front cover of From Scenarios to Networks
From Scenarios to Networks
Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico
Leo Cabranes-Grant
Northwestern University Press, 2016

In this innovative study, Leo Cabranes-Grant analyzes four intercultural events in the Viceroyalty of New Spain that took place between 1566 and 1690. Rather than relying on racial labels to describe alterations of identity, Cabranes-Grant focuses on experimentation, rehearsal, and the interaction between bodies and objects. His analysis shows how scenarios are invested with affective qualities, which in turn enable cultural and semiotic change. Central to his argument is Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which figures society as a constantly evolving web of relationships among objects, people, and spaces. In examining these scenarios, Cabranes-Grant attempts to discern the reasons why the conditions of an intensified moment within this ceaseless flow take on a particular value and inspire their re-creation. Cabranes-Grant offers a fresh perspective on Latour’s theory and reorients debates concerning history and historiography in the field of performance studies.

 

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History of Hurricanes
Poems
Teresa Cader
Northwestern University Press, 2009

In her third collection of poems, Teresa Cader spins a complete universe of lyrical, probing verse that reaches out to readers and invites them to come inside. These poems deal with love and loss in particularly striking ways, as Cader uses rigorously controlled verse to express chaotic emotion. Stylistically adventurous, her work moves gracefully from intricate, slant-rhymed couplets to elliptical, lanky free verse. Geographically, she takes readers on a ride with stops in Kraków’s rock clubs, colonial New England’s sites, and shrines of contemporary Japan. The shadow of death, especially the loss of Cader’s mother, falls across many of her poems, but her verse reacts viscerally to such events, her emotion resounding out from each line to move through pain or desire.

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The Paper Wasp
Teresa Cader
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In these poems, Teresa Cader undertakes three poetic explorations, all of them deriving from the book's opening image of a paper wasp spinning its white nest on a terrace in ancient China. The paper universe assembled by the wasp teems with both destructive and creative forces and will lead to the invention of paper and the power of writing. The book's first section explores the mystery of creativity; the second looks beneath the papery surface of the nest at the connection between physical and figurative birth. "Internal Exile," winner of the Poetry Society of America's 1997 George Bogin Memorial Award, forms the third section of the collection, addressing the invasion of the nest by destructive powers in the example of the life of Soviet writer Eugenia Ginzburg.
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A Court That Shaped America
Chicago's Federal District Court from Abe Lincoln to Abbie Hoffman
Richard Cahan
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Big and small dramas play out every day in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Headquartered in Chicago, the court has played a pivotal role in U.S. history. This is where Abraham Lincoln, as a young lawyer, changed the direction of westward expansion when he argued that trains-not steamships-were America's future. This is where Al Capone met his fall, at a trial that finished him as Public Enemy Number One. And this is where Abbie Hoffman, the nation's first Yippie, butted heads with Judge Julius J. Hoffman and the Establishment at the trial known as the Conspiracy Eight.

A Court That Shaped America traces the flesh-and-blood courtroom scenes from the district's first cases in the early nineteenth century through the turn of the millennium. Historical figures--including Mormon leader Joseph Smith, inventor Thomas Edison, and author Mark Twain--as well as contemporary superstars like Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey have all had their day in the Northern Illinois court. Some were victorious; some came out scathed. This book examines these great trials and the people behind them to offer a unique look at Chicago and U.S. history.
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South Side Venus
The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs
Mary Ann Cain
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The extraordinarily productive life of curator, artist, and activist Margaret Burroughs was largely rooted in her work to establish and sustain two significant institutions in Chicago: the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), founded in 1940, and the DuSable Museum of African American History, founded in her living room in 1961.

As Mary Ann Cain's South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs reveals, the primary motivations for these efforts were love and hope. Burroughs was spurred by her love for Chicago's African American community—largely ill served by mainstream arts organizations—and by her hope that these new, black-run cultural centers would welcome many generations of aspiring artists and art lovers.

This first, long–awaited biography of Burroughs draws on interviews with peers, colleagues, friends, and family, and extensive archival research at the DuSable Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Public Library. Cain traces Burroughs's multifaceted career, details her work and residency on Chicago's South Side, and highlights her relationships with other artists and culture makers. Here, we see Burroughs as teacher and mentor as well as institution builder.

Anchored by the author's talks with Burroughs as they stroll through her beloved Bronzeville, and featuring portraits of Burroughs with family and friends, South Side Venus will enlighten anyone interested in Chicago, African American history, social justice, and the arts.
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The Way It Works with Women
Louis Calaferte
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Now in its first English translation, The Way It Works with Women is a brutal and relentless exploration of the dark side of desire. Shocking and poetic, the novel is composed of bits of dialogue: outbursts and exchanges spoken in the night and expressing naked physical and psychological yearning; murmurs of fragmentary declarations spoken in deserted doorways and dark hotel rooms. Grounded firmly in the literary tradition exemplified by Pierre Jean Jouve and Georges Bataille, The Way It Works with Women is a stunning introduction to one of the most unusual writers in contemporary French literature.
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C'est la Guerre
Louis Calaferte
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In C'est la guerre Louis Calaferte presents the World War II--from the moment its outbreak is announced to the public through the unprecedented disaster that ensues, and through France's liberation in 1945--as it registers itself in the ever more isolated consciousness of a young, nameless boy.
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front cover of Pray for Yourself and Other Stories
Pray for Yourself and Other Stories
Anne Calcagno
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Anne Calcagno's exhilaratingly original first collection of short stories vividly captures the textures of women's lives. Her style is at once idiomatic and metaphorical; her dramatic situations are extreme, edgy, and utterly convincing. Calcagno's characters grapple with problems ranging from domestic violence to obsession with body weight, and speak with conviction and authority about the complex obstacles in their lives. She writes of the desperation of fragile families, of sibling rivalries, of husbands and wives hanging onto or running from each other.
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Long Way Home
A Young Man Lost in the System and the Two Women Who Found Him
Laura Caldwell
Northwestern University Press, 2012

