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Fertility and Jewish Law
Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox Responsa Literature
Ronit Irshai
Brandeis University Press, 2012
This book presents, from the perspective of feminist jurisprudence and feminist and liberal bioethics, a complete study of Jewish law (halakhah) on contemporary reproductive issues such as birth control, abortion, and assisted fertility. Irshai examines these issues to probe gender-based values that underlie the interpretations and determinations reached by modern practitioners of halakhah. Her primary goal is to tell, through common halakhic tools, a different halakhic story, one that takes account of the female narrative and its missing perspective.
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Fertility and Other Stories
Vsevolod Ivanov
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Vsevolod Ivanov's personal experiences in Siberia and Central Asia during the Revolution and Civil War, set against a childhood and youth wandering that vast expanse, infuse his writing. Combining traditional elements with the fantastic and the surreal, Ivanov's stories address not only the themes of the Revolution--the dehumanizing effects of famine; the ferment, energy, and uncertainty of the tempestuous times—but also the quotidian: the quiet world of man and nature, and the elemental bond that tied peasants to their native land. Fertility and Other Stories makes available for the first time in English some of the best stories of one of the most talented twentieth-century Russian writers.
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Fertility Change in Contemporary Japan
Robert W. Hodge and Naohiro Ogawa
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The authors examine the striking decline in Japan's birthrate in light of the rapid urbanization, industrialization, and socioeconomic development experienced by the nation since World War II.
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The Fertility Revolution
A Supply-Demand Analysis
Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins
University of Chicago Press, 1985
For most of human history a "natural fertility" regime has prevailed throughout the world: there has been almost no conscious limitation of family size within marriage, and women have spent their reproductive lives tied to the "wheel of childbearing." Only recently in developed countries has fertility been brought under conscious control by individual couples and childbearing fallen to an average of two births per woman. The explanation of this "fertility revolution" is the main concern of this book.

Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins present and test a fertility theory that has gained increasing attention over the last decade, a "supply-demand theory" that integrates economic and sociological approaches to fertility determination. The results of the tests, which draw on data from four developing countries—Colombia, India, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan—are highly consistent, though a number of the conclusions are likely to arouse controversy. For example, couples' motivation for fertility control appears to be the prime mover in the fertility revolution, rather than access to family planning services or unfavorable attitudes toward such services.

The interdisciplinary approach and nontechnical exposition of this study will attract a wide readership among economists, sociologists, demographers, anthropologists, statisticians, biologists, and others.
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Festal Letters 1-12
St. Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
No description available
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Festal Letters 13-30
St. Cyril of Alexandria
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
Twenty-nine in all, these letters cover all but three of Cyril's years as a bishop. The first twelve were published in 2009 (Fathers of the Church 118). The present volume completes the set. Festal letters were used in Alexandria primarily to announce the beginning of Lent and the date of Easter. They also served a catechetical purpose, however, allowing the Patriarch an annual opportunity to write pastorally not just about issues facing the entire see, but also about the theological issues of the day.
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A Festering Sweetness
Poems of American People
Robert Coles
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978
A Festering Sweetness is a new approach for the renowned child psychiatrist and writer Robert Coles. His works have always portrayed children in their own social fabric and language, but in this book he has arranged the words and intent of the children and their parents into verse forms.  These skillfully constructed poems capture the hopes, fears, assumptions, and expectations of these people.

The sense of life and suffering among the poor of the South, the northern ghettos, and the West conveyed in A Festering Sweetness could not  be expressed in any form other than poetry.  And only Robery Coles, who has lived and worked among these people, could have revealed with such sympathy and insight the minds and emotions of the deprived in America.  He is a superb stylist, with an extraordinary sensitivity of ear and eye, as well as a fine and humane psychiatrist—indeed, a man in the doctor-writer tradition of William Carlos Williams.
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Festival of the Poor
Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class
Jane C. Schneider
University of Arizona Press, 1996
The historical decline of fertility in Europe has occupied a central place in social history and demography over the past quarter-century. Most scholars credit Europeans with modulating sexual behavior, through either abstinence or the practice of coitus interruptus, as a rational choice made in the interest of personal economic comfort; yet peasant and working classes have typically lagged behind in birth control and have given rise to the adage that "sexual embrace is the festival of the poor." Scholarly analyses of "lag" often reinforce this stigmatizing view. Now this subject is given a fresh look through a case study in Sicily, one of the last outposts of Western Europe's demographic transition.

By examining population changes in a single community between 1860 and 1980, the authors offer an extended review and critique of existing models of fertility decline in Europe, proposing a new interpretation that emphasizes historical context and class relations. They show how the spread of capitalism in Sicily induced an unprecedented rate of population growth, with boom-and-bust cycles creating the class experiences in which "reputational networks" came to redefine family life; how Sicilians began to control their fertility in response to class-mediated ideas about gender relations and respectable family size; and how the town's gentry, artisan, and peasant classes adopted family planning methods at different times in response to different pressures.

Jane and Peter Schneider's anthropologically oriented political-economy perspective challenges the position of Western Europe as a model for fertility decline on which every other case should converge, looking instead at the diversity of cultural ideals and practices--such as those found in Sicily--that influence the spread and form of birth control. Combining anthropological, oral historical, and archival methods in new and insightful ways, the authors' synthesis of a particular case study with a broad historical and theoretical discussion will play a major role in the ongoing debates over the history of European fertility decline and point the way toward integrating the analysis of demographic upheaval with the study of class formation and ideology.
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A Festival of Violence
An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930
Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck
University of Illinois Press, 1995
This finely detailed statistical study of lynching in ten southern states shows that economic and status concerns were at the heart of that violent
practice. Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck empirically test competing explanations of the causes of lynching, using U.S. Census and historical voting data and a newly constructed inventory of southern lynch victims. Among their surprising findings: lynching responded to fluctuations in the price of cotton, decreasing in frequency when prices rose and increasing when they fell.
 
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Festivals and the French Revolution
Mona Ozouf
Harvard University Press, 1988

Festivals and the French Revolution—the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals, although most historians have been content either to ridicule them as ineffectual or to bemoan them as repugnant examples of a sterile, official culture. Mona Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. Festivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revolution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew.

Historians have recognized the importance of the revolutionary festival as a symbol of the Revolution. But they have differed widely in their interpretations of what that symbol meant and have considered the festivals as diverse as the rival political groups that conceived and organized them. Against this older vision, Ozouf argues for the fundamental coherence and profound unity of the festival as both event and register of reference and attitude. By comparing the most ideologically opposed festivals (those of Reason and the Supreme Being, for instance), she shows that they clearly share a common aim, which finds expression in a mutual ceremonial and symbolic vocabulary. Through a brilliant discussion of the construction, ordering, and conduct of the festival Ozouf demonstrates how the continuity of the images, allegories, ceremonials, and explicit functions can be seen as the Revolution’s own commentary on itself.

A second and important aim of this book is to show that this system of festivals, often seen as destructive, was an immensely creative force. The festival was the mirror in which the Revolution chose to see itself and the pedagogical tool by which it hoped to educate future generations, Far from being a failure, it embodied, socialized, and made sacred a new set of values based on the family, the nation, and mankind—the values of a modern, secular, liberal world.

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Festivals of Attica
An Archaeological Commentary
Erika Simon
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

The festivals of the Athenian sacred calendar constitute a vital key to classical Greek culture and religion.  Erika Simon sets out here to explicate those complex and often obscure festivals.  By careful marshaling of a variety of proofs from literary, historical, and archaeological sources, she is able to justify some startling conclusions and achieve a comprehensive and truly original synthesis that clarifies, as never before, the probable origins and meanings of the Attic cults.

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Festivals of Freedom
Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915
Mitch Kachun
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003
With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation.

Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning.

Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American—not just an African American—day of commemoration.
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Festive Devils of the Americas
Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo
Seagull Books, 2015
The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil—the devil that dances—turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Festive Devils of the Americas is the first volume to present a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them.

Each section of this volume opens with regional maps ranging from the Andes, Afro-Atlantic, and Caribbean, to Central and North America. However, festive devils defy geographical as well as moral boundaries. From Brazil’s Candomblé to New Mexico’s dance halls, festive devils and their stories sustain and transform ancestral memory, recast historical narratives, and present political, social, and cultural alternatives in many guises. Within economic, political, and religious cross-currents, these paradoxical figures affirm the spirit of community within the framework of subversion and inversion found at the heart of the festival world.
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Festive Ukrainian Cooking
Marta Pisetska Farley
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Ukrainian cooking embodies national and ethnic tastes and reflects the spiritual and social awareness of Ukrainians. More than just a cookbook, Festive Ukrainian Cooking is a definitive account of traditional Ukrainian culture as perpetuated in family rituals and celebrated with elegantly prepared food and drink. Working from original sources in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish, and drawing on experience as an accomplished cook, Marta Pisetska Farley arranges these recipes as they were enjoyed throughout the year, beginning with kolach, a glazed braided bread sprinkled with poppy seeds, for Christmas Eve, and ending with succulent dishes made with wild mushrooms harvested in the fall. Chapter introductions describe the folkways associated with major holidays and family events and the symbolic and celebratory role of food appropriate to each. Festive Ukrainian Cooking, originally published in 1990 and now newly repackaged in paperback, records these traditions and adapts old-style recipes for the modern kitchen.
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Fetal Rights, Women's Rights
Gender Equality in the Workplace
Suzanne U. Samuels
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many private employers in the United States enacted fetal protection policies that barred fertile women—that is, women who had not been surgically sterilized—from working in jobs that might expose fetuses to toxins. In Fetal Rights, Women’s Rights, Suzanne Samuels analyzes these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants, and interest groups. She poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace, including: are women workers or wombs?
    Placing the fetal protection controversy within the larger societal debate about gender roles, Samuels argues that governmental decision-makers confuse sex, which is based solely on biological characteristics, with gender, which is based on societal conceptions. She contends that the debate about fetal protection policies brought this ambiguity into stark relief, and that the response of policy-makers was rooted in assumptions about gender roles. Judges, legislators, and regulators used gender as a proxy, she argues, to sidestep the question of whether fetal protection policies could be justified by the biological differences between women and men.
    The fetal protection controversy raises a number of concerns about women's role in the workplace. Samuels discusses the effect on governmental policies of the ongoing controversy over abortion rights and the debates between egalitarian and relational feminists about the treatment of women at work. A timely and engrossing study, Fetal Rights, Women's Rights  details the pattern of gender politics in the United States and demonstrates the broader ramifications of gender bias in the workplace.

