work. She explores the ways Bishop’s lesbianism, alcoholism, allergic illnesses, and fear of mental instability affected her poetry—the ways she translated her bodily experiences into poetic form.

A cornerstone of The Body and the Song is the poet’s thirty-year correspondence with her physician, Dr. Anny Baumann, who was both friend and surrogate mother to Bishop. The letters reveal Bishop’s struggles to understand the relation between her physical and creative drives. "Dr. Anny" also helped Bishop unravel the connections in her life between psychosomatic illness and early maternal deprivation—her mother was declared incurably insane and institutionalized in 1916, when Bishop was five years old. Effectively an orphan, she spent the rest of her childhood with relatives.

In addition to these letters, Lombardi uses Bishop’s unpublished notebooks to demonstrate the poet’s resolve to "face the facts"—to confront her own emotional, intellectual, and physical frailties—and translate them into poetry that is clear-eyed and economical in its form.

Lombardi argues that in her subtle way, Bishop explores the same issues that preoccupy the current generation of women writers. A deeply private artist, Bishop never directly refers to her homosexuality in her published work, but the metaphors she draws from her carnal desires and aversions confront stifling cultural prescriptions for personal and erotic expression. In choosing restraint over confession, Bishop parted company with her friend Robert Lowell, but Lombardi shows that her reticence becomes a powerful artistic strategy resulting in poetry remarkable for its hermeneutic potential.

Informed by recent gender criticism, Lombardi’s lucid argument advances our understanding of the ways the material circumstances of life can be transformed into art.

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The Body as Capital
Masculinities in Contemporary Latin American Fiction
Vinodh Venkatesh
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Through economic liberalization and the untethering of labor and production markets, masculinity as hegemon has entered a crisis stage. Renegotiated labor and familial orders have triggered a widespread cultural renegotiation of how masculinity operates and is represented. This holds especially true in Latin America.

Addressing this, Vinodh Venkatesh uses contemporary Latin American literature to examine how masculinity is constructed and conceived. The Body as Capital centers socioeconomic and political concerns, anxieties, and paradigms on the male anatomy and on the matrices of masculinities presented in fiction. Developing concepts such as the “market of masculinities” and the “transnational theater of masculinities,” the author explains how contemporary fiction centers the male body and masculine expressions as key components in the relationship between culture, space, and global tensile forces.

Venkatesh includes novels by canonical and newer writers from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Peru, and Chile. He focuses on texts produced after 1990, coinciding with what has popularly been termed the neoliberal experiment. In addition to probing well-known novels such as La fiesta del Chivo and La mujer habitada and their accompanying body of criticism, The Body as Capital defines and examines several masculine tropes that will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Latin American literature and gender studies. Ultimately, Venkatesh argues for a more holistic approximation of discursive gender that will feed into other angles of criticism, forging a new path in the critical debates over gender and sexuality in Latin American writing.
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Body as Landscape, Love as Intoxication
Conceptual Metaphors in the Song of Songs
Brian P. Gault
SBL Press, 2019

Explore metaphors in the exquisite and enigmatic poetry of Song of Songs

One of the chief difficulties in interpreting the Song's lyrics is the unusual imagery used to depict the lovers' bodies. Why is the maiden's hair compared to a flock of goats (4:1), the man’s cheeks likened to garden beds of spice (5:13), and the eyes of both lovers described as doves (4:1; 5:12)? While scholars speculate on the significance of these images, a systematic inquiry into the Song's body metaphors is curiously absent. Based on insights from cognitive linguistics, this study incorporates biblical and comparative data to uncover the meaning of these metaphors surveying literature in the eastern Mediterranean (and beyond) that shares a similar form (poetry) and theme (love). Gault presents an interpretation of the Song's body imagery that sheds light on the perception of beauty in Israel and its relationship to surrounding cultures.

Features

  • Exploration of the Song's use of universal themes and culturally specific variations
  • Discussion of the Song's literary structure and unity
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Body Blows
Six Performances
Tim Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

    Hailed for his humor and passion, the internationally acclaimed performance artist Tim Miller has delighted, shocked, and emboldened audiences all over the world. Body Blows gathers six of Miller’s best-known performances that chart the sexual, spiritual, and political topography of his identity as a gay man: Some Golden States, Stretch Marks, My Queer Body, Naked Breath, Fruit Cocktail, and Glory Box. In Body Blows, Tim Miller leaps from the stage to the page, as each performance script is illustrated with striking photographs and accompanied by Miller’s notes and comment.
    This book explores the tangible body blows—taken and given—of Miller’s life and times as explored in his performances: the queer-basher’s blow, the sweet blowing breath of a lover, the below-the-belt blow of HIV/AIDS, the psychic blows from a society that disrespects the humanity of lesbian and gay relationships. Miller’s performances are full of the put-up-your-dukes and stand-your-ground of such day-to-day blows that make up being gay in America

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Body by Darwin
How Evolution Shapes Our Health and Transforms Medicine
Jeremy Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2015
We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions—whether it’s a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows in Body by Darwin, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future.
 
In Body by Darwin, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimer’s disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis.  Throughout, he not only explores the impact of evolution on human form and function, but he integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health.
 
As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our body’s performance is shaped by its past, Body by Darwin draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge.
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The Body Can Speak
Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama
Edited by Annelise Mertz. Foreword by Joseph Roach
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Movement is our first language, our universal language. Expression of body movement is the very basis of life as the nineteen contributors to The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama attest. Students use their bodies as an instrument of expression, and movement as medium; this means investigating space, energy, time, and motion in order to gain insight into these basic principles. At the same time they gain essential awareness of the self. Such work stimulates the senses and intellect, and develops a tangible new vision to satisfy the human need for aesthetic and artistic expression.

As editor of this collection, accomplished dancer and artistic director Annelise Mertz provides both an aesthetic appreciation for creative movement education as well as practical pedagogy for incorporating dance and drama into contemporary curriculum. Mertz has assembled here a definitive body of work from fellow artists and former students that speaks to the need to actively promote art as part of education.

The book gives voice to accomplished teachers, actors, dancers, directors, authors, and choreographers who share their experiences while they address creative movement education from preschool through college. Forty-eight photographs add an illuminating visual dimension to this wealth of stimulating ideas. The Body Can Speak provides a balanced and varied mosaic, with each essay offering evidence that creative movement education is vital for human development.

Contributors include Becky Engler-Hicks, Ruth Grauert, Anna Halprin, Joanna G. Harris, Margaret N. H’Doubler, Michael Hoeye, Murray Louis, Annelise Mertz, Jaime Nisenbaum, Carol North, Jeff Rehg, Shirley Ririe, G. Hoffman Soto, Emma D. Sheehy, Harold Taylor, Branislav Tomich, Dorothy M. Vislocky, and Joan J. Woodbury.

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Body, Capital and Screens
Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century
Christian Bonah
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century brings together new research from leading scholars from Europe and North America working at the intersection of film and media studies and social and cultural history of the body. The volume focuses on visual media in the twentieth century in Europe and the U.S. that informed and educated people about life and health as well as practices improving them. Through a series of in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate the relationships between film/television, private and public actors of the health sector and economic developments. The book explores the performative and interactive power of these visual media on individual health understandings, perceptions and practices. Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century aims to better understand how bodily health has evolved as a form of capital throughout the century.
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The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising)
Mark Wagenaar
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Let no lip, shoulder, hip, go untasted tonight. Let no one be unscathed.
And as you close the door & fold yourself in sleep against another

look for a moment at the empty stretch of dark between heaven
& earth: someone is missing from the world . . .

The Body Distances is filled with long, limber, nimble poems at once ecstatic and elegiac. These poems are odes to the miraculous embedded in the everyday, in which "the unlikely continues / to dovetail with the present."
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Body Double
The Author Incarnate in the Cinema
Lucy Fischer
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Body Double explores the myriad ways that film artists have represented the creative process. In this highly innovative work, Lucy Fischer draws on a neglected element of auteur studies to show that filmmakers frequently raise questions about the paradoxes of authorship by portraying  the onscreen writer. Dealing with such varied topics as the icon of the typewriter, the case of the writer/director, the authoress, and the omnipresent infirm author, she probes the ways in which films can tell a plausible story while contemplating the conditions and theories of their making.

By examining many forms of cinema, from Hollywood and the international art cinema to the avant-garde, Fischer considers the gender, age, and mental or physical health of fictionalized writers; the dramatized interaction between artists and their audiences and critics; and the formal play of written words and nonverbal images.