By all accounts, Jovan Mosley was a good kid. He was working on a way out of his tough Chicago neighborhood and had been accepted at Ohio State University when he was forced to confess to a murder he did not commit. He then spent five years and ten months in jail without a trial. His efforts to exonerate himself got him nowhere until he happened to meet a successful criminal defense lawyer, Catharine O’Daniel. She became convinced of his innocence and took him on as her first pro bono client. Along with Laura Caldwell, she decided to fight to free Jovan. Against enormous odds, they fi­nally won some measure of justice. In this affecting memoir, Caldwell tells the unforgettable story of a breakdown in the criminal justice system and what it took to free an innocent man.

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Black Freethinkers
A History of African American Secularism
Christopher Cameron
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Black Freethinkers argues that, contrary to historical and popular depictions of African Americans as naturally religious, freethought has been central to black political and intellectual life from the nineteenth century to the present. Freethought encompasses many different schools of thought, including atheism, agnosticism, and nontraditional orientations such as deism and paganism. 

Christopher Cameron suggests an alternative origin of nonbelief and religious skepticism in America, namely the brutality of the institution of slavery. He also traces the growth of atheism and agnosticism among African Americans in two major political and intellectual movements of the 1920s: the New Negro Renaissance and the growth of black socialism and communism. In a final chapter, he explores the critical importance of freethought among participants in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Examining a wealth of sources, including slave narratives, travel accounts, novels, poetry, memoirs, newspapers, and archival sources such as church records, sermons, and letters, the study follows the lives and contributions of well-known figures, including Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, as well as lesser-known thinkers such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Sarah Webster Fabio, and David Cincore. 
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Memorial
Ferdinando Camon
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Memorial is the third part of the celebrated trilogy Camon called "the cycle of the lowliest," which traced one of the most important but least recognized events of modern history: the death of Italy's peasant civilization.

Camon's northern Italy was primitive and poor; little more than strong religious beliefs helped sustain its people through years of poverty, hunger, and disease. With the arrival of modern life and its "civilizing" aspects, the peasant ways, and all they stood for, changed forever.
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Conversations with Primo Levi
Ferdinando Camon
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Beginning in 1982 and at intervals over the next four years Ferdinando Camon traveled to Turin for a series of meetings with Primo Levi. This book is the record of their dialogues. Levi spoke of the war, of anti-Semitism, of the camps, of German guilt, of Israel's emergence, and of his own extraordinary life and work. The give-and-take of the discussion, its tone, its lucidity, its intelligence, lift it well above the level and format of the usual journalistic interview with a celebrated author.
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War with the Newts
Karel Capek
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Working in the fantastic satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Karel Čapek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders on an Indonesian island. Čapek sardonically portrays the reactions of the civilized world-from horror to skepticism, from intellectual fascination to mercantile opportunism-and the ultimate destruction from which it (and the newts) might not escape.
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Rakes of the Old Court
A Novel
Mateiu Caragiale
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Widely regarded as the greatest Romanian novel of the twentieth century, Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) follows four characters through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay.
 
Originally published in 1929, Rakes of the Old Court is considered a jewel of Romanian modernism. Devoted “Mateists” have long read, memorized, and reenacted the novel, and after the Romanian Revolution, it became part of the high school curriculum. Now canonical, Mateiu’s work has been celebrated for its opulent literary style and enigmatic tone.
 
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front cover of The Thinking of the Sensible
The Thinking of the Sensible
Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy
Mauro Carbone
Northwestern University Press, 2004
In this first English publication of a well-known and widely respected Italian scholar, readers will encounter the preeminent interpreter of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty engaged in a dialogue of critical concern to contemporary philosophy. In subtle and sensitive language eminently suited to the style and substance of Merleau-Ponty's own writings, Mauro Carbone fashions four essays around a central theme-the relations of the sensible and the intelligible, and of philosophy and non-philosophy-that occupied Merleau-Ponty in his later work.