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Fetch the Devil
The Sierra Diablo Murders and Nazi Espionage in America
Clint Richmond
University Press of New England, 2014
In 1938, Hazel Frome, the wife of a powerful executive at Atlas Powder Company, a San Francisco explosives manufacturer, set out on a cross-country motor trip with her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Nancy. When their car broke down in El Paso, Texas, they made the most of being stranded by staying at a posh hotel and crossing the border to Juarez for shopping, dining, and drinking. A week later, their near-nude bodies were found in the Chihuahuan Desert. Though they had been seen on occasion with two mystery men, there were no clues as to why they had apparently been abducted, tortured for days, and shot execution style. El Paso sheriff Chris Fox, a lawman right out of central casting, engaged in a turf war with the Texas Rangers and local officials that hampered the investigation. But the victims’ detours had placed them in the path of a Nazi spy ring operating from the West Coast to Latin America through a deep-cover portal at El Paso. The sleeper cell was run by spymasters at the German consulate in San Francisco. In 1938, only the inner circle of the Roosevelt White House and a few FBI agents were aware of the extent to which German agents had infiltrated American industry. Fetch the Devil is the first narrative account of this still officially unsolved case. Based on long forgotten archives and recently declassified FBI files, Richmond paints a convincing portrait of a sheriff’s dogged investigation into a baffling murder, the international spy ring that orchestrated it, and America on the brink of another world war.
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Fetching the Old Southwest
Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain
James H. Justus
University of Missouri Press, 2004
For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain’s early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers.
James H. Justus’s Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern “new country,” a place that would, in time, become the Deep South.
Justus’s study focuses mainly on the humor from the area categorized in the federal censuses of the mid-nineteenth century as the Southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and, eventually, Arkansas and Texas. Where it is pertinent, he also includes North Carolina and Missouri in this cultural map. Although some of these pieces may not precisely reflect their cultural setting, they are assuredly refractions of it.
While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary.
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The Fetish Revisited
Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make
J. Lorand Matory
Duke University Press, 2018
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike. 
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The Fetishists
By Ibrahim al-Koni, Translated by William M. Hutchins
University of Texas Press, 2018

The Fetishists, originally published in Arabic as Al Majus, is considered the masterpiece of Ibrahim al-Koni, one of the most prolific and important writers in Arabic today. In The Fetishists, Al-Koni explores what happens when a writer asks the novel to speak of and for the Sahara, when rival cultures clash, and when communities seek to build a utopia on Earth as individuals struggle between a desire for material well-being (represented by gold dust) and a need for spiritual meaning. As the story opens, Sultan Oragh of Timbuktu, who has already lost most of his power to Fetishist Bambara leaders of the forestlands, fears he will lose his only daughter, Tenere, as a human sacrifice to their god Amnay. The sultan sends Tenere to seek refuge with fellow Tuareg nomads in the plain. But even in their traditional, nomadic community, a competition rages between jihadi militant Islam; moderate Anhi Islam, which is the ancient Tuareg Law; and the cults of gold dust and of traditional African folk religions.

In this epic novel, Al-Koni blends Tuareg folklore and history with intense, fond descriptions of daily life in the desert, creating a mirror for life anywhere. Through its tragic rendering of a clash between the Tuareg and traditional African civilizations, the novel profoundly probes the contradictions of the human soul as it takes the reader on a unique spiritual adventure inside the Tuareg world.

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Fetterd Or Free
British Women Novelists, 1670-1815
Mary Anne Schofield
Ohio University Press, 1986
Traditional literary theory holds that women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century produced works of limited range and value: simple tales of domestic conflict, seduction, and romance. Bringing a broad range of methodologies (historical, textual, post-structuralist, psychological) to bear on the works of Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and others. Fetter'd or Free? encourages a re-evaluation of these elder sisters of the Brontes and Eliot.

In addition to examining the relationship between the minor female writers and the acknowledged greats of the age, these twenty-three essays focus on such issues as politics and ideology in the novel; the social, cultural, and economic context of the female writer; female character types and iconography; fictional and rhetorical strategies; and the development of such recurrent themes as imprisonment and subversion. What emerges is a much clearer view than we have had of the predicament of the female writer in the eighteenth century, the constraints on her freedom and artistic integrity, and the means by which she recognized, expressed, and responded to the conditions of this turbulent age.

The collection includes essays by Paula Backscheider, Patricia M. Spacks, Jerry C. Beasley, Margaret Anne Doody, Robert A. Day, and others. None of the essays has been previously published. In scope and variety, Fetter'd of Free? is unlike anything currently available. It will be of interest to both the specialist and the ambitious general reader and will initiate fresh dialogues among scholars of both eighteenth century literature and women's studies.
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Fetus into Man
Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity, Revised edition
J. M. Tanner
Harvard University Press, 1990

Here is a brief and authoritative account of human physical growth, beautifully written by one of the world's foremost experts. In Fetus into Man Professor Tanner tells the story of growth in language that is both accessible to the nonbiologist and acceptable to the biologist.

The book begins with the basics of growth: cell division, hormonal control and differential growth of body tissues. It then builds on these basics to provide a picture of individual growth--from the fetus in utero to the development of sex differences at puberty. Tanner pays special attention along the way to the psychological and social problems faced by children who mature either too soon or too late, and he concludes with a full description of the major growth disorders and current methods of treatment.

Fetus into Man will be an important reference for parents, educators, students of development, and indeed anyone who must deal with the growing child.

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Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan
The Sankin Kōtai System
Toshio G. Tsukahira
Harvard University Press

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Feudal Society, Volume 1
Marc Bloch
University of Chicago Press, 1964
"Few have set themselves to the formidable task of reconstructing and analyzing a whole human environment; fewer still have succeeded. Bloch dared to do this and was successful; therein lies the enduring achievement of Feudal Society."—Charles Garside, Yale Review
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Feudal Society, Volume 2
Marc Bloch
University of Chicago Press, 1964
"Few have set themselves to the formidable task of reconstructing and analyzing a whole human environment; fewer still have succeeded. Bloch dared to do this and was successful; therein lies the enduring achievement of Feudal Society."—Charles Garside, Yale Review
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Fever Dogs
Stories
Kim O'Neil
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Finalist, 2017 Balcones Fiction prize

Kim O’Neil’s debut collection, Fever Dogs, is a fictional biography of three generations of women. It begins at the turn of the twenty-first century with Jean, a young woman at an impasse. Romantically adrift, in a dying profession, she decides that to make herself a future, she must first make herself a past. 

To deal with a violent history, Jean’s mother has violently erased it. Starting from a bare outline that includes an unspoken death, a predatory father, and a homeless stint, Jean reconstructs the life her mother, Jane, might have lived. But origin stories can never completely cover their tracks: like Jean’s story, Jane’s cannot be told apart from that of her own mother. 

What follows is a set of stories spanning nearly a century in response to questions the narrator wishes she had asked her mother and to which she has disjointed answers at best. In the absence of answers, the narrator, in various points of view, invents them. As the stories progress backward in time, the footholds in fact grow fewer and the shift to fabulism greater. But in her attempt to unravel her mother's origin and her own, Jean finds that the stories she invents—like the dogs who run through them as witnesses, allies, and objects of desire—serve as well as any other in the makeshift task of authoring a life.
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Fever Dreams
Contemporary Arizona Poetry
Leilani Wright
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Dream worlds, real worlds: this book ushers in an extraordinary collection of new work by nearly forty poets currently living and writing in Arizona. From campuses and coffee houses, prisons and pueblos, classrooms and kitchen tables comes the work of both well-known and emerging writers drawn to the state's blazing days and starry nights in search of place, time, idea, and self.Brief introductions for each poet reveal that socially, geographically, and emotionally, they come from anywhere and everywhere. Here and together, however, their energy and synergy are shaping a literary landscape unlike any other. They write of jazz, serotonin levels and talk shows, homelessness, convenience stores and gunplay, Tiananmen Square and Bosnia. Their poems, like these lines by Alberto Ríos, are as clear as the desert air: "The birds, they make this happen. / In the sky with nothing else to do, a Saturday, / The slow knee-bend of an afternoon, out there. / I have seen them myself / The birds caw down a rain, tease it / To a hard ground of grass and flat and edge."For the anthology, well-known contributors—Ríos, Richard Shelton, Steve Orlen, Alison Deming, and others—were asked to surprise the editors with their ideas for the best less-known artists to include in the volume. Like a kaleidoscope, then, each page brings a shift in tone and color from the one before, from mainstream, "language," and experimental poetry, to that shaped by rural or traditional cultures.In English, Spanish, and Native languages, voices here reach out to those readers whose home—or whose heart—is in Arizona, and to many others who will never travel here. "Each distinct and other," says Forché of the words in Fever Dreams, make of poetry "what it could not be without this place, translating into poetry its timelessness and awe."Contributors:
William Aberg
Ai
Jed Allen
Barbara Anderson
Jon Anderson
Michael Bowden
Becky Byrkit
Cordelia Candelaria
James Cervantes
David Chorlton
Jeanne E. Clark
Jane Candia Coleman
Michael Cuddihy
Barbara Cully
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Norman Dubie
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Catherine Hammond
Rex Lee Jim
Ramson Lomatewama
Rita Magdaleno
Jane Miller
Paul Morris
Sheila Murphy
Rick Noguchi
Steve Orlen
Henry Quintero
Alberto R¡os
William Pitt Root
Jeannine Savard
Richard Shelton
Jim Simmerman
Virginia Chase Sutton
Laura Tohe
Tracy Trefethen
Peter Wild
Leilani Wright
Brian Young
Ofelia Zepeda
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Fevered Lives
Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870
Katherine Ott
Harvard University Press, 1996

Consider two polar images of the same medical condition: the pale and fragile Camille ensconced on a chaise in a Victorian parlor, daintily coughing a small spot of blood onto her white lace pillow, and a wretched poor man in a Bowery flophouse spreading a dread and deadly infection. Now Katherine Ott chronicles how in one century a romantic, ambiguous affliction of the spirit was transformed into a disease that threatened public health and civic order. She persuasively argues that there was no constant identity to the disease over time, no “core” tuberculosis.