By analyzing such movies as Adaptation,Diary of a Country Priest, Naked Lunch, American Splendor, and Irezumi, Fischer tracks the parallels between film author and character, looking not for the creative figure who stands outside the text, but for the one who stands within it as corporeal presence and alter-ego.

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Body Drift
Butler, Hayles, Haraway
Arthur Kroker
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, the writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a “writing machine” in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species.

According to Arthur Kroker, the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body, in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented.

Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, Kroker reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.

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The Body Eclectic
Evolving Practices in Dance Training
Edited by Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol
University of Illinois Press, 2007

This rich collection of essays and interviews explores modern-dance technique training from the last fifty years. Focusing on the culture of dance, editors Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol examine choreographic process and style, dancer agency and participation in the creative process, and changes in the role and purpose of training. Bringing recent writings on dance into dialogue with dance practice, The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training asks readers to consider the relationship between training practices and choreographic style and content. The contributors explore how technique training both guides and reflects the art of dance. 

Contributors include Melanie Bales, Glenna Batson, Wendell Beavers, Veronica Dittman, Natalie Gilbert, Joshua Monten, Martha Myers, and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol.

Dance professionals interviewed include David Dorfman, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Tere O’Connor, and Shelley Washington.

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Body Evidence
Intimate Violence against South Asian Women in America
Edited by Shamita Das Dasgupta
Rutgers University Press, 2007
When South Asians immigrated to the United States in great numbers in the 1970s, they were passionately driven to achieve economic stability and socialize the next generation to retain the traditions of their home culture. During these years, the immigrant community went to great lengths to project an impeccable public image by denying the existence of social problems such as domestic violence, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, mental illness, racism, and intergenerational conflict. It was not until recently that activist groups have worked to bring these issues out into the open.

In Body Evidence, more than twenty scholars and public health professionals uncover the unique challenges faced by victims of violence in intimate spaces . . . within families, communities and trusted relationships in South Asian American communities. Topics include cultural obsession with women's chastity and virginity; the continued silence surrounding intimate violence among women who identify themselves as lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; the consequences of refusing marriage proposals or failing to meet dowry demands; and, ultimately, the ways in which the United States courts often confuse and exacerbate the plights of these women.
 
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Body Factory
Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room
Kaitlin Pericak
Temple University Press, 2025

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Body Heat
Temperature and Life on Earth
Mark S. Blumberg
Harvard University Press, 2004

Whether you're a polar bear giving birth to cubs in an Arctic winter, a camel going days without water in the desert heat, or merely a suburbanite without air conditioning in a heat wave, your comfort and even survival depend on how well you adapt to extreme temperatures.

In this entertaining and illuminating book, biopsychologist Mark Blumberg explores the many ways that temperature rules the lives of all animals (including us). He moves from the physical principles that govern the flow of heat in and out of our bodies to the many complex evolutionary devices animals use to exploit those principles for their own benefit.

In the process Blumberg tells wonderful stories of evolutionary and scientific ingenuity--how penguins withstand Antarctic winters by huddling together by the thousands, how vulnerable embryos of many species are to extremes of temperature during their development, why people survive hour-long drowning accidents in winter but not in summer, how certain plants generate heat (the skunk cabbage enough to melt snow around it). We also hear of systems gone awry--how desert species given too much water can drink themselves into bloated immobility, why anorexics often complain of feeling cold, and why you can't sleep if the room is too hot or too cold. After reading this book, you'll never look at a thermostat in quite the same way again.

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The Body Impolitic
Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value
Michael Herzfeld
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The Body Impolitic is a critical study of tradition, not merely as an ornament of local and national heritage, but also as a millstone around the necks of those who are condemned to produce it.

Michael Herzfeld takes us inside a rich variety of small-town Cretan artisans' workshops to show how apprentices are systematically thwarted into learning by stealth and guile. This harsh training reinforces a stereotype of artisans as rude and uncultured. Moreover, the same stereotypes that marginalize artisans locally also operate to marginalize Cretans within the Greek nation and Greece itself within the international community. What Herzfeld identifies as "the global hierarchy of value" thus frames the nation's ancient monuments and traditional handicrafts as evidence of incurable "backwardness."

Herzfeld's sensitive observations offer an intimately grounded way of understanding the effects of globalization and of one of its most visible offshoots, the heritage industry, on the lives of ordinary people in many parts of the world today.
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The Body in Bodega Bay
A Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Mystery
Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Life in Bodega Bay, famous as the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, has been quiet for antiques dealer Toby Sandler—until his new business partner is found dead in the harbor. Soon, the local sheriff discovers that the victim’s recently acquired Hitchcock artifacts and a painting of an angel have mysteriously vanished. Toby and his wife, art historian Nora Barnes, are enlisted to aid the investigation. As they dig into tales of the area’s past and encounter perplexing clues that are both criminal and otherworldly, the couple contemplates whether some mysteries are too deep to solve.
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The Body in Bodega Bay
A Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Mystery
Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Life in Bodega Bay on the rugged, foggy coast of northern California has been pretty quiet since Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds there. But antiques dealer Toby Sandler learns that his new business partner Charlie has been found dead on an abandoned boat in the harbor. When the local sheriff discovers that Charlie’s newly acquired Hitchcock artifacts and a painting of an angel are missing, he enlists Toby and his wife, Nora Barnes, an art historian, in the investigation.
            Local tales about Hitchcock’s famous film, and some digging into the region’s past as a Russian outpost, provide Toby and Nora with clues to the existence of a lost masterpiece. Convinced that this forgotten work may hold the key to the murder, Nora and Toby set out to find it. When Nora’s trouble-prone sister Angie arrives, events take a surprising turn, leading to the uncanny realm of angel reading and putting Nora and her family in danger. As Nora and Toby investigate matters both criminal and otherworldly, Nora realizes that some mysteries in life may be too deep to solve.
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The Body in Crisis
New Pathways and Short Circuits in Representation
Christine Greiner
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The Body in Crisis introduces the English-speaking world to the work of leading Latin American dance scholar and philosopher of the body, Christine Greiner. The book offers an innovative set of tools with which to examine the role of moving bodies and bodily actions in relation to worldwide concerns, including identity politics, alterity, migration, and belonging. The book places the concept of bodymedium in dialogue with the work of Giorgio Agamben to investigate notions of alterity, and shows how an understanding of the body-environment continuum can shed light on things left unnamed and at the margins. Greiner’s analyses draw from a broad range of theory concerned with the epistemology of the body, including cognitive science, political philosophy, evolutionary biology, and performance studies to illuminate radical experiences that question the limits of the body.  Her analysis of the role that bodies play in negotiations of power relations offers an original and unprecedented contribution to the field of dance studies and expands its scope to recognize theoretical models of inquiry developed in the Global South.
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The Body in Late-Capitalist USA
Donald M. Lowe
Duke University Press, 1995
In The Body in Late-Capitalist USA, Donald M. Lowe explores the varied social practices that code and construct the body. Arguing that our bodily lives are shaped by a complex of daily and ongoing practices—how we work, what we buy and consume—Lowe contends that as a result of the commodification of these and other social practices in the late-twentieth century, what we often understand to be the needs of the body are in fact means for capital accumulation.
Moving beyond studies of representations and images of the body, Lowe focuses on the intersection of body practices, language, and the Social to describe concretely the reality of a lived body. His strongly synthetic work brings together Marxist critique, semiotics, Foucaultian discourse analysis, and systems and communications theory to examine those practices that construct the body under late capitalism: habits of work and consumption, the ways we give birth and raise children, socialization, mental and physical healing, reconstructions and contestations of sexuality and gender. Lowe draws upon a wide range of sources, including government and labor studies and statistics, diagnostic and statistical manuals on mental illness, computer manuals, self-help books, and guides to work-related stress disorders, to illustrate the transformation of the body into a nexus of exchange value in postmodern society.
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The Body in Mystery
The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England
Jennifer R. Rust
Northwestern University Press, 2013
In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust engages the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship. Her book expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. Rust reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of literature from Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England, and between the premodern and early modern periods.
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The Body in the Mind
The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason
Mark Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"There are books—few and far between—which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."—Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle
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A Body in the O
Performances and Stories
Tim Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
From London to DC to Australia to Los Angeles, Tim Miller has sold out shows in which he addresses issues of gender, immigration, homophobia, and censorship. As one of the “NEA Four,” who successfully sued the federal government for violating their First Amendment rights when their funding was rescinded in the early 1990s, Miller has always played an important role in defending queer artistic expression on stage. His autobiographical explorations into identity, politics, and art through the lens of his own experiences lead to visceral, humorous, and poignant performances. His activism and experiences inform his newest collection of performance scripts and writings, which represent the culmination of the many struggles for rights and equality that Miller has documented, and performed, over the course of his career. A Body in the O is an important addition to Miller’s existing body of work, picking up from his show Lay of the Land and moving into his more recent piece, Rooted.
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Body Language
Sisters in Shape, Black Women's Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics
Kimberly J. Lau
Temple University Press, 2011

In her evocative ethnographic study, Body Language, Kimberly Lau traces the multiple ways in which the success of an innovative fitness program illuminates what identity means to its Black female clientele and how their group interaction provides a new perspective on feminist theories of identity politics—especially regarding the significance of identity to political activism and social change.