An original and innovative interpretation of the ontology of Merleau-Ponty--and themselves a significant contribution to the field of Continental thought--these essays constitute a sustained exploration of what Merleau-Ponty detected, and greeted, as a "mutation within the relations of man and Being," which would provide him with the basis for a new idea of philosophy or "a-philosophy." In lucid, often elegant terms, Carbone analyzes key elements of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relation to Proust's Recherche, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the new biology of Von Uexküll, Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant, and Heidegger's conception of "letting-be." His work clearly demonstrates the vitality of Merleau-Ponty's late revolutionary philosophy by following its most salient, previously unexplored paths. This is essential reading for any scholar with an interest in Merleau-Ponty, in the questions of embodiment, temporality and Nature, or in the possibility of philosophy today.
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Cosmic Canticle
Ernesto Cardenal
Northwestern University Press, 2002
In this epic poem, Cardenal explores Latin American history by relating the evolution of the universe to the development of human understanding. Throughout, Cardenal blends the visible and the invisible, science and poetry, religion and nature, in 43 autonomous yet integrated cantos.
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Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria
Ernesto Cardenal
Northwestern University Press, 1995
In this bilingual edition, Ernesto Cardenal celebrates his country's successful revolution against the Somoza regime. Recognized world-wide as a major poetic voice from Latin America, he also has long been an activist fighting for political freedom, and he served as Nicaragua's Minister of Culture from 1979-1988. In Flights of Victory, Ernesto Cardenal reflects on events of recent Nicaraguan history with poems about the insurrection against Somoza, the triumph of the popular movement, and the reconstruction of the country, from the unique perspective of a poet-participant.
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The Politics of Reception
Critical Constructions of Mikhail Zoshchenko
Greg Carleton
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Mikhail Zoshchenko was one of the most popular and contentious Russian writers in the period from 1920 to 1950. Scholars and critics have long enlisted Zoshchenko to fight the cultural battles of early Soviet history, the Cold War, and even the glasnost era. In The Politics of Reception, Gregory Carleton analyzes how and why Zoshchenko's legacy has become a battleground for competing ideological interests.
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front cover of Phenomenology and the Problem of History
Phenomenology and the Problem of History
A Study of Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy
David Carr
Northwestern University Press, 2009
In Phenomenology and the Problem of History, David Carr examines the paradox involving Husserl's transcendental philosophy and his later historicist theory. Rejecting the arguments of earlier critics that compromise aspects of Husserl's writing, Carr proposes a model of the transcendental philosopher who balances necessary historical reduction with a strict mind to historical context. 
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The Ethics of History
David Carr
Northwestern University Press, 2004
What is implied by "ethics of history"? The authors of this volume, internationally renowned philosophers and intellectual historians, address this question in all its novelty and ambiguity and develop varied perspectives on the place and nature of ethics in the philosophy, enterprise, and practice of history.
Is the whole historical process--largely consisting of the actions and sufferings of persons and groups--subject to ethical constraint? And what of the ways in which historians present their subject matter; are these methods subject to moral scrutiny? Although they approach these issues from different directions, the contributors agree in their critique of the correspondence theory of history, tin their acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between the past and the historian's present account, and in their call for a revision of the popular appeal to historical objectivity.
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Paul Bowles
A Life
Virginia Spencer Carr
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Paul Bowles, best known for his classic 1949 novel, The Sheltering Sky, is one of the most compelling yet elusive figures of twentieth-century American counterculture. In this definitive biography, Virginia Spencer Carr has captured Bowles in his many guises: gifted composer, expatriate novelist, and gay icon, to name only a few.
 
Born in New York in 1910, Bowles' brilliance was evident from early childhood. His first artistic interest was music, which he studied with the composer Aaron Copland. Bowles wrote scores for films and countless plays, including pieces by Tennessee Williams and Orson Welles. Over the course of his life, his intellectual pursuits led him around the world. He cultivated a circle of artistic friends that included Gertrude Stein, W.H. Auden, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Stephen Spender, and Carson McCullers.
 
Just as fascinating for his flamboyant personality as for his literary success, Bowles' leftist politics and experimentation with drugs make him an ever-controversial character. Carr delves into Bowles' unconventional marriage to Jane Auer and his self-exile in Morocco. Close friends with him before his death in 1999, Carr's first-hand knowledge of Bowles is undeniable. This book encompasses her personal experiences plus ten years of research and interviews with some two hundred of Bowles' acquaintances.
 
Virginia Spencer Carr has written a riveting biography that tells not only the story of Paul Bowles' literary genius, but also of a crucial period of redefinition in American culture. Carr is simultaneously entertaining and precise, delivering a wealth of information on one of the most mythologized figures of mid-century literature.
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Dos Passos
A Life
Virginia Spencer Carr
Northwestern University Press, 2004
A New York Times Notable Book

An intimate biography of a great American writer.

He rose from a childhood as the illegitimate son of a financial titan to become the man Sartre called "the greatest writer of our time." A progressive writer who turned his passions into the groundbreaking U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos later embraced conservative causes. At the height of his career he was considered a peer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, yet he died in obscurity in 1970.