What we understand today as pulmonary tuberculosis would have been largely unintelligible to a physician or patient in the late nineteenth century. Although medically the two terms described the same disease of the lungs, Ott shows that “tuberculosis” and “consumption” were diagnosed, defined, and treated distinctively by both lay and professional health workers. Ott traces the shift from the pre-industrial world of 1870, in which consumption was conceived of primarily as a middle-class malaise that conferred virtue, heightened spirituality, and gentility on the sufferer, to the post-industrial world of today, in which tuberculosis is viewed as a microscopic enemy, fought on an urban battleground and attacking primarily the outcast poor and AIDS patients.

Ott’s focus is the changing definition of the disease in different historical eras and environments. She explores its external trappings, from the symptoms doctors chose to notice (whether a pale complexion or a tubercle in a dish) to the significance of the economic and social circumstances of the patient. Emphasizing the material culture of disease—medical supplies, advertisements for faraway rest cures, outdoor sick porches, and invalid hammocks—Ott provides insight into people’s understanding of illness and how to combat it. Fevered Lives underscores the shifting meanings of consumption/tuberculosis in an extraordinarily readable cultural history.

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Fevered Measures
Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942
John Mckiernan-González
Duke University Press, 2012
In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens from U.S. citizens, a process troubled by the deeply interconnected nature of border communities. Mckiernan-González uncovers forgotten or ignored cases in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other groups were subject to—and sometimes agents of—quarantines, inspections, detentions, and forced-treatment regimens. These cases illustrate the ways that medical encounters shaped border identities before and after the Mexican Revolution. Mckiernan-González also maintains that the threat of disease provided a venue to destabilize identity at the border, enacted processes of racialization, and re-legitimized the power of U.S. policymakers. He demonstrates how this complex history continues to shape and frame contemporary perceptions of the Latino body today.
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The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos
Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution
Francesco Manzini
University of London Press, 2010

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A Few Good Books
Stephanie L. Maatta
American Library Association, 2010

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A Few Months to Live
Different Paths to Life’s End
Jana Staton, Roger W. Shuy, and Ira Byock
Georgetown University Press, 2001

A Few Months to Live describes what dying is like from the perspectives of nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms-especially pain-and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services.

Describing the nationwide crisis that surrounds end-of-life care, the authors contend that informal caregiving by relatives and close friends is an enormous and too-often invisible resource that deserves close and public attention. By incorporating not only the ill person's but also the family's perspective, they portray the nine participants in the contexts of their daily lives and relationships rather than simply as patients. Addressing such issues as palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with medical personnel, the authors identify how families, professionals, and communities can respond to the challenges of terminal illness and the need to confront life's end.

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A Few Planes for China
The Birth of the Flying Tigers
Eugenie Buchan
University Press of New England, 2017
On December 7, 1941, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into armed conflict with Japan. In the following months, the Japanese seemed unbeatable as they seized American, British, and European territory across the Pacific: the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies. Nonetheless, in those dark days, the US press began to pick up reports about a group of American mercenaries who were bringing down enemy planes over Burma and western China. The pilots quickly became known as Flying Tigers, and a legend was born. But who were these flyers for hire and how did they wind up in the British colony of Burma? The standard version of events is that in 1940 Colonel Claire Chennault went to Washington and convinced the Roosevelt administration to establish, fund, and equip covert air squadrons that could attack the Japanese in China and possibly bomb Tokyo even before a declaration of war existed between the United States and Japan. That was hardly the case: although present at its creation, Chennault did not create the American Volunteer Group. In A Few Planes for China, Eugenie Buchan draws on wide-ranging new sources to overturn seventy years of received wisdom about the genesis of the Flying Tigers. This strange experiment in airpower was accidental rather than intentional; haphazard decisions and changing threat perceptions shaped its organization and deprived it of resources. In the end it was the British—more than any American in or out of government—who got the Tigers off the ground. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the most important man behind the Flying Tigers was not Claire Chennault but Winston Churchill.
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Few Returned
Twenty-eight Days on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-1943
Eugenio Corti, Translated by Peter Edward Levy, & Foreword by Carlo D'Este
University of Missouri Press, 1997

After World War II more than one hundred books appeared that dealt with the experience of the Italian army in Russia, and particularly the terrible winter retreat of 1942-1943. Few Returned (I piu' non ritornano) is the only one of these that is still regularly reissued in Italy.

Eugenio Corti, who was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant at the time, found himself, together with 30,000 Italians and a smaller contingent of Germans, encircled on the banks of the River Don by enemy forces who far outnumbered them. To break out of this encirclement, these men undertook a desperate march across the snow, with constant engagements and in temperatures ranging from -20 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit. Whereas supplies were air-dropped to the Germans, the predicament of the Italians was far more difficult: lacking gasoline, they were compelled to abandon their vehicles and to proceed without heavy arms, equipment, ammunition, or provisions. Even the wounded had to be abandoned, though it was well known that the soldiers of the Red Army"enraged by the brutality of the German invasion"killed all the enemy wounded who fell into their hands. After twenty-eight days of encirclement, only 4,000 of the 30,000 Italians made it out of the pocket.

Why is it that Corti's book, which was first published in 1947, continues after fifty years to be reprinted in Italy? Because, as Mario Apollonio of the University of Milan said, when the book first appeared: "It is a chronicle . . . but it is much more than that: behind the physical reality, there is the truth" about man at his most tragic hour. Apollonio adds: "The power of the writing immediately transforms the document into drama"; the result is a "novel-poem-drama-history." The philosopher Benedetto Croce found in Corti's book "the not infrequent gleam of human goodness and nobility." Few Returned is a classic of war literature that succeeds in bringing home the full hatefulness of war.

Eugenio Corti began writing his diary at a military hospital immediately after being repatriated from the Russian front. When in September 1943 Italy found itself cut in two by the Armistice, Corti, loyal to his officer's oath, joined up with what remained of the Italian army in the south and with those few troops participated in driving the Germans off Italian soil, fighting at the side of the British Eighth and the American Fifth Armies.

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Fiammetta. Paradise
Ugolino Verino
Harvard University Press, 2016
Ugolino Verino (1438–1516) was among the principal Latin poets in the Florence of Lorenzo de’Medici. A student of Cristoforo Landino, whose youthful love poems Verino imitated, Verino was a leading figure in the Renaissance revival of ancient Latin elegy. He blended Propertius, Ovid’s Amores, and elements of Petrarch’s lyric style to forge a distinctive poetic voice in a three-book cycle of poems in honor of his lady-love, Fiammetta. His Paradise, by contrast, is a vision-poem indebted to Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante, and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, in which Ugolino is taken on a tour of Heaven and the afterlife by the recently deceased Cosimo de’Medici.
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The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Seagull Books, 2023
A lyrical novel with a poetic narrative about an overlooked individual in Arab African history.

For two days the rabbi rides on a donkey to find the ideal fiancée. Legs and arms shaved, hands dyed with henna, a girl to be married must shine like a mirror. Every girl hopes to be the chosen one and ride off on a donkey to live in the city. The desert is the domain of men; they believe they see oases and palm trees sagging with fruit, while women see only sand on top of sand. A rapid look-around at the girls in the circle was enough for the traveling rabbi to find the right one. He chooses Yudah because of her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and because she lowered her eyes when he looked at her.

The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey tells Yudah’s story. Instead of experiencing her dream of being chosen and riding off on a donkey to live in a palace, she finds herself in an encampment of tents swaying in the wind. She also doesn’t find the Emir, who is battling on other fronts and soon surrenders. Yudah and the rest of his followers are exiled to Ile Sainte-Marguerite, where she pursues a tireless quest for her future husband in France, seeking a man she has never seen. Will the fantastic destiny of the young girl from the desert ever be fulfilled?

In lyrical novel after novel, Vénus Khoury-Ghata chooses overlooked individuals from history and brings them back to life on the page. Hauntingly unforgettable, The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey is yet another poetic narrative from one of the most respected French authors of our times.
 