Sisters in Shape, Inc., Fitness Consultants (SIS), a Philadelphia company, promotes balance in physical, mental, and spiritual health. Its program goes beyond workouts, as it educates and motivates women to make health and fitness a priority. Discussing the obstacles at home and the importance of the group's solidarity to their ability to stay focused on their goals, the women speak to the ways in which their commitment to reshaping their bodies is a commitment to an alternative future.

Body Language shows how the group's explorations of black women's identity open new possibilities for identity-based claims to recognition, justice, and social change.

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Body Love
The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden
William R. Hunt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

Bernarr Macfadden (1868–1955) entertained and instructed Americans for decades. He championed physical exercise, fasting, and diet reform and was the relentless scourge of established doctors. He presented his views in Physical Culture, a popular magazine featuring photographs of strong men and healthy women and articles promoting the healthy life. While some critics derided him as a health nut, no one could dispute his genius as a magazine publisher. He established the world’s greatest magazine publishing empire through the innovation of such popular publications as True Story, the first confession magazine; True Detective; and many others.

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Body Messages
The Quest for the Proteins of Cellular Communication
Giamila Fantuzzi
Harvard University Press, 2016

Whether classified as regulators of inflammation, metabolism, or other physiological functions, a distinctive set of molecules enables the human body to convey information from one cell to another. An in-depth primer on the molecular mediators that coordinate complex bodily processes, Body Messages provides fresh insight into how biologists first identified this special class of molecules and the consequences of their discovery for modern medicine.

Focusing on proteins that regulate inflammation and metabolism—including the cytokines and adipokines at the core of her own research—Giamila Fantuzzi examines the role body messages play in the physiology of health as well as in the pathology of various illnesses. Readers are introduced to different ways of conceptualizing biomedical research and to the advantages and pitfalls associated with identifying molecules beginning with function or structure. By bringing together areas of research usually studied separately, Fantuzzi stresses the importance of investigating the body as a whole and affirms the futility of trying to separate basic from clinical research. Drawing on firsthand interviews with researchers who made major contributions to the field, Body Messages illustrates that the paths leading to scientific discovery are rarely direct, nor are they always the only routes available.

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The Body Multiple
Ontology in Medical Practice
Annemarie Mol
Duke University Press, 2002
The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations.

The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice.

Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine.

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Body My House
May Swenson's Work and Life
edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt
Utah State University Press, 2000

The first collection of critical essays on May Swenson and her literary universe, Body My House initiates an academic conversation about an unquestionably major poet of the middle and late twentienth century. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, May Swenson produced eleven volumes of poetry, received many major awards, was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was acclaimed by writers in virtually every school of American poetry.

Essays here address the breadth of Swenson's literary corpus and offer varied scholarly approaches to it. They reference Swenson manuscripts---poems, letters, diaries, and other prose---some of which have not been widely available before. Chapters focus on Swenson's work as a nature writer; the literary and social contexts of her writing; her national and international acclaim; her work as a translator; associations with other poets and writers (Bishop, Moore, and others); her creative process; and her profound explorations of gender and sexuality. The first full volume of scholarship on May Swenson, Body My House suggest an ambitious agenda for further work.

Contributors include Mark Doty, Gudrun Grabher, Cynthia Hogue, Suzann Juhasz, R.R. Knudson, Alicia Ostriker, Martha Nell Smith, Michael Spooner, Paul Swenson, and Kirstin Hotelling Zona.

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The Body of Brooklyn
David Lazar
University of Iowa Press, 2003
Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of A Million Little Pieces, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers' claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, "How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it's true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, 'This is really true'? Why do they choose to say it then?"
The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of non-fiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.
Contributors: 
John D'Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer.
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The Body of Faith
A Biological History of Religion in America
Robert C. Fuller
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The postmodern view that human experience is constructed by language and culture has informed historical narratives for decades. Yet newly emerging information about the biological body now makes it possible to supplement traditional scholarly models with insights about the bodily sources of human thought and experience.

The Body of Faith is the first account of American religious history to highlight the biological body. Robert C. Fuller brings a crucial new perspective to the study of American religion, showing that knowledge about the biological body deeply enriches how we explain dramatic episodes in American religious life. Fuller shows that the body’s genetically evolved systems—pain responses, sexual passion, and emotions like shame and fear—have persistently shaped the ways that Americans forge relationships with nature, to society, and to God.

The first new work to appear in the Chicago History of American Religion series in decades, The Body of Faith offers a truly interdisciplinary framework for explaining the richness, diversity, and endless creativity of American religious life.

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A Body of Individuals
The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction
Sue-Im Lee
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
Why are some versions of the collective “we” admired and desired while other versions are scorned and feared? A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction examines the conflict over the collective “we” through discourses of community. In the discourse of benevolent community, community is a tool towards achieving healing, productiveness, and connection. In the discourse of dissenting community, community that serves a function is simply another name for totalitarianism; instead, community must merely be a fact of coexistence. What are the sources and the appeal of these irreconcilable views of community, and how do they interact in contemporary fiction’s attempt at imagining “we”?
 
By engaging contemporary U.S. writers such as Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and David Markson with theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, François Lyotard, Ernesto Laclau, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book reveals how the two conflicting discourses of community—benevolent and dissenting—are inextricably intertwined in various literary visions of “we”—“we” of the family, of the world, of the human, and of coexistence.
 
These literary visions demonstrate, in a way that popular visions of community and postmodern theories of community cannot, the dialectical relationship between the discourses of benevolent community and dissenting community. Sue-Im Lee argues that contemporary fiction’s inability to resolve the paradox results in a model of ambivalent community, one that offers unique insights into community and into the very notion of unity.
 
 
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The Body of John Merryman
Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus
Brian McGinty
Harvard University Press, 2011

In April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus along the military line between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. This allowed army officers to arrest and indefinitely detain persons who were interfering with military operations in the area. When John Merryman, a wealthy Marylander suspected of burning bridges to prevent the passage of U.S. troops to Washington, was detained in Fort McHenry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney, declared the suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional and demanded Merryman's immediate release. Lincoln defied Taney’s order, offering his own forceful counter-argument for the constitutionality of his actions. Thus the stage was set for one of the most dramatic personal and legal confrontations the country has ever witnessed.

The Body of John Merryman is the first book-length examination of this much-misunderstood chapter in American history. Brian McGinty captures the tension and uncertainty that surrounded the early months of the Civil War, explaining how Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was first and foremost a military action that only subsequently became a crucial constitutional battle. McGinty's narrative brings to life the personalities that drove this uneasy standoff and expands our understanding of the war as a legal—and not just a military, political, and social—conflict. The Body of John Merryman is an extraordinarily readable book that illuminates the contours of one of the most significant cases in American legal history—a case that continues to resonate in our own time.

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A Body of One's Own
A Trans History of Argentina
Patricio Simonetto
University of Texas Press, 2024

A history of Argentina that examines how trans bodies were understood, policed, and shaped in a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives.

As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. A Body of One's Own explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina’s legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012. Analyzing the decisive yet overlooked impact of gender transformation in the formation of the nation-state, gender-belonging, and citizenship, this book ultimately shows that supposedly abstract struggles to define the shifting notions of "sex," citizenship, and nationhood are embodied material experiences.