Award-winning biographer Virginia Spencer Carr examines the contradictions of Dos Passos's life with an in-depth study of the man. Using the writer's letters and journals, and with assistance from the Dos Passos family, Carr reconstructs an epic life, one of literary acclaim and bitter obscurity, restless wandering and happy marriage, friendship with Edmund Wilson and feuds with Hemingway. First published to acclaim in 1984, Dos Passos remains the definitive personal portrait of the author.
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This Is Not the End of the Book
Jean-Claude Carriare
Northwestern University Press, 2012

A book lover today might sometimes feel like the fictional medieval friar William of Baskerville in Eco’s The Name of the Rose, watching the written word become lost to time. In This Is Not the End of the Book, that book’s author, Umberto Eco, and his fellow raconteur Jean-Claude Carriere sit down for a dazzling dialogue about memory and the pitfalls, blanks, omissions, and irredeemable losses of which it is made. Both men collect rare and precious books, and they joyously hold up books as hardy survivors, engaging in a critical, impassioned, and rollicking journey through book history, from papyrus scrolls to the e-book. Along the way, they touch upon science and subjectivity, dialectics and anecdotes, and they wear their immense learning lightly. A smiling tribute to what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy, this dialogue will be a delight for all readers and book lovers.

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Theatricality of the Closet
Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan
Michelle Liu Carriger
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities

Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity.

By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.

 

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The Perfect Bastard
Poems
Quinn Carver Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2023
An innovative poetic interrogation of wrestling, queerness, and staying true to oneself

Quinn Carver Johnson’s debut collection, The Perfect Bastard, follows its titular protagonist, a nonbinary and queer professional wrestler, as they travel across Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri, working for a booker known as the Puppeteer. Inspired by their idol Adrian Street, the Perfect Bastard strives to positively represent queerness and resist the Puppeteer’s stereotypical and demeaning kayfabe. In the ring, they face off against the likes of champion Jack Holiday and the First Crusher, but their most important battles, against the Puppeteer, take place behind the scenes. They must choose between person and persona, authenticity and humiliating hype, if they want to succeed in the industry.

When offered success on the grandest scale—the championship belt—in exchange for mocking their own queerness, the Perfect Bastard questions their path: Will they betray their identity to achieve their dream, or will they walk away from the world of professional wrestling—a world that refuses to make a genuine, healthy space for them?
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Each One Teach One
Up and Out of Poverty, Memoirs of a Street Activist
Ron Casanova
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Each One Teach One chronicles Ron Casanova's struggle out of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction to find dignity and purpose in life. Through his own awakening, this Black, Puerto Rican activist ultimately finds his answer in helping other people. Born into a dysfunctional family and placed in an orphanage on Staten Island at an early age, Casanova faced overwhelming odds. His story illuminates some of the major events of our time, including the "police riot" at Tompkins Square, the "Housing Now" march of the homeless on Washington, and community takeovers of housing in Kansas City, New York, and Philadelphia.

Underlying Each One Teach One, with its vivid cast of characters and intimate descriptions of Harlem and other urban areas, is the profound sense that no matter what your circumstance, you can use your past experience to help others. Ultimately, Casanova's story is a message of hope for the future and for the possibility of self-sufficiency and self-empowerment for each individual.
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Each One Teach One
Up and Out of Poverty; Memoirs of a Street Activist
Ron Casanova
Northwestern University Press, 1996
The gritty and inspiring story of Ron Casanova, who went from homelessness to national homeless advocate

Each One Teach One recounts Ron Casanova’s struggle out of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction to find dignity and purpose in life. Through his own awakening, this Black Puerto Rican activist ultimately finds his salvation in helping other people. Placed in an orphanage on Staten Island at the age of three, Casanova faced overwhelming odds. His story illuminates significant twentieth-century protests, including the 1988 riot at Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, the “Housing Now” march of the homeless on Washington, DC, in 1989, and community takeovers of housing in Kansas City, New York, and Philadelphia.
 
Underlying Each One Teach One, with its vivid cast of characters and intimate descriptions of Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Tent City, is the profound sense that, no matter what your circumstance, you can use your experience to help others. Ultimately, Casanova’s story demonstrates the possibility of self-sufficiency and self-empowerment. Amid today’s economic crisis and rising homelessness, Casanova’s story brings a message of hope.
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Turning Emotion Inside Out
Affective Life beyond the Subject
Edward S. Casey
Northwestern University Press, 2022
In Turning Emotion Inside Out, Edward S. Casey challenges the commonplace assumption that our emotions are to be located inside our minds, brains, hearts, or bodies. Instead, he invites us to rethink our emotions as fundamentally, although not entirely, emerging from outside and around the self, redirecting our attention from felt interiority to the emotions located in the world around us, beyond the confines of subjectivity.
 
This book begins with a brief critique of internalist views of emotion that hold that feelings are sequestered within a subject. Casey affirms that while certain emotions are felt as resonating within our subjectivity, many others are experienced as occurring outside any such subjectivity. These include intentional or expressive feelings that transpire between ourselves and others, such as an angry exchange between two people, as well as emotions or affects that come to us from beyond ourselves. Casey claims that such far‑out emotions must be recognized in a full picture of affective life. In this way, the book proposes to “turn emotion inside out.”
 