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Fiat Flux
The Writings of Wilson R. Bachelor, Nineteenth-Century Country Doctor and Philosopher
William D. Lindsey
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
Wilson R. Bachelor was a Tennessee native who moved with his family to Franklin County, Arkansas, in 1870. A country doctor and natural philosopher, Bachelor was impelled to chronicle his life from 1870 to 1902, documenting the family's move to Arkansas, their settling a farm in Franklin County, and Bachelor's medical practice. Bachelor was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests in literature, science, nature, politics, and religion, and he became a self-professed freethinker in the 1870s. He was driven by a concept he called "fiat flux," an awareness of the "rapid flight of time" that motivated him to treat the people around him and the world itself as precious and fleeting. He wrote occasional pieces for a local newspaper, bringing his unusually enlightened perspectives to the subjects of women's rights, capital punishment, the role of religion in politics, and the domination of the American political system by economic elite in the 1890s. These essays, along with family letters and the original diary entries, are included here for an uncommon glimpse into the life of a country doctor in nineteenth-century Arkansas.
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Fiat G.91
Arno Landewers
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The Fiat G.91 was an Italian jet fighter aircraft. It was the winner of the NATO competition in 1953 for a light fighter as standard equipment for Allied air forces. It entered in operational service with the Italian Air Force in 1961, with the West German Luftwaffe in 1962, and later with the Portuguese Air Force. It was in production for nineteen years. 756 aircraft were completed, including the prototypes and pre-production models. The assembly lines were finally closed in 1977. The Fiat G.91 enjoyed a long service life that extended over 35 years. It was widely used by Portugal in the Portuguese Colonial War in Africa.
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Fibre Bragg Gratings in Harsh and Space Environments
Principles and applications
Brahim Aïssa
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
A fibre Bragg grating (FBG) is a type of distributed Bragg reflector constructed in a short segment of optical fibre that reflects particular wavelengths of light and transmits all the others. As such, FBGs can be used as inline optical filters to block certain wavelengths, or as wavelength-specific reflectors. Applications include optical fibre communications, sensors and fibre lasers. This book addresses the critical challenge of developing Fibre Bragg Gratings (FBGs) for applications as sensors in harsh and space environment. Coverage ranges from the basic principles through design, fabrication, and testing to their industrial implementation. A thorough review includes the in-depth examination of the FBGs properties and the most important developments in devices and applications. A particular emphasis is given to the applications of fibre optic sensors in the space environment, which is characterized mainly by vacuum, high thermal gradients, mechanical vibrations and various types of cosmic radiation. The book concludes with a summary and overview of challenges faced by FBG technology. The book is supplemented by an extensive survey of published papers, books and conference reports. As an added benefit, the book is structured in such a way as to provide useful and in-depth training and skills development to graduate/undergraduate students, specialised engineers, and academic/industrial experts.
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The Fibromyalgia Story
Medical Authority And Women'S Worlds Of Pain
Kristin K. Barker
Temple University Press, 2005
More than six million Americans—most of them women—have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a disorder that produces musculo-skeletal pain and fatigue. In the absence of visible evidence, a well-understood cause, or effective treatment, many have questioned whether FMS is a "real" illness. Amidst the controversy, millions of women live with their very real symptoms.Rather than taking sides in the heated debate, Kristin Barker explains how FMS represents an awkward union between the practices of modern medicine and the complexity of women's pain. Using interviews with sufferers, Barker focuses on how the idea of FMS gives meaning and order to women beset by troubling symptoms, self-doubt, and public skepticism.This book offers a fresh look at a controversial diagnosis; Barker avoids overly simplistic explanations and empathizes with sufferers without losing sight of the social construction of disease and its relation to modern medical practice.
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Fickle Formulas
The Political Underbelly of Macroeconomic Indicators
Daniel Mügge
Harvard University Press

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The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter
Harry John Mooney
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962

One of the earliest, and still one of the most perceptive analyses of Katherine Anne Porter, it gives careful interpretation of the style and intent of Porter’s work from 1935 through the publication and critical reception of Ship of Fools.

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Fiction And Incarnation
Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages
Alexandre Leupin
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

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Fiction and Repetition
Seven English Novels
J. Hillis Miller
Harvard University Press, 1985

In Fiction and Repetition, one of our leading critics and literary theorists offers detailed interpretations of seven novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved, Conrad's Lord Jim, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts. Miller explores the multifarious ways in which repetition generates meaning in these novels—repetition of images, metaphors, motifs; repetition on a larger scale of episodes, characters, plots; and repetition from one novel to another by the same or different authors. While repetition creates meanings, it also, Miller argues, prevents the identification of a single determinable meaning for any of the novels; rather, the patterns made by the various repetitive sequences offer alternative possibilities of meaning which are incompatible. He thus sees “undecidability” as an inherent feature of the novels discussed.

His conclusions make a provocative contribution to current debates about narrative theory and about the principles of literary criticism generally. His book is not a work of theory as such, however, and he avoids the technical terminology dear to many theorists; his book is an attempt to interpret as best he can his chosen texts. Because of his rare critical gifts and his sensitivity to literary values and nuances, his readings send one back to the novels with a new appreciation of their riches and their complexities of form.

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Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin
Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative
William Mills Todd III
Harvard University Press, 1986

The early decades of the nineteenth century in Imperial Russia embraced a sequence of catastrophic events—the assassination of Paul I, Napoleon’s invasion, the Decembrist rebellion, the cholera epidemic, the Polish uprising—along with radical changes in the fabric of society. Yet, far from exhausted by these convulsions, Russian literature blossomed as never before, producing the first in the long line of novels now regarded as masterpieces throughout the world. With all the sentimentality, nostalgia, and mythic echoes the term evokes, posterity has called this the golden age of Russian letters.

William Mills Todd describes the ideology of the educated westernized gentry (obshchestvo) of the time, then charts the various possibilities for literary life: first patronage, the salons, popular literature; then the rapid emergence of an incipient literary profession, which was encouraged by copyright laws, journals and booksellers, and an increasing readership. Through an examination of three brilliant fictions—Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and Gogol’s Dead Souls—he explores the complicated interactions of literature and society as these writers “discovered” their own milieu and were discovered by it, confronting the fragility, exclusiveness, and potential for hypocrisy and self-delusion in Russian culture. Todd’s interdisciplinary approach will ensure his book’s appeal to students of comparative and other national literatures as well as of Russian culture.

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Fiction and the Ways of Knowing
Essays on British Novels
By Avrom Fleishman
University of Texas Press, 1978

In this highly individual study, Avrom Fleishman explores a wide range of literary references to human culture—the culture of ideas, facts, and images. Each critical essay in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing takes up for sustained analysis a major British novel of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The novels are analyzed in the light of social, historical, philosophical, and other perspectives that can be grouped under the human sciences.

The diversity of critical contexts in these thirteen essays is organized by Avrom Fleishman's governing belief in the interrelations of literature and other ways of interpreting the world. The underlying assumptions of this approach—as explained in his introductory essay—are that fiction is capable of encompassing even the most recondite facts and recalcitrant ideas; that fiction, though never a mirror of reality, is linked to realities and takes part in the real; and that a critical reading may be informed by scientific knowledge without reducing the literary work to a schematic formula.

Fleishman investigates the matters of fact and belief that make up the designated meanings, the intellectual contexts, and the speculative parallels in three types of novel. Some of the novels discussed make it clear that their authors are informed on matters beyond the nonspecialist's range; these essays help bridge this information gap. Other fictional works are only to be grasped in an awareness of the cultural lore tacitly distributed in their own time; a modern reader must make the effort to fathom their anachronisms. And other novels can be found to open passageways that their authors can only have glimpsed intuitively; these must be pursued with great caution but equal diligence.

The novels discussed include Little Dorrit, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, he Return of the Native, and The Magus. Also examined are Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, To the Lighthouse, Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, and A Passage to India.

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Fiction Beyond Secularism
Justin Neuman
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight.

In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective.

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Fiction, Crime, and Empire
CLUES TO MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM
Jon Thompson
University of Illinois Press, 1993

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Fiction, Fact and Future
The Essence of EU Democracy
James Elles
Haus Publishing, 2019
Since its inception, the European Union has developed to become an open and transparent system which is democratically accountable to more than five hundred million European citizens. James Elles explains how the EU functions, emphasizing the emerging role of the European Parliament in the process. Elles reviews the history of Britain’s relationship with the EU and illustrates how a reluctance to consult the British people on multiple Treaty changes led to a lack of understanding about Brussels. Looking to the future, Elles assesses the global long-term trends that lie ahead to 2030 and underlines that closer European cooperation, for example on environmental and digital policies, will help them to be more easily resolved. As the next decade unfurls, the EU with President Macron at the forefront of the debate will progress and the European Parliament will continue to develop as a platform for the voice of the European people. From the disinterest of political leaders to the ambitions of emerging nations, Fiction, Fact and Future is not only a guide to why Britain failed to make the most of its EU membership, but also an optimistic message to a younger generation to help shape their future in the 21st century.
 
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Fiction, Film, And Faulkner
The Art Of Adaptation
Gene D. Phillips
University of Tennessee Press, 1988

Fiction, Film and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation 

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Fiction in the Age of Photography
The Legacy of British Realism
Nancy Armstrong
Harvard University Press, 1999
Victorians were fascinated with how accurately photography could copy people, the places they inhabited, and the objects surrounding them. Much more important, however, is the way in which Victorian people, places, and things came to resemble photographs. In this provocative study of British realism, Nancy Armstrong explains how fiction entered into a relationship with the new popular art of photography that transformed the world into a picture. By the 1860s, to know virtually anyone or anything was to understand how to place him, her, or it in that world on the basis of characteristics that either had been or could be captured in one of several photographic genres. So willing was the readership to think of the real as photographs, that authors from Charles Dickens to the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf had to use the same visual conventions to represent what was real, especially when they sought to debunk those conventions. The Victorian novel's collaboration with photography was indeed so successful, Armstrong contends, that literary criticism assumes a text is gesturing toward the real whenever it invokes a photograph.
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The Fiction of Gloria Naylor
Houses and Spaces of Resistance
Maxine Lavon Montgomery
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

The Fiction of Gloria Naylor is one of the very first critical studies of this acclaimed writer. Including an insightful interview with Naylor
and focusing on her first four novels, the book situates various acts of insurgency throughout her work within a larger framework of African American opposition to hegemonic authority. But what truly distinguishes this volume is its engagement with African American vernacular forms and twentieth-century political movements.

In her provocative analysis, Maxine Lavon Montgomery argues that Naylor constantly attempts to reconfigure the home and homespace to be more conducive to black self-actualization, thus providing a stark contrast to a dominant white patriarchy evident in a broader public sphere. Employing a postcolonial and feminist theoretical framework to analyze Naylor’s evolving body of work, Montgomery pays particular attention to black slave historiography, tales of conjure, trickster lore, and oral devices involving masking, word play, and code-switching—the vernacular strategies that have catapulted Naylor to the vanguard of contemporary African American letters.

Montgomery argues for the existence of home as a place that is not exclusively architectural or geographic in nature. She posits that in Naylor’s writings, home exists as an intermediate space embedded in cultural memory and encoded in the vernacular. Home closely resembles a highly symbolic, signifying system bound with vexed issues of racial sovereignty as well as literary authority. Through a reinscription of the subversive, frequently clandestine acts of resistance on the part of the border subject—those outside the dominant
culture—Naylor recasts space in such a way as to undermine reader expectation and destabilize established models of dominance, influence, and control.

Thoroughly researched and sophisticated in its approach, The Fiction of Gloria Naylor will be essential reading for scholars and students of African American, American, and Africana Literary and Cultural studies.