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The Body of Poetry
Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self
Annie Finch
University of Michigan Press, 2005
The Body of Poetry collects essays, reviews, and memoir by Annie Finch, one of the brightest poet-critics of her generation. Finch's germinal work on the art of verse has earned her the admiration of a wide range of poets, from new formalists to hip-hop writers. And her ongoing commitment to women's poetry has brought Finch a substantial following as a "postmodern poetess" whose critical writing embraces the past while establishing bold new traditions. The Body of Poetry includes essays on metrical diversity, poetry and music, the place of women poets in the canon, and on poets Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Sara Teasdale, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Hacker, and John Peck, among other topics. In Annie Finch's own words, these essays were all written with one aim: "to build a safe space for my own poetry. . . . [I]n the attempt, they will also have helped to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry's heart."

Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.

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Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance
The Culture and History of a South African People
Jean Comaroff
University of Chicago Press, 1985
In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.
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The Body of the Artisan
Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
Pamela H. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a "new" philosophy known as science. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source-artists and artisans.

From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans' objects and their writings, Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. With nearly two hundred images, The Body of the Artisan provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art, craft, and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution-an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world.
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The Body of the People
East German Dance since 1945
Jens Richard Giersdorf
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
The Body of the People is the first comprehensive study of dance and choreography in East Germany. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis.
    Giersdorf looks closely at uniquely East German dance forms—including mass exercise events, national folk dances, Marxist-Leninist visions staged by the dance ensemble of the armed forces, the vast amateur dance culture, East Germany’s version of Tanztheater, and socialist alternatives to rock ‘n’ roll—to demonstrate how dance was used both as a form of corporeal utopia and of embodied socialist propaganda and indoctrination. The Body of the People also explores the artists working in the shadow of official culture who used dance and movement to critique and resist state power, notably Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Arila Siegert, and Fine Kwiatkowski. Giersdorf considers a myriad of embodied responses to the Communist state even after reunification, analyzing the embodiment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the works of Jo Fabian and Sasha Waltz, and the diasporic traces of East German culture abroad, exemplified by the Chilean choreographer Patricio Bunster.
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The Body of War
Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia
Dubravka Zarkov
Duke University Press, 2007
In The Body of War, Dubravka Žarkov analyzes representations of female and male bodies in the Croatian and Serbian press in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, during the war in which Yugoslavia disintegrated. Žarkov proposes that the Balkan war was not a war between ethnic groups; rather, ethnicity was produced by the war itself. Žarkov explores the process through which ethnicity was generated, showing how lived and symbolic female and male bodies became central to it. She does not posit a direct causal relationship between hate speech published in the press during the mid-1980s and the acts of violence in the war. Instead, she argues that both the representational practices of the “media war” and the violent practices of the “ethnic war” depended on specific, shared notions of femininity and masculinity, norms of (hetero)sexuality, and definitions of ethnicity.

Tracing the links between the war and press representations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Žarkov examines the media’s coverage of two major protests by women who explicitly identified themselves as mothers, of sexual violence against women and men during the war, and of women as militants. She draws on contemporary feminist analyses of violence to scrutinize international and local feminist writings on the war in former Yugoslavia. Demonstrating that some of the same essentialist ideas of gender and sexuality used to produce and reinforce the significance of ethnic differences during the war often have been invoked by feminists, she points out the political and theoretical drawbacks to grounding feminist strategies against violence in ideas of female victimhood.

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The Body of Writing
An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction
Flore Chevaillier
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction examines four postmodern texts whose authors play with the material conventions of “the book”: Joseph McElroy’s Plus (1977), Carole Maso’s AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula’s VAS (2003). By demonstrating how each of these works calls for an affirmative engagement with literature, Flore Chevaillier explores a centrally important issue in the criticism of contemporary fiction. Critics have claimed that experimental literature, in its disruption of conventional story-telling and language uses, resists literary and social customs. While this account is accurate, it stresses what experimental texts respond to more than what they offer. This book proposes a counter-view to this emphasis on the strictly privative character of innovative fictions by examining experimental works’ positive ideas and affects, as well as readers’ engagement in the formal pleasure of experimentations with image, print, sound, page, orthography, and syntax.
 
Elaborating an erotics of recent innovative literature implies that we engage in the formal pleasure of its experimentations with signifying techniques and with the materiality of their medium. Such engagement provokes a fusion of the reader’s senses and the textual material, which invites a redefinition of corporeality as a kind of textual practice.
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Body of Writing
Figuring Desire in Spanish American Literature
René Prieto
Duke University Press, 2000
Body of Writing focuses on the traces that an author’s “body” leaves on a work of fiction. Drawing on the work of six important Spanish American writers of the twentieth century, René Prieto examines narratives that reflect—in differing yet ultimately complementary ways—the imprint of the author’s body, thereby disclosing insights about power, aggression, transgression, and eroticism.

Healthy, invalid, lustful, and confined bodies—as portrayed by Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Tununa Mercado—become evidence for Roland Barthes’s contention that works of fiction are “anagrams of the body.” Claiming that an author’s intentions can be uncovered by analyzing “the topography of a text,” Prieto pays particular attention not to the actions or plots of these writers’ fiction but rather to their settings and characterizations. In the belief that bodily traces left on the page reveal the motivating force behind a writer’s creative act, he explores such fictional themes as camouflage, deterioration, defilement, entrapment, and subordination. Along the way, Prieto reaches unexpected conclusions regarding topics that include the relationship of the female body to power, male and female transgressive impulses, and the connection between aggression, the idealization of women, and anal eroticism in men.

This study of how authors’ longings and fears become embodied in literature will interest students and scholars of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies, and twentieth-century and Latin American literature.

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Body Parts of Empire
Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive
Nerissa S. Balce
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Body Parts of Empire is a study of abjection in American visual culture and popular literature from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). During this period, the American national territory expanded beyond its continental borders to islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Simultaneously, new technologies of vision emerged for imagining the human body, including the moving camera, stereoscopes, and more efficient print technologies for mass media.

Rather than focusing on canonical American authors who wrote at the time of U.S. imperialism, this book examines abject texts—images of naked savages, corpses, clothed native elites, and uniformed American soldiers—as well as bodies of writing that document the goodwill and violence of American expansion in the Philippine colony. Contributing to the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and gender studies, the book analyzes the actual archive of the Philippine-American War and how the racialization and sexualization of the Filipino colonial native have always been part of the cultures of America and U.S. imperialism. By focusing on the Filipino native as an abject body of the American imperial imaginary, this study offers a historical materialist optic for reading the cultures of Filipino America.
 

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Body Parts
Property Rights and the Ownership of Human Biological Materials
E. Richard Gold
Georgetown University Press

In Body Parts, E. Richard Gold examines whether the body and materials derived from it—such as human organs and DNA—should be thought of as market commodities and subject to property law. Analyzing a series of court decisions concerning property rights, Gold explores whether the language and assumptions of property law can help society determine who has rights to human biological materials.

Gold observes that the commercial opportunities unleashed by advances in biotechnology present a challenge to the ways that society has traditionally valued the human body and human health. In a balanced discussion of both commercial and individual perspectives, Gold asserts the need to understand human biological materials within the context of human values, rather than economic interests.

This perceptive book will be welcomed by scholars and other professionals engaged in questions regarding bioethics, applied ethics, the philosophy of value, and property and intellectual property rights. Given the international aspects of both intellectual property law and biotechnology, this book will be of interest throughout the world and especially valuable in common-law (most English-speaking) countries.

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Body, Remember
A Memoir
Kenny Fries
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

In this poetic, introspective memoir, Kenny Fries illustrates his intersecting identities as gay, Jewish, and disabled. While learning about the history of his body through medical records and his physical scars, Fries discovers just how deeply the memories and psychic scars run. As he reflects on his relationships with his family, his compassionate doctor, the brother who resented his disability, and the men who taught him to love, he confronts the challenges of his life. Body, Remember is a story about connection, a redemptive and passionate testimony to one man’s search for the sources of identity and difference.

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Body, Society, and Nation
The Creation of Public Health and Urban Culture in Shanghai
Chieko Nakajima
Harvard University Press, 2018

Body, Society, and Nation tells the story of China’s unfolding modernity by exploring the changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai. The pursuit of good health loomed large in Chinese political, social, and economic life. Yet, “good health” had a range of associations beyond individual well-being. It was also an integral part of Chinese nation-building, a goal of charitable activities, a notable outcome of Western medical science, a marker of modern civilization, and a commercial catchphrase. With the advent of Western powers, Chinese notions about personal hygiene and the body gradually expanded. This transformation was complicated by indigenous medical ideas, preexisting institutions and social groups, and local cultures and customs.