 
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Watercolor Women Opaque Men
A Novel in Verse
Ana Castillo
Northwestern University Press, 2017
2006 Independent Publisher Book Award for Story Teller of the Year
 
In this updated edition of Ana Castillo’s celebrated novel in verse, featuring a new introduction by Poet Laureate of Texas Carmen Tafolla, we revisit the story’s spirited heroine, known only as “Ella” or “She,” as she takes us through her own epic journey of self-actualization as an artist and a woman. With a remarkable combination of tenderness, lyricism, wicked humor, and biting satire, Castillo dramatizes Ella’s struggle through poverty as a Chicano single mother at the threshold of the twenty-first century, fighting for upward mobility while trying to raise her son to be independent and self-sufficient. Urged on by the gods of the ancients, Ella’s life interweaves with those of others whose existences are often neglected, even denied, by society’s status quo. Castillo’s strong rhythmic voice and exploration of such issues as love, sexual orientation, and cultural identity will resonate with readers today as much as they did upon the book’s original publication more than ten years ago. This expanded edition also includes a short preface by the author, as well as a glossary, a reader’s guide, and a list of additional suggested readings.
 
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Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems
Aime Cesaire
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas’s new translations of Aimé Césaire’s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po­et’s course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire’s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. 

This volume’s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire’s legacy and remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between “black conscious­ness” and “social consciousness.”

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Optical Play
Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture
Julia Bekman Chadaga
Northwestern University Press, 2014

Longlist finalist, 2015 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History 

Julia Bekman Chadaga’s ambitious study posits that glass—in its uses as a material and as captured in culture—is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is easy to overlook how glass has profoundly transformed vision. Chadaga shows the far-reaching effects of this phenomenon.

Her book examines the similarities between glass and language, the ideological uses of glass, and the material’s associations with modernity, while illuminating the work of Lomonosov, Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Eisenstein, among others. In particular, Chadaga explores the prominent role of glass in the discourse around Russia’s contentious relationship with the West—by turns admiring and antagonistic—as the nation crafted a vision for its own future. Chadaga returns throughout to the spectacular aspect of glass and shows how both the tendentious capacity and the playfulness of this material have shaped Russian culture.

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The Making of a Terrorist
On Classic German Rogues
Jeffrey Champlin
Northwestern University Press, 2015

In The Making of a Terrorist, Jeffrey Champlin examines key figures from three canonical texts from the German-language literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen, Schiller’s Die Rauber, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. Champlin situates these readings within a larger theoretical and historical context, exploring the mechanics, aesthetics, and poetics of terror while explicating the emergence of the terrorist personality in modernity. In engaging and accessible prose, Champlin explores the ethical dimensions of violence and interrogates an ethics of textual violence.

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Synthetic Jungle
Poems
Michael Chang
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A new poetry collection from award-winning author Michael Chang
 
A vital breath of life arrives in American poetry with Synthetic Jungle, the latest collection from acclaimed poet Michael Chang. With poems in a register both hilarious and scathing, Synthetic Jungle effortlessly bashes convention while simultaneously rebuilding the language we use to communicate our fears and joys.
 
Synthetic Jungle is a collection written by a brilliant jester who winks at you as you catch their every reference before sharing a laugh at your own self-satisfaction. Themes of identity, sexuality, and literacy play out in a dizzying rhythm of microtheaters. Readers will find themselves giggling, snorting, and guffawing their way through this work: whether at a repudiation of the literary landscape or a critique of a failing justice system, to laugh along with Chang is to recognize your mistakes and, ultimately, grow from them.
 
Fractal and kinetic in the quick-witted spirit of John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson, Chang’s tender poems dance around, between, and through the personal and philosophical. Synthetic Jungle is as sweet as it is grand, and beneath its sarcastic grin reverberates an immense, open heart.
 
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Delinquent Palaces
Poems
Danielle Chapman
Northwestern University Press, 2015
What does it mean to pray or praise in the twenty-first century? What does it mean to lament, to attend? In this volatile, visionary debut collection, Danielle Chapman seeks “to be known / in one’s own person as crocuses are known / by sun, conceiving green to breathe it / for ravishment by light.” Driven toward stark landscapes and “nowheres” of the spirit, these poems steadfastly seek the lyrical and spiritual promise implicit in difficulty—where “spring sing[s] slime / through snail stones” and “the river’s cashmere roiled.” Chapman’s work testifies to the revelation and the anguish of love, and to the possibility of finding grace in the “interstices of pain / where God’s green / meets man’s limestone.” These hard-edged, wry, and intricately musical poems deliver a life that has been felt to its limits, and transformed into singular art.
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Chekhov for the Stage
The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov
Northwestern University Press, 1992
While the influence of Chekhov in modern theater worldwide, and especially in America, has been immense, translations into English have tended to be too literary and have not communicated the full emotional power and precise attention to detail of Chekhov's Russian. Milton Ehre began translating Chekhov's plays to provide professional theaters with performance texts that capture the feel and rhythms of spoken, rather than written, language. Chekhov for the Stage is the first publication of his revised versions of The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Sea Gull. Ehre's sensitive renderings of these classics make this volume the translation of choice for performers and directors, teachers, and the general reading public.
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Prologue
A Novel for the Beginning of the 1860s
Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Northwestern University Press, 1994
Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-89) is most famous as the author of What is To Be Done? (1863), one of the most inspirational texts in the Russian revolutionary movement. But during his long and lonely Siberian exile Chernyshevsky wrote Prologue, an novel of extraordinary interest for anyone eager to understand the course of Russian history and the political debate over democratization taking place in Russia today.