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Fiction Refracts Science
Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges
Allen Thiher
University of Missouri Press, 2005
In Fiction Refracts Science, Allen Thiher demonstrates that major modernists, in their concern with the sciences, were strongly influenced by them. He argues that there are direct relations between science and the formal shape of fiction developed by some of the most important modernists. Especially relevant for his arguments are modern cosmology and quantum mechanics, as well as examples from mathematics, biology, and medicine.
            Thiher begins his study by examining the question about the two cultures—scientific and humanistic—that is often invoked in discussions of their relationship. He outlines the essential context for understanding how science was perceived by modernist novelists. This background included Pascalian and Newtonian cosmology, Darwinism, and the questions of epistemology ushered in by relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He then devotes a chapter each to Musil, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce in which he focuses on epistemology and on ideas about law in science and literature.
            Thiher goes on to describe the subsequent development of modernist fiction. He proposes that, after Joyce, thought experiments dominated the relations between science and later modernist fiction, as exemplified by Woolf, Faulkner, and Borges. In conclusion Thiher addresses the ongoing development of these experiments in postmodern fiction and discusses the fortunes of positivism in postmodern fiction.
            Written in a clear and accessible style, Fiction Refracts Science will be of interest to specialists in literary modernism, science studies, and the history of science, as well as to scientists themselves.
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Fiction Rivals Science
The French Novel from Balzac to Proust
Allen Thiher
University of Missouri Press, 2001

     In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going into the twentieth century, Proust. According to Thiher, each of these novelists considered himself to be in competition with science to make the novel an instrument for knowledge.

The first chapter sets forth the understanding of science that dominated the early nineteenth century in order to make it plausible that literary minds, throughout the nineteenth century, thought that they could not only rival science, but even make positive contributions to knowledge. The Newtonian paradigm that had dominated the Enlightenment was slowly being challenged by new developments both in physics and in nonphysical sciences such as biology. Especially in biology the development of a scientific discourse using narrative temporality favored the idea that novelists could also use fiction to construct discourses that advanced knowledge.

Balzac wanted to construct a natural history of society and correct the chemical theory of his time. Flaubert drew upon medicine and physiology for the rhetoric of his realist fiction. Zola used unsuccessful medical paradigms for his doctrine of heredity, and models drawn from thermodynamics to describe the relation of the individual to societal forces. Finally, Proust drew upon thinkers such as Poincar‚ to elaborate an epistemology that put an end to the rivalry novelists might feel with scientists. Proust located certain knowledge within the realm of human subjectivity while granting the power of laws to rule over the contingent realm of physical reality, in which, after Poincar‚, neither mathematics nor Newton was any longer a source of absolute certainty. Proust's novel is thus the last great realist work of the nineteenth century and the first modernist work of consciousness taking itself as the object of knowledge.

By demonstrating that the great French realist novelists dealt with many of the same problems as did the scientists of the nineteenth century, Fiction Rivals Science attempts to show how culture unites literary and scientific inquiry into knowledge. Providing a new interpretation of the development of literary realism, this important new work will be welcomed not only by literary scholars, but by historians of science and culture as well.

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Fiction Sets You Free
Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture
Russell A. Berman
University of Iowa Press, 2007
In what can only be called a genuine intellectual adventure, Russell Berman raises fundamental questions long ignored by literary scholars; Why does literature command our attention at all? Why would society want to cultivate a sphere of activity devoted to the careful study of literary fiction? Written as a tonic to what he calls the debilitating cultural relativism of contemporary literary studies, Fiction Sets You Free advances the innovative argument that literature and capitalism, rather than representing merely commercialization, actually belie a long and positive association: literary autonomy is a central part of modern Western culture, thoroughly intertwined with political democracy and free market capitalism.
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Fictional Blues
Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White
Kimberly Mack
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
The familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression. Fictional Blues unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression.

Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency.
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The Fictional Christopher Nolan
By Todd McGowan
University of Texas Press, 2012

From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan’s films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us how truth must emerge out of the lie if it is not to lead us entirely astray.

The Fictional Christopher Nolan discovers in Nolan’s films an exploration of the role that fiction plays in leading to truth. Through close readings of all the films through Inception, Todd McGowan demonstrates that the fiction or the lie comes before the truth, and this priority forces us to reassess our ways of thinking about the nature of truth. Indeed, McGowan argues that Nolan’s films reveal the ethical and political importance of creating fictions and even of lying. While other filmmakers have tried to discover truth through the cinema, Nolan is the first filmmaker to devote himself entirely to the fictionality of the medium, and McGowan discloses how Nolan uses its tendency to deceive as the basis for a new kind of philosophical filmmaking. He shows how Nolan’s insistence on the priority of the fiction aligns his films with Hegel’s philosophy and understands Nolan as a thoroughly Hegelian filmmaker.

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A Fictional Commons
Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature
Michael K. Bourdaghs
Duke University Press, 2021
Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.
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Fictional Environments
Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America
Victoria Saramago
Northwestern University Press, 2021

Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

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Fictional Shakespeares and Portraits of Genius
Annalisa Castaldo
Arc Humanities Press, 2022
This study is the first to investigate how cultural interpretations of "genius" influence, and are reflected in, fictional portraits of Shakespeare. It explores the wide range of portraits (including children's books, romance novels, graphic novels, and film) that bring Shakespeare to life, and suggests that different portrayals present different conceptions of genius. How does Shakespeare become a genius? How does being a genius affect his life? In some portraits Shakespeare is a man in love with life, fully immersed in the world around him and therefore able to transform the richness of the world into words. But other portrayals present a man cut off from the world, unable to connect to anyone because his creations are more real to him than people, while others suggest that Shakespeare's genius can only be understood as a supernatural or magical gift. In each portrait, Shakespeare mirrors back to us what we believe about what it means to be a genius.
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The Fictional World of William Hoffman
Edited by William L. Frank
University of Missouri Press, 2000

Over the past forty-five years, William Hoffman has written eleven novels, including the critically acclaimed Tidewater Blood, winner of the Dashiell Hammett award, and four short-fiction collections, the most recent being Doors—all of which have enjoyed a loyal and appreciative readership. His work has received numerous honors, including the Andrew Nelson Lytle Prize for the best short story published in the Sewanee Review; the Jeanne C. Goodheart Prize for fiction, awarded by Shenandoah; and the Hillsdale Prize for fiction, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Yet a critical evaluation of his acclaimed fiction has not previously appeared.

The Fictional World of William Hoffman provides readers with the first vital and informative assessment of Hoffman's work. Including penetrating commentary and analysis from fellow writers—Fred Chappell, George Core, George Garrett, Dabney Stuart—as well as from established and emerging critics—Ron Buchanan, Martha Cook, Jeanne Nostrandt, Gordon Van Ness-this collection of essays aims to deepen the appreciation of those already familiar with Hoffman and to introduce new readers to one of the South's most influential voices.

George Core's opening essay provides an overview of Hoffman's novels to date, with sufficient examples to suggest his range, scope, imagery, and principal themes, including honor, courage, love, self-sacrifice, and the role of religion. The other essays in the collection focus in detail on his most admired work, especially the war novels, the short stories, and the philosophical novels of recent years. All eleven novels are covered briefly throughout the collection, six are treated extensively, and three essays focus on his short fiction.

There is no doubt that William Hoffman is a major contemporary writer. His considerable talent and influence have been felt by generations of readers. The Fictional World of William Hoffman helps to secure this influence for years to come. "As with all gifted and talented writers," Frank concludes, "the themes of Hoffman's fiction are what will endure."

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Fictional Worlds
Thomas G. Pavel
Harvard University Press, 1986

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Thomas Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties, and their reason for being.

Pavel is a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavel argues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes us through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

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Fictionality and Literature
Core Concepts Revisited
Lasse R. Gammelgaard
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Taking its cues from Richard Walsh’s influential 2007 book, The Rhetoric of FictionalityFictionality and Literature sets out to examine the implications of a rhetorical understanding of fictionality. A rhetorical approach understands fictionality and nonfictionality not as binary opposites but as different means to the same end: influencing an audience’s understanding of the world. Arguing that fiction is not just a feature of particular works, such as novels, but an adaptable instrument used to achieve an author’s specific rhetorical goals, the contributors theorize how to reconceive of core literary features and influences such as author, narrator, plot, character, consciousness, metaphor, metafiction/metalepsis, intertextuality, paratext, ethics, and social justice. Combining analyses of a wide range of texts by Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others with historical events such as the Nat Tate biography hoax and the Anders Breivik murders, contributors discuss not only a rhetorical definition of fictionality but also the wider consequences of such a conception. In addition, some chapters within Fictionality and Literature offer alternatives to a rhetorical paradigm, thus expanding the volume’s representation of the current state of the conversation about fictionality in literature.

Contributors:
H. Porter Abbott, Catherine Gallagher, Lasse R. Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, Rikke Andersen Kraglund, Susan S. Lanser, Jakob Lothe, Maria Mäkelä, Greta Olson, Sylvie Patron, James Phelan, Richard Walsh, Wendy Veronica Xin, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen
 
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Fictionalizing Anthropology
Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human
Stuart J. McLean
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them.  

At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.