This study explores the many ways that members of the various strata of Shanghai society experienced and understood multiple meanings of health and body within their everyday lives. Chieko Nakajima traces the institutions they established, the regulations they implemented, and the practices they brought to the city as part of efforts to promote health. In doing so, she explains how local practices and customs fashioned and constrained public health and, in turn, how hygienic modernity helped shape and develop local cultures and influenced people’s behavior.

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The Body Soviet
Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State
Tricia Starks
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
In 1918 the People's Commissariat of Public Health began a quest to protect the health of all Soviet citizens, but health became more than a political platform or a tactical decision. The Soviets defined and categorized the world by interpreting political orthodoxy and citizenship in terms of hygiene. The assumed political, social, and cultural benefits of a regulated, healthy lifestyle informed the construction of Soviet institutions and identity. Cleanliness developed into a political statement that extended from domestic maintenance to leisure choices and revealed gender, ethnic, and class prejudices. Dirt denoted the past and poor politics; health and cleanliness signified mental acuity, political orthodoxy, and modernity.

Health, though essential to the revolutionary vision and crucial to Soviet plans for utopia, has been neglected by traditional histories caught up in Cold War debates. The Body Soviet recovers this significant aspect of Soviet thought by providing a cross-disciplinary, comparative history of Soviet health programs that draws upon rich sources of health care propaganda, including posters, plays, museum displays, films, and mock trials. The analysis of propaganda makes The Body Soviet more than an institutional history; it is also an insightful critique of the ideologies of the body fabricated by health organizations.

"A masterpiece that will thoroughly fascinate and delight readers. Starks's understanding of propaganda and hygiene in the early Soviet state is second to none. She tells the stories of Soviet efforts in this field with tremendous insight and ingenuity, providing a rich picture of Soviet life as it was actually lived."— Elizabeth Wood, author of From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia
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Body Story
Julia K. Depree
Ohio University Press, 2004
Something other than a memoir of a life well lived, Body Story conveys Julia K. De Pree's troubling journey from adolescence to adulthood and from anorexia to health.

For De Pree, between being a girl and being a woman, there was starvation. Body Story is her intimate account of girlhood, virginity, anorexia, and motherhood. De Pree's prose is spare and unguarded, revealing in vivid flashbacks and poignant vignettes the sources of her inner pain.

In high school, the five-foot-ten De Pree weighed as little as 114 pounds. She was too weak to raise her arms above her head. “In a paradoxical way, I starved my body in order to understand my life,” she writes. “I had to place my body in suspension before I could move physically into sexuality. Starving allowed me to create an interim space between innocence and experience.”

De Pree renders the starkness of anorexia along with the process of recovery, relapse, and, ultimately, redemption. She also tells the story of the physical landscape, from her origins in the Midwest to the American South, Paris, and the vast New Mexican desert, as well as the psychic landscape of her body as it encounters the joys and challenges of maturation, childbirth, and motherhood.

De Pree offers readers a new way of understanding women¿s bodily experience, as she writes about the mystery and the meaning of her illness. As many as eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders. Body Story, unlike clinical reports or news accounts, illuminates the complexity of anorexia as the narrative moves toward a subjective and deeply personal truth.

This evocative and often radiant vision is a unique window into womanhood and selfhood in middle-class, contemporary America.
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Body, Subject, and Power in China
Edited by Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow
University of Chicago Press, 1994
For the first time, this volume brings to the study of China the theoretical concerns and methods of contemporary critical cultural studies. Written by historians, art historians, anthropologists, and literary critics who came of age after the People's Republic resumed scholarly ties with the United States, these essays yield valuable new insights not only for China studies but also, by extension, for non-Asian cultural criticism.

Contributors investigate problems of bodiliness, engendered subjectivities, and discourses of power through a variety of sources that include written texts, paintings, buildings, interviews, and observations. Taken together, the essays show that bodies in China have been classified, represented, discussed, ritualized, gendered, and eroticized in ways as rich and multiple as those described in critical histories of the West. Silk robes, rocks, winds, gestures of bowing, yin yang hierarchies, and cross-dressing have helped create experiences of the body specific to Chinese historical life. By pointing to multiple examples of reimagining subjectivity and renegotiating power, the essays encourage scholars to avoid making broad generalizations about China and to rethink traditional notions of power, subject, and bodiliness in light of actual Chinese practices. Body, Subject, and Power in China is at once an example of the changing face of China studies and a work of importance to the entire discipline of cultural studies.
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Body Thesaurus
Jennifer Militello
Tupelo Press, 2013
In her second book, Jennifer Militello uses symptoms, diagnostic tests, and antidotes to illuminate tensions of identity that are central to illness and health. An endangered psyche confronts maladies and faces gods in poems that embody the complexities of self. Selected by Marilyn Hacker as a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Body Thesaurus examines the failing conduit of human physicality, offering beauty as a counter-stream to struggle.
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Body Thoughts
Andrew J. Strathern
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Provides an excellent review of anthropological thought on the body
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The Body Wars
Poems
Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
What would it take to be home in one’s body, to walk around the world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Jan Beatty boldly answers that question by making a fire map of the body. These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy. These are vital poems of dimension, of both psychic and literal travel, of the elasticity of truth and struggle, of the daily nature of desire that brings us to our knees—then shotguns us back to the heart’s center.
 
Yellow Sky                                                                                                                 

The summer that I had nowhere to live:
 
the sky was yellow everywhere.
The cars of other people had their own private shine.
 
I walked slowly.
Several birds re-visited the backyards of strangers,
 
I was free
singing the song of the last thing I didn’t say to you.
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Body Work
Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
Peter Brooks
Harvard University Press, 1993

The desire to know the body is a powerful dynamic of storytelling in all its forms. Peter Brooks argues that modern narrative is intent on uncovering the body in order to expose a truth that must be written in the flesh. In a book that ranges widely through literature and painting, Brooks shows how the imagination strives to bring the body into language and to write stories on the body.

From Rousseau, Balzac, Mary Shelley, and Flaubert, to George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras, from Manet and Gauguin to Mapplethorpe, writers and artists have returned in fascination to the body, the inescapable other of the spirit. Brooks's deep understanding of psychoanalysis informs his demonstration of how the "epistemophilic urge"--the desire to know-guides fictional plots and our reading of them.

It is the sexual body that furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, eventually of language itself-which then takes us away from the body. Yet mind and language need to recover the body, as an other realm that is primary to their very definition. Brooks shows how and why the female body has become the field upon which the aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of a whole society are played out. And he suggests how writers and artists have found in the woman's body the dynamic principle of their storytelling, its motor force.

This major book entertains and teaches: Brooks presumes no special knowledge on the part of his readers. His account proceeds chronologically from Rousseau in the eighteenth century forward to contemporary artists and writers. Body Work gives us a set of analytical tools and ideas-primarily from psychoanalysis, narrative and film studies, and feminist theory-that enable us to read modern narrative afresh.

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A Body Worth Defending
Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
Ed Cohen
Duke University Press, 2009
Biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years “immunity,” a legal concept invented in ancient Rome, serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends. “Self-defense” also originates in a juridico-political context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first “natural right.” In the 1880s and 1890s, biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one, creating a new vital function, “immunity-as-defense.” In A Body Worth Defending, Ed Cohen reveals the unacknowledged political, economic, and philosophical assumptions about the human body that biomedicine incorporates when it recruits immunity to safeguard the vulnerable living organism.

Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.

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Bodylore
Katharine Young
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
With this book, a new field of inquiry is instantiated in folklore, bodylore. Coming out of work in critical theory and cultural studies, semiology and psychology, philosophy and communication, literature and psychoanalysis, anthropology and history, Bodylore investigates the bodily discourses and practices of various cultures, including our own, in order to delineate the metaphysics in terms of which we conceive and experience ourselves and others. The body is disclosed as a cultural artifact rather than a natural object, one invented and reinvented in and by its social appearances. The term bodylore was coined for the 1989 meeting of the American Folklore Society. It brings folkloristic concerns with body language, body costumes and accoutrements, body movement, discourses and representations of the body, body rituals and taboos, and beliefs about the body to a social history of embodiment.
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Bodymakers
A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building
Leslie Heywood
Rutgers University Press, 1998
"A highly unique and refreshing contribution. Heywood not only theorizes the relationships among feminism, activism, and bodybuilding but also provides what so many works on built female bodies lack-a feminine historical context. . . . Heywood concludes with a call for women to 'feel our muscles, our power, our terrible, wonderful, monstrous strengths' by leaving behind aerobics, replacing light weights with heavy ones, and claiming our right to take up space. . . . Like all influential and groundbreaking works, this book raises new and important questions that should provide grist for much feminist debate and scholarship in coming years." --Signs

"Bodymakers is most ambitious in terms of its engagement with feminist cultural criticism and its unconventional scope. Heywood comments on film, novels, magazine pictures, popular criticisms of feminism, the J. Crew catalog, [and] the concept of power feminism." --Gender and Society

"In this brilliantly insightful and immensely readable book, Leslie Heywood makes us think about women's body building in an entirely new way. She argues persuasively that, far from being an individualistic, apolitical act, it is a powerful form of resistance, empowering women to overcome their victim status and heal past abuse." --Myra Dinnerstein, University of Arizona

"Bodymakers has a power and an honesty that is unusual in a book with its theoretical sophistication." --Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.