Set in Petersburg in 1857, on the eve of the great reforms that would include the emancipation of the serfs, Prologue expresses the author's hostility toward Russian liberals, their halfhearted attempts to alleviate the sufferings of peasants, and their insufficient support of revolution, while also exploring the obstacles in the path of women's social and personal development in the Victorian era. Michael R. Katz's new translation makes this singular work available to the non-Russian reading public for the first time.
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Space as Storyteller
Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature
Laura Chiesa
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project suggests that space can become a storyteller: if so, plenty of fleeting stories can be read in the space of modernity, where repetition and the unexpected cross-pollinate. In Space as Storyteller, Laura Chiesa explores several stories across a wide range of time that narrate spatial jumps, from Benjamin's tangential take on the cityscape, the experimentalism of Futurist theatricality, the multiple and potential atlases narrated by Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, and the posturban thought and practice of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas/OMA. Space as Storyteller diverts attention from isolated disciplines and historical or geographical contexts toward transdisciplinary encounters that mobilize the potential to invent new spaces of comparison, a potential the author describes as "architecturability."
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The Virtual Point of Freedom
Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion
Lorenzo Chiesa
Northwestern University Press, 2016
The principal motif that runs throughout The Virtual Point of Freedom is a confrontation with the discourse of freedom, or, more specifically, the falsely transgressive ideal of a total emancipation that would know no constraints. Far from delineating a supposed “subject of freedom” that would allegedly overcome alienation once and for all, the seven chapters in Chiesa’s book seek to unfold an innovative reading of the dialectical coincidence between dis-alienation and re-alienation in politics, aesthetics, and religion, using psychoanalysis as a privileged critical tool. Topics include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s attack on the visual and biological degeneration of bodies brought about by pleasure-seeking “liberal” consumerism, Giorgio Agamben’s and Slavoj Žižek’s conflicting negotiations with the Christian tradition of “poverty” and “inappropriateness” as potential redemption, and Alain Badiou’s inability to develop a philosophical anthropology that could sustain a coherent politics of emancipation. The book concludes by sketching out the figure of the partisan, a subject who makes it possible to conceive of an intersection between provisional morality and radical politics.
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Selected Plays
Alice Childress
Northwestern University Press, 2011
The first African American woman to have a play professionally produced in New York City (Gold Through the Trees, in 1952), Alice Childress occupies an important but surprisingly under-recognized place in American drama. She herself rejected an emphasis on the pioneering aspects of her career, saying that “it’s almost like it’s an honor rather than a disgrace” and that she should “be the fiftieth and the thousandth by this point”—a remark that suggests the complexity and singularity of vision to be found in her plays. Childress worked as an actress before turning to playwriting in 1949, and she was a political activist all of her life. 

Spanning the 1940s to the 1960s, the plays collected here are the ones Childress herself believed were her best, and offer a realistic portrait of the racial inequalities and social injustices that characterized these decades. Her plays often feature strong-willed female protagonists whose problems bring into harsh relief the restrictions faced by African American women. This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the work of a major playwright whose impact on the American theater was profound and lasting.
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Muscle Works
Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity
Broderick D.V. Chow
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Men’s fitness as a performancefrom nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today
 
This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity.
 
Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies.
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Scandinavian Elements of Finnegans Wake
Dounia Bunis Christiani
Northwestern University Press, 1965
In Scandinavian Elements of “Finnegans Wake,” Dounia Bunis Christiani addresses herself to an enormous task: examining the significance of Scandinavian history, literature, and languages for the composition of James Joyce’s masterwork. Whereas critical studies of Joyce tend to fall into two categories—those exploring the philosophical grounding of his works and those providing close textual readings—the significance of Christiani’s work lies in her deep historical and cultural analysis.
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A Theater of Our Own
A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago
Richard Christiansen
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Book Award for Superior Achievement

A Theater of Our Own is a fascinating, fast-paced, and fact-filled chronicle of Chicago's legendary theater scene by the long-time chief critic for the Chicago Tribune. Who produced the first stage adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz" in 1902-nearly forty years before the movie classic? What entertainment juggernaut began in a converted Chinese laundry on Wells Street in 1959? Where did Louis (Studs) Terkel make his stage debut? When did the original production of "Grease" open at Kingston Mines Theater? Richard Christiansen, former chief critic for the Chicago Tribune, answers these and many more questions about the rich role of the theater in Chicago, from its earliest days in 1837 to its present state as a diverse community of artists with international stature.