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Fiction’s Family
Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China
Ellen Widmer
Harvard University Press, 2016
At the end of the Qing dynasty, works of fiction by male authors placed women in new roles. Fiction’s Family delves into the writings of one literary family from western Zhejiang whose works were emblematic of shifting attitudes toward women. The mother, Wang Qingdi, and the father, Zhan Sizeng, published their poems during the second half of the nineteenth century. Two of their four sons, Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, wrote novels that promoted reforms in women’s lives. This book explores the intergenerational link, as well as relations between the sons, to find out how the conflicts faced by the parents may have been refigured in the novels of their sons. Its central question is about the brothers’ reformist attitudes. Were they based on the pronouncements of political leaders? Were they the result of trends in Shanghai publishing? Or did they derive from Wang Qingdi’s disappointment in her “companionate marriage,” as manifested in her poems? By placing one family at the center of this study, Ellen Widmer illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the period just before it, the synchronic interplay of genres during the brothers’ lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with regions outside Shanghai.
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Fictions Inc.
The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture
Clare, Ralph
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Beginning with perhaps the most famous depiction of a corporation—Frank Norris’s The Octopus—Ralph Clare traces this figure as it shifts from monster to man, from force to “individual,” and from American industry to multinational “Other.” Clare examines a variety of texts that span the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, including novels by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Joshua Ferris; films such as Network, Ghostbusters, Gung Ho, Office Space, and Michael Clayton; and assorted artifacts of contemporary media such as television’s The Office and the comic strips Life Is Hell and Dilbert

Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend. Whether demonized or lionized, the corporation embodies American anxieties about these current conditions and ongoing fears about the viability of a capitalist system. 
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Fictions of Affliction
Physical Disability in Victorian Culture
Martha Stoddard Holmes
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"Highly recommended . . . Holmes moves seamlessly from novelists like Charles Dickens to sociologists like Henry Mayhew to autobiographers like John Kitto."
---Choice
"An absolutely stunning book that will make a significant contribution to both Victorian literary studies and disability studies."
---Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University
"Establishes that Victorian melodrama informs many of our contemporary notions of disability . . . We have inherited from the Victorians not pandemic disability, but rather the complex of sympathy and fear."
---Victorian Studies
Tiny Tim, Clym Yeobright, Long John Silver---what underlies nineteenth-century British literature's fixation with disability? Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like "can disabled men work?" and "should disabled women have babies?" and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day.
Martha Stoddard Holmes is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos.
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Fictions of Certitude
Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning, 1840–1920
John S. Haller Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The search for belief and meaning among nineteenth-century intellectuals
 
The nineteenth century’s explosion of scientific theories and new technologies undermined many deep-seated beliefs that had long formed the basis of Western society, making it impossible for many to retain the unconditional faith of their forebears. A myriad of discoveries—including Faraday’s electromagnetic induction, Joule’s law of conservation of energy, Pasteur’s germ theory, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories of evolution by natural selection, and Planck’s work on quantum theory—shattered conventional understandings of the world that had been dictated by traditional religious teachings and philosophical systems for centuries.

Fictions of Certitude: Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning, 1840–1920 investigates the fin de siècle search for truth and meaning in a world that had been radically transformed. John S. Haller Jr. examines the moral and philosophical journeys of nine European and American intellectuals who sought deeper understanding amid such paradigmatic upheaval. Auguste Comte, John Henry Newman, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Fiske, William James, Lester Frank Ward, and Paul Carus all belonged to an age in which one world was passing while another world that was both astounding and threatening was rising to take its place.

For Haller, what makes the work of these nine thinkers worthy of examination is how they strove in different ways to find certitude and belief in the face of an epochal sea change. Some found ways to reconceptualize a world in which God and nature coexist. For others, the challenge was to discern meaning in a world in which no higher power or purpose can be found. As explained by D. H. Meyer, “The later Victo­rians were perhaps the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation collectively to suspect that he never would.”
 
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Fictions of Consciousness
Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose
Loesberg, Jonathan
Rutgers University Press, 1986
Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose
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Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque
Architectural Space and Prostitution in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Emily Kuffner
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary eroticstrategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.
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Fictions of Evidence
Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages
Jamie K. Taylor
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Throughout the Middle Ages, witnessing was a crucial way religious and legal “truths” were understood and produced. Religious and secular officials alike harnessed the power of testimony to assert doctrinal, political, or legal responsibilities. Swearing an oath, testifying in court, and signing a deposition were common ways to shape and discipline both devotional and legal communities. In Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Jamie K. Taylor traces depictions of witnessing in a wide range of late medieval texts and shows how witnessing practices formed and reformed, policed and challenged medieval communities.
 
Through close study of texts like the Man of Law’s Tale and Piers Plowman alongside sermon exempla, common law statutes, and pastoral treatises, Fictions of Evidence argues that vernacular literature was a vital site of criticism and dissent. It shows that devotional and legal witnessing practices offered medieval writers a distinct vocabulary they could use to expose how the ethical and legal obligations to one’s community were constructed. And since vernacular writers often challenged the ways ecclesiastical or secular authorities asserted community bonds, they found they could use those same witnessing practices and language to imagine extra-legal or extra-ecclesiastical communities that followed different ethical codes.
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Fictions Of Feminist Ethnography
Kamala Visweswaran
University of Minnesota Press, 1994
Although feminist ethnography is an emerging genre, the question of what the term means remains open. Recent texts that fall under this rubric rely on unexamined notions of "sisterhood" and the recovery of "lost" voices. Writing about her work with women in Southern India, Kamala Visweswaran addresses such troubled questions in the essays that make up Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Blurring distinctions between ethnographic and literary genres, the author employs the narrative strategies of history, fiction, autobiography and biography, deconstruction, and postcolonial discourse to reveal the fictions of ethnography and the ethnography in fiction. In the process of reflecting on the nature of anthropology itself Visweswaran devises an experimental approach to writing feminist ethnography. What sets this work apart from other self-reflexive feminist ethnographies is its rigorous engagement with the concrete inequalities, refusals, and misunderstandings between the author and the women she worked with in India. In each essay, she takes up the specific ellipses of power differentials in her field research and works out their epistemological consequences. The result is a series of contextualizations of the politics of identity in the field, at "home," and within the lives of women who particpated in the Indian nationalist movement. We learn in lucid detail about the partiality of knowledge and the inevitable difficulties and violations involved in representing the lives of women, both inside and outside the United States. Clearly and forcefully written, this book should be of interest not only to anthropologists but also to cultural theorists and critics, feminist scholars and writers, and other social scientists who grapple with epistemological and political issues in their fields. "Fictions of Feminist Ethnography is an ambitious, experimental, comprehensive and learned book directed at a professional (anthropological) audience. I find the book thought-provoking and highly recommendable because of the sensitive, critical and sometimes even surprisingly innovative handling of 'data'. In addition to the sharp analyses, it succeeds in elegantly combining form and content, and in mastering the unification of literary criticism with identity politics and a sophisticated feminism." Folk - Journal of Danish Ethnographic Society "The text provides an excellent resource for thinking about what constitutes 'reading,' 'writing,' and 'researching' from a feminist ethnographic positioning." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography "In reaching beyond traditional ethnographic form, Kamala Visweswaran places her own style of feminist ethnography at the nexus of feminist anthropology and literature-in the forms of autobiography, personal narrative, fable and fiction. By working through these 'experimental' forms Kamala Visweswaran puts her own theories of feminist ethnography into practice, calling traditional positivist ethnographic form into question, as well as the rather limited definitions of current experimental ethnography." Cross Cultural Poetics Kamala Visweswaran is an assistant professor of anthropology in the graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research.
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Fictions of Land and Flesh
Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation
Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2019
In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.
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Fictions of Migration
Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia
Lorena Cuya Gavilano
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Lorena Cuya Gavilano’s Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia is an aesthetic and cultural analysis of how political and economic trends have impacted narratives about migration in Peru and Bolivia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Going beyond representations of migrants as subjects of crisis, Fictions of Migration approaches the migrant as a subject of knowledge, examining how narratives of migrancy in the Andes have become affective epistemological tools to learn about migrants’ experiences, cultural roots, and the mishaps of modernity that caused their displacement in the first place. Through the examination of films and novels—by such writers and filmmakers as José María Arguedas, Blanca Wiethüchter, Daniel Alarcón, Claudia Llosa, Jorge Sanjinés, Juan Carlos Valdivia, Jesús Urzagasti, and Paolo Agazzi, among others–Cuya Gavilano looks at the intersection of crisis, knowledge, and affect in order to piece together seemingly incompatible images of migrancy. She explores how dissimilar images of migration in two countries with a common ethnic and cultural history are the result of differentiated emotional and social responses to the adoption and adaptation of neoliberal economic agendas. Fictions of Migration thereby shows Andean stories of displacement can serve as distinctive models to understand multiethnic national spaces globally.
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Fictions of Modesty
Women and Courtship in the English Novel
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
University of Chicago Press, 1991
From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, no figure was more central to debates in England about the relations between the sexes than that of the modest woman. Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and conflicting wishes that were covered by talk of "modesty" and explores some of the most striking uses of a modest heroine.

Combining evidence from conduct books and ladies' magazines with the arguments of influential theorists like Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, this book begins by asking why writers were devoted to the anxious remaking of women's "nature" and to codifying rules for their porper behavior. Fictions of Modesty shows how the culture at once tried to regulate young women's desires and effectively opened up new possibilities of subjectivity and individual choice.

Yeazell goes on to demonstrate that modest delaying actions inform a central tradition of English narrative. On the Continent, the English believed, the jeune fille went from the artificial innocence of the convent to an arranged marriage and adultery; the natural modesty of the Englishwoman, however, enabled her to choose her own mate and to marry both prudently and with affection. Rather than taking its narrative impetus from adultery, then, English fiction concentrated on courtship and the consciousness of the young woman choosing. After paired studies of Richardson's Pamela and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (even Fanny Hill, Yeazell argues, is a modest English heroine at heart), Yeazell investigates what women novelists made of the virtues of modesty in works by Burney, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Gaskell.

A speculative postscript briefly addresses the discourse of late nineteenth-century science in order to show how Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Havelock Ellis's psychology of sex replicate fictions of female modesty. While those who sought to codify modest behavior in previous centuries often appealed to Nature for support, our modern understanding of the natural, Yeazell suggests, owes something to the work of the novelists.

Sharply reasoned and witty, Fictions of Modesty will appeal to all those interested in women's studies, the English novel, and the continuing history of relations between the sexes.
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Fictions of Pleasure
The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France
Alistaire Tallent
University of Delaware Press, 2024
Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality.
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Fictions of Romantic Irony
Lilian R. Furst
Harvard University Press, 1984

What is meant by "romantic irony"? What is specifically romantic about this kind of irony? How does it relate to--and differ from--ordinary, traditional irony? Is it a variant of traditional irony, or an independent phenomenon? Are its lines of demarcation primarily historical or modal? How does it become manifest in a text? What is its impact on the art of narration?