"With clarity, force, and passionate investment grounded in both theory and her own experience, Heywood understands that women can strengthen body, mind, and spirit through everyday practice. Her argument that body building is this kind of activist practice is as inspirational as it is poignant." --Joanna Frueh, author of Erotic Faculties

"Flexing her muscles through autobiographical, theoretical, and spectacular acts, Heywood insists that we read the muscular female body not as an 'extreme oddity' but as a 'form of activism' through which we can understand anew larger cultural issues and trends, including the American romance with individualism and the relationship of second and third wave feminisms. Muscular female bodies will never be read in the same way again." --Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan

Women with muscles are a recent phenomenon, so recent that, while generating a good deal of interest, their importance to the cultural landscape has yet to be acknowledged. Leslie Heywood looks at the sport and image of female body building as a metaphor for how women fare in our current political and cultural climate. She argues that the movement in women's body building from small, delicate bodies to large powerful ones and back again is directly connected to progress and backlash within the abortion debate, the ongoing struggle for race and gender equality, and the struggle to define "feminism" in the context of the nineties. She discusses female body building as activism, as an often effective response to abuse, race and masculinity in body building, and the contradictory ways that photographers treat female body builders. Engaging and accessible, Bodymakers reveals how female body builders find themselves both trapped and empowered by their sport.
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Bodyminds Reimagined
(Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction
Sami Schalk
Duke University Press, 2018
In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.
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bodys
Vanessa Roveto
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Vanessa Roveto’s debut collection, bodys, is a work of stunning strangeness, force, and audacity, generated by—and degenerating toward—the unanswerable question at the heart of poetic speech: What does it mean to be “a person?” A dizzying hybrid of poetry and prose, post-human analytics and ribaldry, spiritual autobiography, and grim satire, Roveto lends exacting voice to “a most complicated vocabulary of feeling-your-feelings.” Viscerally drawn to forbidden states and suspicious of its own desires, bodys is literature as high-risk, low-tech radiology, mapping the dim edges of identity and identification: “Brain scans indicated the moral center and the disgust center overlap on the mind field.”

Roveto’s sentences hurtle forward with withering disjunctive energy, laying down traps of wordplay, tacking toward and veering away from syntactical targets, trying-on and sloughing-off pronoun positions with abandon. Yet for all its postmodern bravado—and irreverence, and frequent scary hilarity—bodys remains abidingly attached to exploring the problem of a human speaker addressing itself to another, and colliding with its own otherness along the way. It is the same problem—articulation as disarticulation—that animates the great Renaissance sonnet sequences, from which bodys is affectionately, and perversely, descended. What is bodys—what are bodys—anyway? A dysfunction in the body’s ability to multiply itself? A dysmorphic take on the body’s sense of its reality? A dystopian vision of a world in which boundaries between selves and others have been overwhelmed by commerce, surveillance, medical technology, nihilistic agitprop? “Last night one of the girls asked about the relationship between a body and nobody,” Roveto writes. “It was the beautiful question.”
 
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Boeing B-47 Stratojet
the cold war jet bomber
Nico Braas
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Built by Boeing, designated as B-47 and named the Stratojet, this plane was quantum leap in aircraft development. Initially Boeing entered the unknown when they started this project, but soon it would be evident that Strategic Air Command would have its multi-engine jet bomber with a speed performance similar to the latest jet fighters...
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Boethius and Aquinas
Ralph McInerny
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
In this study of the relationship between Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, Ralph McInerny dispels the notion that Aquinas misunderstood the early philosopher and argues instead that he learned from Boethius, assimilated his ideas, and proved to be a reliable interpreter of his thought.
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The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People
Don Brothwell
Harvard University Press, 1987

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Boggs
A Comedy of Values
Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In this highly entertaining book, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J. S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps more precisely, value. Boggs draws money-paper notes in standard currencies from all over the world-and tries to spend his drawings. It is a practice that regularly lands him in trouble with treasury police around the globe and provokes fundamental questions regarding the value of art and the value of money.

"Lawrence Weschler, who evidently admires [Boggs]-something not difficult to do-has written what may be the most extraordinary biography imaginable: "weird," to use a favourite Boggs word. It does something towards changing our entire outlook on money and its uses. And the reader is left with an uneasy feeling that anything in this world can be created by drawing it." —Ruth Rendell, Daily Telegraph

"As ideal a subject matter as money is for Boggs' genius, Boggs is as ideal a topic for Weschler's considerable talents. . . . A writer any less lucid than Weschler would smudge the lines, making of Boggs a counterculture caricature or a high-art huckster. And a writer any less confident would knock the balance, making academic mud pies of Boggs' enlightened chaos." —Jonathon Keats, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"[A] witty and engaging chronicle. . . . Weschler's fascinating account of the artist as agent provocateur demonstrates both the significance of Boggs's art and his determination to continue his unusual critique of the idea of money." —Henry Wessells, Washington Post Book World

"[A] witty, excellently written account of a bizarre and fascinating snippet of modern life." —Paul Ormerod, Times Higher Education Supplement

"The book, like the artist, challenges people to pause and consider the extent to which the economic bedrock of everyday life is in part a confusing welter of artistic abstractions. It's a work that is at once informative, entertaining, and provocative-a reading experience, one might say, of rather good value." —Toby Lester, Atlantic Monthly

"[A] fascinating tale, especially in these days of fluctuating currency rates, the euro, and inexplicable Net-stock valuations." —Paul Lukas, Fortune

Lawrence Weschler, a recipient of the prestigious Lannan Literary Award for 1998, is the author of numerous books, including Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas, and Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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Bogotá
A Novel
Alan Grostephan
Northwestern University Press, 2013

In Bogotá, a taut, moving novel set in present-day Colombia, Wilfredo decides to uproot his family from their small town, where his ferry service on the river subjects him to the gruesome errands demanded by the local paramilitary. Moving in with relatives in a slum in Bogotá, the family tries desperately to achieve the smallest measure of comfort and hope in a world of almost total ruin, wracked by deprivation, fear, and ceaseless violence. 

Alan Grostephan depicts with startling immediacy an urban landscape of extreme harshness and oppressive instability. The tension between the desperate conditions surrounding his characters and their efforts to hold on to their humanity gives Bogotá a ferocious energy. As Wilfredo and his family fight to stay alive and stay together, their plight emerges as equally enraging and uplifting, constituting a portrait of a society always on the verge of disintegration.

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Bogs of the Northeast
Charles W. Johnson
University Press of New England, 1985
What makes bogs so interesting yet so misunderstood? This generously illustrated book presents many of the exciting, almost enthralling, facets of bogs--unusual plants, intricate ecological relationships, animals, myths and folklore, and the myriad history recorded in the peats. Despite the fascinating bogs hold, until now there has been no popular book that deals with them in a comprehensive yet authoritative manner. The Northeastern United States has a wonderful diversity of bogs: some are southern in nature, others are very arctic, and still others maritime. And although this is a book primarily about peatlands in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the six New England states, it will interest a much wider audience seeking an exciting and attractive approach to these often-neglected areas of our natural heritage.
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The Bohemian Body
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture
Alfred Thomas
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     The Bohemian Body examines the modernist forces within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe that helped shape both Czech nationalism and artistic interaction among ethnic and social groups—Czechs and Germans, men and women, gays and straights. 
     By re-examining the work of key Czech male and female writers and poets from the National Revival to the Velvet Revolution, Alfred Thomas exposes the tendency of Czech literary criticism to separate the political and the personal in modern Czech culture. He points instead to the complex interplay of the political and the personal across ethnic, cultural, and intellectual lines and within the works of such individual writers as Karel Hynek Mácha, Bozena Nemcová, and Rainer Maria Rilke, resulting in the emergence and evolution of a protean modern identity. The product is a seemingly paradoxical yet nuanced understanding of Czech culture (including literature, opera, and film), long overlooked or misunderstood by Western scholars.
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A Bohemian Youth
Josef Hirsal
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Winner, 1998 PEN Center USA West Award for Translation

Josef Hiršal's experimental novel is a Dada-like romp through the life of a young man born into a Bohemian peasant family. Told in five parts, A Bohemian Youth begins with a word to the wise, moves on to the text, continues with notes and with notes to the note, and ends with a note on the notes to the notes.

