From ballet to burlesque, from the frontier jig to the jitterbug, Americans have always loved watching dance, whether in grand ballrooms, on Mississippi riverboats, or in the streets. Dance and American Art is an innovative look at the elusive, evocative nature of dance and the American visual artists who captured it through their paintings, sculpture, photography, and prints from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The scores of artists discussed include many icons of American art: Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Edward Steichen, David Smith, and others.
    As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Their portrayals of dance and dancers, from the anonymous to the famous—Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker, Martha Graham—have testified to the enduring importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmic motion in creating aesthetic form.
    Through extensive research, sparkling prose, and beautiful color reproductions, art historian Sharyn R. Udall draws attention to the ways that artists’ portrayals of dance have defined the visual character of the modern world and have embodied culturally specific ideas about order and meaning, about the human body, and about the diverse fusions that comprise American culture.

Although most people think "Generation X" is a recently coined label for the post–Baby Boom generation, since the early 1950s the phrase has signified a seemingly identity-less group of young people trying to define themselves within an uncertain, even hostile world. GenXegesis: Essays on Alternative Youth (Sub)Culture is the first collection of critical essays on Generation X.
    Resituating the term in its neglected (sub)cultural context, the contributors offer a critical assessment of the "Generation X" phenomenon and its relation to the fashioning of differing identities within and against the mainstream. The essays explore a variety of topics, including punk subculture, alternative music, reality television, postmodernism, and the Internet. Together, the contributors share a refreshingly self-conscious approach to Generation X’s precarious, often paradoxical position as an alternative to the mainstream. This collection will be enjoyed by scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and anyone interested in popular culture, including Gen-Xers themselves.

Though the world was stunned by the horrific massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu majority in Rwanda beginning in April 1994, there has been little coverage of the reprisals that occurred after the Tutsi gained political power. During this time hundreds of thousands of Hutu were systematically hunted and killed.
Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire is the eyewitness account of Marie Béatrice Umutesi. She tells of life in the refugee camps in Zaire and her flight across 2000 kilometers on foot. During this forced march, far from the world’s cameras, many Hutu refugees were trampled and murdered. Others died from hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, or simply vanished, ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian organizations. Amidst this brutality, day-to-day suffering, and desperate survival, Umutesi managed to organize the camps to improve the quality of life for women and children.
In this first-hand account of inexplicable brutality, day-to-day suffering, and survival, Marie Béatrice Umutesi sheds light on a backlash of violence that targeted the Hutu refugees of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994.  Umutesi’s documentation of the flight and terror of these years provides the world a veritable account of a history that is still widely unknown. After translations from its original French into three other languages, this important book is available in English for the first time. It is more than a testimony to the lives and humanity lost; it is a call for those politicians, military personnel, and humanitarian organizations responsible for the atrocious crimes—and the devastating silence—to be held accountable.


“Umutesi’s tale, told with honesty and eloquence, is a tribute to the human spirit, a searing indictment of the agents who perpetrated these horrors, and a reproach to those who turned away.”—Catharine Newbury, African Studies Review

“Restores a human dimension that has been lacking in the history of the genocide and massacres in Rwanda.”—Danielle de Lame, African Studies Review

“A vivid account of the grueling nightmare experienced by tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians whom the world had deliberately forsaken. . . . An outstanding call for justice.”—Aloys Habimama, African Studies Review

 “A towering work. . . . An epic for our times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness.”—Jan Vansina, African Studies Review

“Of all the current books and films ten years after the Rwandan genocide, none is more effective than Surviving the Slaughter . . . . This book carries one along, often as if running with the refugees.”—Anne Serafin, Multicultural Review

Balanced precariously between fact and fiction, the historical novel is often viewed with suspicion. Some have attacked it as a mongrel form, a “bastard son” born of “history’s flagrant adultery with imagination.” Yet it includes some of the most celebrated achievements of Russian literature, with Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and scores of other writers contributing to this tradition.
    Dan Ungurianu’s Plotting History traces the development of the Russian historical novel from its inception in the romantic era to the emergence of Modernism on the eve of the Revolution. Organized historically and thematically, the study is focused on the cultural paradigms that shaped the evolution of the genre and are reflected in masterpieces such as The Captain’s Daughter and War and Peace. Ungurianu examines the variety of approaches by which Russian writers combined fact with fiction and explores the range of subjects that inspired the Russian historical imagination.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

“Ungurianu has produced a most valuable work for literary scholars.”—Andrew M. Drozd, Slavic and East European Journal

“[Ungurianu’s] overwhelming knowledge, impeccable documentation, erudite notes, and valuable addenda make for a treasure house of information and keen analysis. . . . Essential.”—Choice

In the 1950s, baby boomer Donna Solecka Urbikas grew up in the American Midwest yearning for a "normal" American family. But during World War II, her Polish-born mother and half sister had endured hunger, disease, and desperate escape from slave labor in Siberia. War and exile created a profound bond between mother and older daughter, one that Donna would struggle to find with either of them. In this unforgettable memoir, Donna recounts her family history and her own survivor's story, finally understanding the damaged mother who had saved her sister.

A little-known gem of utopian/dystopian fiction published in 1919 tells

the story of a eugenically engineered society of the future.

It is the year 2218. In "Villautopia," the capital of a Central American nation, the

state selects young, biologically desirable citizens to act as breeders. Embryos

are implanted in males to increase a flagging population rate, and the offspring

are raised in state facilities until old enough to choose their own, nonnuclear

families. Sterilization of children with mental or physical abnormalities further

ensures the purity of the gene pool.

Written two years before Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and twelve years before

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Eugenia recounts the story of Ernesto, who at age twenty-three is selected as a breeder. Celiana, his thirty-eight-year-old lover

and an accomplished scholar, is deemed unfit for reproduction. To cope with

her feelings of guilt and hopelessness, she increasingly turns to marijuana, and

her scholarly productivity declines. Meanwhile Ernesto falls in love with a fellow

breeder, a young woman named Eugenia—but the life they ultimately choose is

not quite what the state had envisioned.

Taking up important challenges of modern society—population growth,

reproductive behavior and technologies, experimentation with gender roles,

and changes in family dynamics—Eugenia is published here in English for the

first time. Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj provide a critical

apparatus helping readers to understand the novel's literary genesis and genealogy

as well as its historical context. Arising from its twentieth-century origins, yet

remarkably contemporary, Eugenia is a treasure of speculative fiction.