These are the questions that Fictions of Romantic Irony addresses. It makes a new approach to romantic irony by envisaging it in a broad European context in relation both to earlier concepts of irony and to traditional uses of irony in narration. Fictions of Romantic Irony shows how irony was transformed in the hands of Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Through an analysis of six major European narratives of the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century it illustrates the reciprocal interplay of theory and practice, and the complex and central role that irony assumes as a shaping aesthetic factor. Using a wide perspective and an original synchronic disposition of texts within its historical framework, it identifies the distinctive philosophical and literary features of romantic irony.

Fictions of Romantic Irony presents an important theory of romantic irony, distinguishing it from traditional irony in the handling of fictional illusion and in the dynamics of the tripartite relationship between narrator, narrative and reader. It dispels many common, limiting fictions about romantic irony, and offers a robust understanding of its workings in narrative and its significance for modern fiction.

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Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937
Joan DeJean
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.
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Fictions of the Bad Life
The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010
Claire Thora Solomon
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the prostitute in Latin American literature, Claire Thora Solomon’s book The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 shows the gender, ethnic, and racial identities that emerge in the literary figure of the prostitute during the consolidation of modern Latin American states in the late nineteenth century in the literary genre of Naturalism. Solomon first examines how legal, medical, and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution. She then traces the persistence of these styles, themes, and stereotypes about women, sex, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature with a particular emphasis on the historical fiction of prostitution and its selective reconstruction of the past.
 
Fictions of the Bad Life illustrates how at very different moments—the turn of the twentieth century, the 1920s–30s, and finally the turn of the twenty-first century—the past is rewritten to accommodate contemporary desires for historical belonging and national identity, even as these efforts inevitably re-inscribe the repressed colonial history they wish to change.
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Fictions of the Cosmos
Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century
Frédérique Aït-Touati
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In today’s academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so distinct. Just as the natural philosophers of the era were discovering in and adopting from literature new strategies and techniques for their discourse, so too were poets and storytellers finding inspiration in natural philosophy, particularly in astronomy.
           
A work that speaks to the history of science and literary studies, Fictions of the Cosmos explores the evolving relationship that ensued between fiction and astronomical authority. By examining writings of Kepler, Godwin, Hooke, Cyrano, Cavendish, Fontenelle, and others, Frédérique Aït-Touati shows that it was through the telling of stories—such as through accounts of celestial journeys—that the Copernican hypothesis, for example, found an ontological weight that its geometric models did not provide. Aït-Touati draws from both cosmological treatises and fictions of travel and knowledge, as well as personal correspondences, drawings, and instruments, to emphasize the multiple borrowings between scientific and literary discourses. This volume sheds new light on the practices of scientific invention, experimentation, and hypothesis formation by situating them according to their fictional or factual tendencies.
 
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Fictive Kinship
Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration
Catherine Lee
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Today, roughly 70 percent of all visas for legal immigration are reserved for family members of permanent residents or American citizens. Family reunification—policies that seek to preserve family unity during or following migration—is a central pillar of current immigration law, but it has existed in some form in American statutes since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In Fictive Kinship, sociologist Catherine Lee delves into the fascinating history of family reunification to examine how and why our conceptions of family have shaped immigration, the meaning of race, and the way we see ourselves as a country. Drawing from a rich set of archival sources, Fictive Kinship shows that even the most draconian anti-immigrant laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, contained provisions for family unity, albeit for a limited class of immigrants. Arguments for uniting families separated by World War II and the Korean War also shaped immigration debates and the policies that led to the landmark 1965 Immigration Act. Lee argues that debating the contours of family offers a ready set of symbols and meanings to frame national identity and to define who counts as “one of us.” Talk about family, however, does not inevitably lead to more liberal immigration policies. Welfare reform in the 1990s, for example, placed limits on benefits for immigrant families, and recent debates over the children of undocumented immigrants fanned petitions to rescind birthright citizenship. Fictive Kinship shows that the centrality of family unity in the immigration discourse often limits the discussion about the goals, functions and roles of immigration and prevents a broader definition of American identity. Too often, studies of immigration policy focus on individuals or particular ethnic or racial groups. With its original and wide-ranging inquiry, Fictive Kinship shifts the analysis in immigration studies toward the family, a largely unrecognized but critical component in the regulation of immigrants’ experience in America.
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A Fiddler's Tale
How Hollywood and Vivaldi Discovered Me
Louis Kaufman with Annette Kaufman; Foreword by Jim Svejda
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
This fascinating memoir, written by one of the greatest American violinists of the twentieth century, recounts an extraordinary life in music.
    Once called by the New York Times "a violinist's violinist and a musician's musician," Louis Kaufman was born in 1905 in Portland, Oregon. He studied violin with Franz Kneisl at New York's Institute of Musical Art. He was the original violist of the Musical Art Quartet (1926-1933) and won the Naumburg Award in 1928, the year of his American solo recital debut in New York's Town Hall.
    During these early years, he played chamber music with Pablo Casals, Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Efrem Zimbalist, among others. After performing the violin solos for Ernst Lubitsch's 1934 film The Merry Widow, Kaufman became the most sought after violin soloist in Hollywood, playing in some 500 films, including Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, The Diary of Anne Frank, Wuthering Heights, The Grapes of Wrath, and Spartacus. He worked closely with Robert Russell Bennett, Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Miklós Rózsa, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, and Victor Young.     
    Extraordinary as it seems today, Kaufman was largely responsible for bringing the once-forgotten music of Antonio Vivaldi to its current popularity worldwide among both classical musicians and the general population of music lovers.
    The book includes a music CD with Kaufman’s performances of Vivaldi’s Concerto 2 of op. 9, Havanaise by Camille Saint Saëns, Nocturne for Violin and Piano by Aaron Copland, Much Ado about Nothing Suite for violin and piano by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Jerome Kern, among other favorites.
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Fiddling for Norway
Revival and Identity
Chris Goertzen
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Fiddling for Norway is an engrossing portrait of a fiddle-based folk revival in Norway, one that in many ways parallels contemporary folk institutions and festivals throughout the world, including American fiddling. It is a detailed case study in the politics of culture, the causes and purposes of folk revivals, and the cultivation of music to define identity.

The book begins with an investigation of the people and events important to Norwegian folk fiddling, tracing the history of Norwegian folk music and the growth and diversification of the folk music revival. The narrative takes us to fiddle clubs, concerts and competitions on the local, regional, and national levels, and shows how conflicting emphases—local vs. national identity, tradition vs. aesthetic qualities—continue to transform Norwegian folk music. Goertzen utilizes a large anthology of meticulously transcribed tunes to illustrate personal and regional repertoires, aspects of performance practice, melodic gesture and form, and tune relationships. Ethnomusicologists and readers who fiddle will enjoy both the music and the stories it tells.
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Fidel between the Lines
Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema
Laura-Zoë Humphreys
Duke University Press, 2019
In Fidel between the Lines Laura-Zoë Humphreys traces the changing dynamics of criticism and censorship in late socialist Cuba through a focus on cinema. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban state strategically relaxed censorship, attempting to contain dissent by giving it an outlet in the arts. Along with this shift, foreign funding and digital technologies gave filmmakers more freedom to criticize the state than ever before, yet these openings also exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped the Cuban public sphere. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution, and how such efforts came up against new forms of suspicion in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Offering insights that extend beyond Cuba, Humphreys reveals what happens to public debate when freedom of expression can no longer be distinguished from complicity while demonstrating the ways in which combining anthropology with film studies can shed light on cinema's broader social and political import.
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Fidel Castro
Nick Caistor
Reaktion Books, 2013
Fidel Castro had ruled the island of Cuba for fifty-two years when ill health forced him to step down in 2008. Over the course of that time, he changed Cuba from a republic to a communist state and became one of the most divisive leaders in the second half of the twentieth century. For some, he is a champion of humanitarianism, socialism, and environmentalism. For others, he is a monster and dictator who perpetuated human rights abuses at home and abroad.
 
Providing a rare, evenhanded account of Castro’s life, journalist Nick Caistor brings together interviews with people who have known Castro with discussion of the ideas that drove him. Caistor follows Castro’s life from his birth as the illegitimate son of a wealthy farmer in 1926 to the developing of his leftist, anti-imperialist ideas at the University of Havana and his primary role in the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s. He explores Castro’s economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union and his hostile relationship with the United States while also looking at how he simultaneously introduced free health care and education while squelching freedom of the press and suppressing dissidents. As Caistor shows, Castro’s numerous writings on politics, capitalism, and other topics have influenced leaders from Nelson Mandela to Hugo Chávez, but allegations of corruption, human rights abuses, and dictatorship never ceased during his long career.
 
Using stories and opinions to enliven the debate about Castro’s choices, strengths, and weaknesses, this concise biography gives readers the opportunity to judge for themselves how they feel about the former Cuban president.
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FIDELITIES
Valerie Nieman
West Virginia University Press, 2004

Fidelities is the first collection of eighteen short stories to be published by this multi-faceted author. The stories in Fidelities, which are mostly set in West Virginia, are both heartrending and beautiful. Nieman published her first novel, Neena Gathering, a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, in 1988. She has also published two poetry chapbooks, Slipping out of Old Eve and How We Live. Her second fictional work, Survivors, was published in 2000.

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Fidel's Ethics of Violence
The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro
Dayan Jayatilleka
Pluto Press, 2007
Fidel Castro's most original contribution to revolutionary and radical thought has been his development of an explicit ethical position on one of the most controversial issues of our time: violence. This book explores the evolution of Castro's political thinking - and in particular how he philosophically reconciles violence, political power and morality.

This book makes a timely intervention into the question of Castro's historical role and contribution. The author argues that Castro's doctrine of armed struggle is the logical development of his idea of the ethical liberation fighter. At its core is an unremitting emphasis on the ethical use of violence.
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Fiela's Child
Dalene Matthee
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Set in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fiela raises Benjamin as one of her own children. But when census takers discover Benjamin, they send him to an illiterate white family of woodcutters who claim him as their son. What follows is Benjamin's search for his identity and the fundamental changes affecting the white and black families who claim him.