More than just a tongue-in-cheek parody of a literary memoir, A Bohemian Youth is a glimpse of the First Czechoslovak Republic as seen through the eyes of a young peasant from the provinces. Abounding in intimate details--the manners of a servant girl, the habits of the town homosexual, the sounds of popular music; the way people eat in wartime—Hiršal's novel is a wrenching and hilarious tale of a young man's emotional and sexual awakening.
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Bohemians
The Glamorous Outcasts
Wilson, Elizabeth
Rutgers University Press, 2000

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.

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Bohemia's Jews and Their Nineteenth Century
Texts, Contexts, Reassessments
Jindrich Toman
Karolinum Press, 2023
Bohemian Jewish culture and literature during the underexamined 1820s to 1880s.

This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the “quiet” decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers’ accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlíćek Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.
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Bohumil Hrabal
A Full-Length Portrait
Jirí Pelán
Karolinum Press, 2019
Described by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times Book Review as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of gossip, beer, cats, and women (in roughly that order),” Bohumil Hrabal is one of the most important, most translated, and most idiosyncratic Czech authors. In Bohumil Hrabal: A Full-Length Portrait, Jiří Pelán makes the case that this praise is far too narrow. A respected scholar of French and Italian literature, Pelán approaches Hrabal as a comparatist, expertly situating him within the context of European and world literature as he explores the entirety of Hrabal’s oeuvre and its development over sixty years. Concise, clear, and as compulsively readable as the works of Hrabal himself, Bohumil Hrabal was universally praised by critics in its original Czech edition as one of best works of Hrabal criticism. Here it is beautifully rendered into English for the first time by David Short, a celebrated translator of Hrabal’s works. Also featuring a fascinating selection of black-and-white images from Hrabal’s life, Bohumil Hrabal is essential reading for anyone interested in this crucial Czech author.
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The Boiler Room and Other Telephone Sales Scams
Robert J. Stevenson
University of Illinois Press, 1998
Sure to make you think twice before responding to the next telephone sales call you receive, this volume explores why telephone boiler rooms and other scams thrive and how fraudulent techniques and deception migrate to and from conventional businesses.
 
The Boiler Room and Other Telephone Sales Scams is grounded in the nine years Robert Stevenson spent working covertly as a "participant-observer" in telephone rooms (the ethical implications of which he discusses in an epilogue). As Stevenson details boiler room hierarchy, you'll learn why all boilers are telephone salesmen but not all telephone salesmen are boilers. You'll read about the "heat" rising in rooms where experienced pitchmen use tried-and-true manipulative techniques to overcome objections to sales. And you'll marvel at Stevenson's insider knowledge of product houses, service shops, and other aspects of a major industry in which both employees and customers are in daily peril—the former of losing their jobs and the latter of losing their money.
 
The Boiler Room and Other Telephone Sales Scams is required reading for anyone who's ever picked up a telephone and been asked to buy a product or a service. It's also an invaluable study of a widespread form of deviance and occupational crime, essential reading for students of criminology and the sociology of occupations.
 
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Boiling Energy
Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung
Richard Katz
Harvard University Press, 1982
This account of the ancient healing dances practiced by the Kung people of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert includes vivid eyewitness descriptions of night-long healing dances and interviews with Kung healers.
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Boko Haram
Brandon Kendhammer
Ohio University Press, 2018

From its small-time origins in the early 2000s to its transformation into one of the world’s most-recognized terrorist groups, this remarkable short book tells the story of Boko Haram’s bloody, decade-long war in northeastern Nigeria. Going beyond the headlines, including the group’s 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok and the international outrage it inspired, Boko Haram provides readers new to the conflict with a clearly written and comprehensive history of how the group came to be, the Nigerian government’s failed efforts to end it, and its enormous impact on ordinary citizens.

Drawing on years of research, Boko Haram is a timely addition to the acclaimed Ohio Short Histories of Africa. Brandon Kendhammer and Carmen McCain—two leading specialists on northern Nigeria—separate fact from fiction within one of the world’s least-understood conflicts. Most distinctively, it is a social history, one that tells the story of Boko Haram’s violence through the journalism, literature, film, and music made by people close to it.

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"A Bold and Hardy Race of Men"
The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen
Jennifer Schell
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
In his novel Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fishermen (1834), Joseph C. Hart proclaimed that his characters were "a bold and hardy race of men," who deserved the "expressive title of American Whale-Fishermen." Hart was not the only American author to applaud these physical laborers as the embodiment of national manhood. Heroic portraits of whalers first appeared in American literature during the 1780s, and they proliferated across time. Writers as various as Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman celebrated the talents of the seafarers who transformed the New England whale fishery into a globally dominant industry. But these images did not go unchallenged. Alternative visions—some of which undermined the iconic status of the trade and its workers—began to proliferate. Even so, these depictions did very little to dismantle the notion that whaling men were prime exemplars of a proud American work ethic.

To explain why this industry had such a widespread and enduring impact on American literature, Jennifer Schell juxtaposes and analyzes a wide array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whaling narratives. Drawing on various studies of masculinity, labor history, and transnationalism, Schell shows how this particular type of maritime work, and the traits and values associated with it, helped to shape the American literary, cultural, and historical imagination. In the process, she reveals the diverse, flexible, and often contradictory meanings of gender, class, and nation in nineteenth-century America.
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Bold Conscience
Luther to Shakespeare to Milton
Joshua R. Held
University of Alabama Press, 2023
How the conscience in early modern England emerged as a fulcrum for public action
 
Bold Conscience chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint—what Shakespeare labels “coward conscience”—to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. The concept of conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the regicide of King Charles I. Yet the most complex and lasting perspectives on conscience emerged from deliberately literary voices—William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton.

Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors transform the idea of conscience as a private, shameful state to one of boldness fit for navigating both royal power and common dissent in the public realm. Held tracks the increasing political power of conscience from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry VIII to Donne’s court sermons and Milton’s Areopagitica, showing finally that in Paradise Lost, Milton roots boldness in the inner paradise of a pure, common conscience.

Applying a fine-grain analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study also looks back to the 1520s, to Luther’s theological foundations of the concept, and forward to 1689, to Locke’s transformation of the idea alongside the term “consciousness.” Ultimately, Held’s study shows how conscience emerges at once as a bulwark against absolute sovereignty and as a stronghold of personal certainty.
 
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Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!
A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959
Eric Schaefer
Duke University Press, 1999
Unashamed nudists, high-flying hopheads, brazen strippers, vicious vice lords, and high school girls who find themselves “in trouble” comprise the population of exploitation films. In the first full-scale history of these low-budget movies of decades past, Eric Schaefer reveals how this pioneering form of “trash film” purveyed the forbidden thrills of explicit sexual behavior, drug use, and vice that the mainstream movie industry could not show.
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! is a meticulously researched, interdisciplinary study that is informed by a wide range of sources—including both mainstream and industry newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts, personal interviews, and the films themselves. Schaefer begins by exploring the unique mode of production of exploitation movies, their distribution, and the outrageous exhibition practices that were rooted in the traditions of sideshows and carnivals. His close analysis of dozens of films, such as The Road to Ruin, Modern Motherhood, One Way Ticket to Hell, and The Wages of Sin demonstrates that these films were more than simply “bad” movies. By situating exploitation films in a historical context and organizing them according to the social problems they addressed, Schaefer shows how they evolved during a period of forty years and how, during that time, they shaped public policies and attitudes. Finally, he focuses on the changes in the postwar American film industry that led to the decline of the classical exploitation film and set the stage for the rise of “sexploitation” in the 1960s.
Engagingly written, illustrated with rare photographs, posters, production stills, and ad slicks, and offering a full filmography, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! reveals a forgotten side of film history and American culture. It will delight and inform those interested in film history, cultural studies, American studies and history, and the many fans of exploitation films.
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A Bold Profession
African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa
Leslie Anne Hadfield
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
In rural South African clinics, Black nurses played critical roles. Charged with administering valuable and life-saving health care measures despite a lack of equipment and personnel, these nurses had to navigate the intersections of traditional African healing practices, changing gender relations, and increasing educational and economic opportunities for South Africa’s Black middle class between the 1960s and 1980s.
 