In A Theater of Our Own, he draws upon his exclusive interviews, insights, and memories gathered over a period of more than forty years of reviewing the arts. This history and memoir traces the evolution of the Chicago theater scene from small theaters to major institutions such as the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Goodman Theater, and The Second City. Along the way, Richard Christiansen relates his behind-the-scenes conversations with some of Chicago's most acclaimed writers, directors, and actors--David Mamet, Frank Galati, Mary Zimmerman, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Harold Ramis, Gary Sinise, and Joe Mantegna--all a part of Chicago's theater renaissance from the 1970s onward. To this day, Chicago remains a city known for its imaginative, innovative, and influential theaters and artists. A Theater of Our Own, a valuable contribution to the history of theater, is a book written for anyone who enjoys the theater and its people as well as the story of Chicago.
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And Quiet Flows the Vodka
or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature with the Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas
Alicia Chudo
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Russia has fascinated outsiders for centuries, and according to Alicia Chudo, it is high time this borscht stopped. In this hilarious send up of Russian literature and history, Chudo takes no prisoners as she examines Russia's great tradition of unreadable geniuses, revolutionaries who can't hit the broad side of a tsar, and Soviets who like their vodka but love their tractors.

Written in the tradition of 1066 and All That, The Pooh Perplex, and The Classics Redefined, And Quiet Flows the Vodka will, with any luck, be the final word on the ghastly first two millennia of Russian literature, history, and culture.
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To the Memory of Childhood
Lydia Chukovskaya
Northwestern University Press, 1988
For years Lydia Chukovskaya's support for persecuted writers cut her off from her own audience. Even her name was banned in the USSR, and she was expelled from the Union of Writers in 1974. Though unable to publish at home and cut off from contacts with readers and editors, Chukovskaya continued to write. To the Memory of Childhood, her loving chronicle of growing up beside the Gulf of Finland with her father, the writer Kornei Chukovsky, reveals the sources of her strength and her belief in the power of the written word.

Her father is a household name in Russia because of his tales in verse for children. But his literary accomplishments ranged far beyond bedtime stories. As a critic he wrote controversial articles and lively profiles of cultural figures; as a translator he introduced Whitman, Twain, Kipling, and Wilde to Russian readers. When his children's literature was attacked in the 1920s and 1930s, he turned to editing, scholarship, and articles on translation. A man of boundless energy, he played a vital role in his country's cultural life until his death in 1969. "I am not writing Kornei Ivanovich's biography," Chukovskaya says, "but he was the author of my childhood."
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The Akhmatova Journals
Volume 1: 1938-1941
Lydia Chukovskaya
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was one of the greatest Russian poets of this century. But during her life she was subjected to scathing critical attacks, denounced as "half-nun, half-whore," and then expelled from the Writers' Union. She also endured severe personal losses. Akhmatova's friend Lydia Chukovskaya (1907–96) kept intimate diaries of her conversations with the great poet. First published in the U.S.S.R. in 1987, The Akhmatova Journals offers a rare look into the day-to-day life of Akhmatova.
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Sofia Petrovna
Lydia Chukovskaya
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's office, hoping against hope for good news. Confronted with a world that makes no moral sense, Sofia goes mad, a madness which manifests itself in delusions little different from the lies those around her tell every day to protect themselves. Sofia Petrovna offers a rare and vital record of Stalin's Great Purges.
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Six Vietnamese Poets
Bilingual Edition
Nguyen Ba Chung
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Six Vietnamese Poets brings together for the first time the works of six writers, three women and three men, who came of age during the American War in Vietnam. In their verse, contemporary readers discover the richness and diversity of Vietnamese life and literature from a bold range of poetic styles, from free verse to romantic lyric to traditional classic Vietnamese forms. This bilingual edition features poets from North and South, men and women, combat soldiers and poet-soldiers writing of life in Vietnam through the turbulent final four decades of the twentieth century.

Speaking to the Heart

After a long night up writing poems,
a streak of sunlight leapt into my room.
I ran to the yard,
running as if I were a child,
footprints breaking the earth's first dew,
chest brushing softly the short grass.
Earth and sky seeped into me like wine.
Startled,
I saw my heart in the shape of a ploughshare<
resting on the earth's shoulder,
the heart thumping, steadily ploughing into time.

—Lam Thi My Da

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The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace
Philosophical Footholds on Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life"
Vernon W. Cisney
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Amid all the controversy, criticism, and celebration of Terrence Malick's award-winning film The Tree of Life, what do we really understand of it? The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace thoughtfully engages the philosophical riches of life, culture, time, and the sacred through Malick's film. This innovative collection traverses the relationships among ontological, moral, scientific, and spiritual perspectives on the world, demonstrating how phenomenological work can be done in and through the cinematic medium, and attempting to bridge the gap between narrow "theoretical" works on film and their broader cultural and philosophical significance. Exploring Malick's film as a philosophical engagement, this readable and insightful collection presents an excellent resource for film specialists, philosophers of film, and film lovers alike.
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The Day I Wasn't There
Helene Cixous
Northwestern University Press, 2006
In this memoir-novel, a narrator who resembles Hélène Cixous obsessively recounts an incident--the premature death of her first-born child, a Down Syndrome baby left in the care of the clinic in Algeria where her midwife mother works. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; and her medical-student brother, who takes on some of the duties of a father figure.

Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic, provocative style, vivid with word play, intense feeling and a stream-of-consciousness that moves freely over time and place. The narrator's mother claims not to remember what happened, and the brother tries to fill in some gaps in the story. By the end of the book we understand the significance of the title: one day Cixous's mother returned to the clinic to find the baby on the brink of death. Rather than attempt to save him she chose to end his suffering.