"Everything a novel can be: convincing, thought-provoking, upsetting, unforgettable, and timeless."—Grace Ingoldby, New Statesman

"Fiela's Child is a parade that broadens and humanizes our understanding of the conflicts still affecting South Africa today."—Francis Levy, New York Times Book Review

"A powerful creation of time and place with dark threads of destiny and oppression and its roots in the almost Biblical soil of a storyteller's art."—Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian

"The characters in the novel live and breathe; and the landscape is so brightly painted that the trees, birds, elephants, and rivers of old South Africa are characters themselves. A book not to miss."—Kirkus Reviews
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Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War, revised edition
James C. Hazlett, Edwin Olmstead, and M. Hume Parks
University of Illinois Press, 1983
This is a detailed survey, replete with photographs and diagrams, of the field artillery used by both sides in the Civil War. In paperback for the first time, the book provides technical descriptions of the artillery (bore, weight, range, etc.), ordnance purchases, and inspection reports. Appendixes provide information on surviving artillery pieces and their current locations in museums and national parks.
 
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A Field Guide to a New Meta-field
Bridging the Humanities-Neurosciences Divide
Edited by Barbara Maria Stafford
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences.

Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.

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Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois
Christopher A. Phillips, John A. Crawford, and Andrew R. Kuhns. Foreword by Ronald A. Brandon
University of Illinois Press, 2022
The second edition of the Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois offers up-to-date information on the state’s 102 species of frogs and toads, salamanders, turtles, lizards, and snakes. Detailed descriptions by the authors include habitats, distinguishing features, behaviors, and other facts, while revised range maps and full-color photographs help users recognize animals in the field. In addition, an identification key and easy-to-navigate page layouts guide readers through extensive background material on each species' population, diet, predators, reproduction, and conservation status.

A one-of-a-kind resource, the Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Illinois is a definitive guide aimed at biologists, teachers, students, wildlife specialists, natural resource managers, conservationists, law enforcement officials, landowners, hobbyists, and everyone else eager to explore herpetology and nature in the Prairie State.

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A Field Guide to Conservation Finance
Story Clark
Island Press, 2007
Finally, a comprehensive book on land conservation financing for community and regional conservation leaders. A Field Guide to Conservation Finance provides essential advice on how to tackle the universal obstacle to protecting private land in America: lack of money.
 
Story Clark dispels the myths that conservationists can access only private funds controlled by individuals or that only large conservation organizations have clout with big capital markets. She shows how small land conservation organizations can achieve conservation goals using both traditional and cutting-edge financial strategies. Clark outlines essential tools for raising money, borrowing money, and reducing the cost of transactions. She covers a range of subjects including transfer fees, voluntary surcharges, seller financing, revolving funds, and Project Related Investment programs (PRIs). A clear, well-written overview of the basics of conservation finance with useful insights and real stories combine to create a book that is an invaluable and accessible guide for land trusts seeking to protect more land.
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A FIELD Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Edited by Stuart Friebert, David Walker, andDavid Young
Oberlin College Press, 1997
One of the hallmarks of FIELD magazine has always been its attention to what poets have to say about poetry. Many of these essays--by William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, and Sandra McPherson, among others--have become classics. This revised and expanded collection of essays from the magazine provides a rich and stimulating perspective on the state of contemporary poetry, as seen through the eyes of the poets themselves.
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Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings
Thomas Durant Visser
University Press of New England, 1997
The quintessential New England barn–photogenic, full of character, and framed by flaming autumn foliage–is an endangered species. Of some 30,000 barns in Vermont alone, nearly a thousand a year are lost to fire, collapse, or bulldozers. Thomas Durant Visser’s field guide to the barns, silos, sugar houses, granaries, tobacco barns, and potato houses of New England is an attempt to document not just their structure but their traditions and innovations before the surviving architectural evidence of this rich rural heritage is lost forever. A recognized authority on historic barn preservation, Visser has combed the six-state region for representative barns and outbuildings, and 200 of his photographs are reproduced here. The text, which includes accounts from 18th– and 19th–century observers, describes key architectural characteristics, historic uses, and geographic distribution as well as specific features like timbers and frames, sheathings, doors, and cupolas. From English barns to bank barns, from ice houses to outhouses, these irreplaceable assets, Visser writes, “linger as vulnerable survivors of the past. Yet before these buildings vanish, each has a story to tell.” Travelers, residents, and scholars alike will find Visser’s text invaluable in uncovering, understanding, and appreciating the stories inherent in these dwindling cultural artifacts.
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Field Guide to Oregon Rivers
Tim Palmer
Oregon State University Press, 2024
In this updated edition of his classic Field Guide to Oregon Rivers, Tim Palmer gives us an unprecedented reference, introducing the state’s waterways and offering outdoor enthusiasts and resource professionals an interpretive approach to an extraordinary network of streams. He begins with natural history—geology, climate, hydrology, plants, and wildlife—then profiles 111 Oregon rivers with notes about nature, fish, and conservation, followed by essential tips on where to see each river, hike along the shores, fish, and explore by canoe, kayak, and raft. Illustrations identify riparian plants and animals while more than 150 photographs showcase a magnificent rivers estate. This volume is an essential outdoor companion for Oregonians and visitors alike.
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A Field Guide to Snow
Matthew Sturm
University of Alaska Press, 2020
People love snow. They love to ski and sled on it, snowshoe through it, and watch it fall from the sky. They love the way it blankets a landscape, making it look tranquil and beautiful. Few people, however, know how snow works. What makes it possible for us to slip and slide over, whether that’s falling on sidewalks or skiing down a mountain? What makes it cling to branches and street signs? What qualities of snow lead to avalanches?

In A Field Guide to Snow, veteran snow scientist Matthew Sturm answers those questions and more. Drawing on decades of study, he explains in clear and simple ways how and why snow works the way it does. The perfect companion a ski trip or a hike in the snowy woods, A Field Guide to Snow will give you a new appreciation for the science behind snow’s beauty.
 
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A Field Guide to the Familiar
Learning to Observe the Natural World
Gale Lawrence
Brandeis University Press, 1998
Designed both to encourage beginning naturalists and to challenge more experienced observers to look at the familiar in new ways, A Field Guide to the Familiar offers an introduction to common plants, animals, and natural phenomena. Beautiful drawings add to the book's refreshing approach to nature study. Organized by the seasons of the year, each chapter focuses on one subject and one learning objective. From fall’s first frost to the field crickets of high summer, this innovative guide explores in depth such familiar sights as bumblebees, rainbows, acorns, blueberries, and shooting stars. Each chapter includes descriptive information to help readers identify each subject, as well as life cycle information that shows how a subject functions within a grander scheme. Readers learn that every plant and animal – even the atmosphere – has its own story, and they begin to perceive the natural world as whole, interconnected, and continuous. Whether read sequentially or used as a field companion or handy desk reference, A Field Guide to the Familiar gives every reader a sense of the natural world as an accessible – and endlessly fascinating – place.
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A Field Guide to the Families and Genera of Woody Plants of Northwest South America
With Supplementary Notes on Herbaceous Taxa
Alwyn H. Gentry
University of Chicago Press, 1993
To understand almost any part of the tropical rain forest's fabulously complex web of life, one must first learn to identify a bewildering array of plants. Alwyn Gentry's landmark book, completed just before his tragic death in 1993, is the only field guide to the nearly 250 families of woody plants in the most species-rich region of South America.

As a consummate field researcher, Gentry designed this guide to be not just comprehensive, but also easy to use in rigorous field conditions. Unlike many field guides, which rely for their identifications on flowers and fruits that are only present during certain seasons, Gentry's book focuses on characters such as bark, leaves, and odor that are present year-round. His guide is filled with clear illustrations, step-by-step keys to identification, and a wealth of previously unpublished data.

All biologists, wildlife managers, conservationists, and government officials concerned with the tropical rain forests will need and use this field guide.

Alwyn Gentry was one of the world's foremost experts on the biology of tropical plants. He was senior curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and was a member of Conservation International's interdisciplinary Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) team, which inventories the biodiversity of the most threatened tropical areas. From 1967 to 1993 he collected more than 80,000 plant specimens, many of them new to science.
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A Field Guide to the Heavens
Frank X. Gaspar
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

Frank X. Gaspar’s collection of poems is haunted by the presence of mystics and visionaries: Mohammed, Buddha, St. Paul, Augustine, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Milton, Rilke. A Field Guide to the Heavens is punctuated with designs of science, the wondering and rapt observations of the sky made at the eyepiece of a backyard telescope. We come to know Gaspar’s city streets, the neighbors and strangers that walk them, the wreckage of past lives, the ocean, the gardens, the orchards and alleys and parking lots, all spread out under the vast sky.

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Field Guide to the Introduced Flora of South Georgia
Rebecca Upson, Bradley Myer, Kelvin Floyd, Jennifer Lee, and Colin Clubbe
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2017
In the late eighteenth century, the first sealing ships from England arrived in South Georgia. With them came a host of invasive plants, which set to work upending the island ecosystem. Today, forty-one non-native plant species are established in the region and, even a century later, they continue to threaten the native species and habitats of South Georgia.
This is the first field guide to comprehensively cover these species, providing full-color photographs, distribution maps, and species descriptions, plus keys to the grasses and sedges of the area. This guide is accessible even to non-botanists and also provides an opportunity for visitors to be part of a citizen science program contributing sightings and improving our knowledge of the introduced flora of South Georgia.
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Field Guide to the Lichens of Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Erin Tripp
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

With 909 recognized species of lichens, Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) is home to more of these lichenized fungi than any other national park in the United States, as well as nearly half of all species known to occur in eastern North America. There is a great deal of room for scientific exploration, inquiry, and systematic description in the realm of lichenology. In Field Guide to the Lichens of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Erin Tripp and James Lendemer take on the formidable task of creating an all-in-one resource for Park exploration, including lichen distribution maps, tools for identification, vivid photographs and illustrations, and even field notes from their own research campaigns. In the process, the authors create a touchstone for lichen taxonomy and ecology, and they inspire others—researchers as well as casual observers—to take interest in the incredible biodiversity of the Great Smoky Mountains. Biologists, botanists, visitors to the park, naturalists, and others interested in the flora and fauna of both the southern Appalachians and GSMNP will thoroughly enjoy this lovingly prepared field guide.

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