Leslie Anne Hadfield compellingly demonstrates how these women were able to successfully carve out their own professional space and reshape notions of health and healing in the Eastern Cape. Bringing forth the stories of these nurses in their own voices, A Bold Profession is an homage to their dedication to the well-being of their communities. Hadfield sheds light on the struggles of balancing commitment to career and family lives during an oppressive apartheid. The volume fills an important gap for scholars studying the history of women, nursing, and health care in South Africa, illuminating the humanity of health care workers.
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Bold Words
A Century of Asian American Writing
Edited by Rajini Srikanth
Rutgers University Press, 2001
A century of Asian American writing has generated a forceful cascade of "bold words." This anthology covers writings by Asian Americans in all genres, from the early twentieth century to the present. Some sixty authors of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian American origin are represented, with an equal split between male and female writers. The collection is divided into four sections-memoir, fiction, poetry, and drama-prefaced by an introductory essay from a well-known practitioner of that genre: Meena Alexander on memoir, Gary Pak on fiction, Eileen Tabios on poetry, and Roberta Uno on drama. The selections depict the complex realities and wide range of experiences of Asians in the United States. They illuminate the writers' creative responses to issues as diverse as resistance, aesthetics, biculturalism, sexuality, gender relations, racism, war, diaspora, and family. Rajini Srikanth teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the coeditor of the award-winning anthology Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America and the collection A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America. Esther Y. Iwanaga teaches Asian American literature and literature-based writing courses at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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The Bolero of Andi Rowe
Stories
Toni Margarita Plummer
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Winner of the Miguel Mármol Prize, this collection of inter-related stories delves into the life of Andi Rowe—a young woman of Mexican and Irish heritage—to give an intimate account of one family’s passage from the immigrant story to the American story, and the cycle of loss, adaptation, and rediscovery that is innate to that experience.

Set largely in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley, and crossing generations and borders, these stories focus on the quiet moments between explosions, where tension simmers just beneath the surface. From a Border Patrol agent whose own mother crossed the border illegally to a lonely woman seeking companionship with her hired day-laborer, characters seek revelation in the most ordinary of experiences, their actions filled with humor, longing, and honesty.

In the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, Toni Margarita Plummer explores themes of grace and redemption as each story spirals toward a surprising but inevitable conclusion. The Bolero of Andi Rowe, an impressive work by an exciting new talent, offers a compassionate look at the struggle between meeting cultural expectations and seeking happiness, and the sacrifices and triumphs made along the way.
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The Boletes of Michigan
Alexander H. Smith and Harry D. Thiers
University of Michigan Press, 1971

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Bolivia in the Age of Gas
Bret Gustafson
Duke University Press, 2020
Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country's natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas, Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country's first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil and gas politics and military intervention, Gustafson shows how natural gas wealth brought a measure of economic independence and redistribution, yet also reproduced political and economic relationships that contradicted popular and Indigenous aspirations for radical change. Though grounded in the unique complexities of Bolivia, the volume argues that fossil-fuel political economies worldwide are central to the reproduction of militarism and racial capitalism and suggests that progressive change demands moving beyond fossil-fuel dependence and the social and ecological ills that come with it.
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The Bolivia Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Sinclair Thomson, Rossana Barragán, Xavier Albó, Seemin Qayum, and Mark Goodale, editors
Duke University Press, 2018
The Bolivia Reader provides a panoramic view, from antiquity to the present, of the history, culture, and politics of a country known for its ethnic and regional diversity, its rich natural resources and dilemmas of economic development, and its political conflict and creativity. Featuring both classic and little-known texts ranging from fiction, memoir, and poetry to government documents, journalism, and political speeches, the volume challenges stereotypes of Bolivia as a backward nation while offering insights into the country's history of mineral extraction, revolution, labor organizing, indigenous peoples' movements, and much more. Whether documenting Inka rule or Spanish conquest, three centuries at the center of Spanish empire, or the turbulent politics and cultural vibrancy of the national period, these sources—the majority of which appear in English for the first time—foreground the voices of actors from many different walks of life. Unprecedented in scope, The Bolivia Reader illustrates the historical depth and contemporary challenges of Bolivia in all their complexity.
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Bolivia
Refounding the Nation
Kepa Artaraz
Pluto Press, 2012

The election of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, movement towards socialism) to power in Bolivia in 2006 marked a historic break from centuries of foreign domination and indigenous marginalisation. Evo Morales, leader of the MAS, became the first indigenous president of Bolivia.

Kepa Artaraz looks at the attempt to 'refound the nation' which the new government has made as its goal. He shows how the mix of Marxism, indigenous liberation politics, anti-imperialism and environmentalism has made Bolivia one of the most interesting and unique political experiments of Latin America's 'red decade'.

As the historic left-turn in Latin America reaches a crossroads, Bolivia: Refounding the Nation guides us through the politics and ideas which have animated this popular movement, drawing out important lessons for progressive politics everywhere.

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Bolivia
Revolution and the Power of History in the Present
James Dunkerley
University of London Press, 2007

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Bolivia
The Uncompleted Revolution
James Malloy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970
The first book-length analysis of the Bolivian revolution by an American political scientist explains the events of 1952 as a Latin American case study, and links the theme of the revolution with other contemporary insurrections in underdeveloped countries. Combining narrative excitement and scholarly analysis, the book pinpoints sources of weakness and stress in the Bolivian old order, with particular attention to the effects of uneven economic developments in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It then focuses on the stormy years after 1936 that led up to the insurrection of April 9-11, 1952. Finally, it examines attempts of the revolutionary government to promote economic development between 1952 and November 1964, when it was overthrown.
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Bolivia's Radical Tradition
Permanent Revolution in the Andes
S. Sándor John
University of Arizona Press, 2012
In December 2005, following a series of convulsive upheavals that saw the overthrow of two presidents in three years, Bolivian peasant leader Evo Morales became the first Indian president in South American history. Consequently, according to S. Sándor John, Bolivia symbolizes new shifts in Latin America, pushed by radical social movements of the poor, the dispossessed, and indigenous people once crossed off the maps of "official" history. But, as John explains, Bolivian radicalism has a distinctive genealogy that does not fit into ready-made patterns of the Latin American left.
 
According to its author, this book grew out of a desire to answer nagging questions about this unusual place. Why was Bolivia home to the most persistent and heroically combative labor movement in the Western Hemisphere? Why did this movement take root so deeply and so stubbornly? What does the distinctive radical tradition of Trotskyism in Bolivia tell us about the past fifty years there, and what about the explosive developments of more recent years? To answer these questions, John clearly and carefully pieces together a fragmented past to show a part of Latin American radical history that has been overlooked for far too long. Based on years of research in archives and extensive interviews with labor, peasant, and student activists—as well as Chaco War veterans and prominent political figures—the book brings together political, social, and cultural history, linking the origins of Bolivian radicalism to events unfolding today in the country that calls itself "the heart of South America."
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Boll Weevil Blues
Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South
James C. Giesen
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. 

As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

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Bollywood's India
Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India
Rachel Dwyer
Reaktion Books, 2014
Bollywood movies have long been known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But these exciting and often amusing films rarely reflect the reality of life on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, the strikingly illustrated Bollywood’s Indiaexamines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society.
 
Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema’s interpretations of India over the last two decades are a reliable guide to understanding the nation’s changing hopes and dreams. She looks at the ways Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of the country—what it believes and feels, as well as life at home and in public. Using Dwyer’s two decades spent working with filmmakers and discussing movies with critics and moviegoers,Bollywood’s India is an illuminating look at Hindi cinema.
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Bollywood’s New Woman
Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies
Megha Anwer
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics. 
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Bolor Erike
Mongolian Chronicle
Rasipungsuy
Harvard University Press
Third in the Scripta Mongolica series, this book reproduces a rare printed text of the Bolor Erike or Chaplet of Crystals, written in the 18th century but preserving a number of recitals, some unknown elsewhere, relating to Chinggis Qaghan and his line and to the history of the Mongols under the Chinese Ming dynasty. The dean of the world’s Mongolists provides a thorough textual and historical analysis.
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Bolshevik Visions
First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Part 1
William G. Rosenberg, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1990
The first volume of a collection of writings by early Soviet critics and theorists
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