By closing the door to the imaginary clinic at the end, the narrator at last resolves the feelings of guilt and realizes that each human being has a fate they must endure. Informed by psychoanalytical theory, and always brutally honest, The Day I Wasn't There is above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape.
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Reveries of the Wild Woman
Primal Scenes
Helene Cixous
Northwestern University Press, 2006
All the time when I lived in Algeria, my native country,
I dreamt of one day arriving in Algeria.

Born in Oran, Algeria, Hélène Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. Reveries of the Wild Woman is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher.

Born to a French father and an Austro-German mother, both Jews, Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crisis. In her moving story she recounts how small events--a new dog, the gift of a bicycle--reverberate decades later as symbols filled with social and psychological meaning. She and her family endure a double alienation, by Algerians for being French and by the French for being Jewish, and Cixous builds her story on the themes of isolation and exclusion she felt in particular under the Vichy government and during the Algerian Civil War. Yet she also concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her a longing for her home country, and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought.

A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a poignant recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.
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The Third Body
Helene Cixous
Northwestern University Press, 2009
In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Hélène Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotes, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her over, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings. This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a "third body" out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover.
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Archive of Style
New and Selected Poems
Cheryl Clarke
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.

Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors
 
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Tolstoy's Phoenix
From Method to Meaning in War and Peace
George R. Clay
Northwestern University Press, 1998
By examining Tolstoy's techniques and analyzing the structure of War and Peace, essayist George R. Clay offers a fresh perspective and jargon-free analysis of one of the world's greatest novels. Beginning with Tolstoy's strategies, devices, and structural elements, Clay moves beyond previous approaches and reveals the novel's larger thematic concerns, showing how all the pieces fit into an overall pattern that he calls the phoenix design.
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Dimitry's Shade
A Reading of Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov
J. Douglas Clayton
Northwestern University Press, 2004
In an ambitious reinterpretation of the premier work of Russia's national poet, J. Douglas Clayton reads Boris Godunov as the expression of Alexander Pushkin's thinking about the Russian state, especially the Russian state of his own time (some two hundred years distant from the events of the play), and even his own place within that state. Here we see how the play marks a sharp break with the Decembrists and Pushkin's own youthful liberalism, signaling its author's emergence as a Russian conservative. Boris Godunov, Clayton argues, can be best understood as an ideologically conservative defense of autocracy.

Sure to shock readers even as it persuades them, Dimitry's Shade reveals, incarnated in Boris Godunov, those three elements that were to become the slogan of Nicholas's Russia in the 1830s: autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality.
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The Coming of the Frontier Press
How the West Was Really Won
Barbara Cloud
Northwestern University Press, 2008

From the first story about the discovery of gold in California in 1848 to features on today’s western boomtowns, western expansion and journalism have had a symbiotic relationship. By examining this relationship along its entire timeline, this book argues that newspapers played a crucial role in pushing aside both wildlife and Native Americans to make room for the settlers who would become their readers. The western news sheets not only shaped reader attitudes but also undertook innovations in content and appearance that would affect newspapers nationwide.

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Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago"
A Critical Companion
Edith W. Clowes
Northwestern University Press, 1995
This book, part of the acclaimed AATSEEL Critical Companions series, is designed to guide readers through Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's classic story of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. An introduction places the novel and its author within Russian history and literature, and essays by scholars offer opinion and analysis of Pasternak's method and thought. Finally, there is correspondence relating to the novel and a bibliography chosen by the editor.
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Blood of the Air
Poems
Ama Codjoe
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Blood of the Air creates a new mythology, repurposing spectacle, stereotype, and song. Inspired by the fictions and frictions of the past, each poem in this collection complicates the next. Lush lyrical moments give way to fracture, vulnerability, and reinvention. The title poem—one of several found poems—calls attention to stories told in the wake of sexual violence. In “She Said,” the collection’s longest piece, language culled from the transcript of a seventeenth-century rape trial feels eerily familiar. Formally dexterous and refreshingly bold, the poems in Blood of the Air are urgent, moving, and fiercely imagined. Though blood can flow from the site of a wound, Codjoe seems to say, blood is also a sign of life.
 
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Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite
Poems
Andrew E. Colarusso
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite, Andrew Colarusso hybridizes lost and unknown spaces, taking his title from a falconry term for the cord used to restrain a bird. The word derives from the late fifteenth century, from the French créance (“faith”), also denoting a cord to retain a bird of peu de créance (“of little faith,” i.e., which cannot yet be relied upon). Poems of personal narrative and metaphorical depth speak for the voices searching—in a world that lashes out or looks right past what remains tethered to the past—the parts that occupy the whispers of wanting, the dreams of finally being seen.
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Lessons and Legacies XIV
The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century; Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age
Tim Cole
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age challenges a number of key themes in Holocaust studies with new research. Essays in the section “Tropes Reconsidered” reevaluate foundational concepts such as Primo Levi’s gray zone and idea of the muselmann. The chapters in “Survival Strategies and Obstructions” use digital methodologies to examine mobility and space and their relationship to hiding, resistance, and emigration. Contributors to the final section, “Digital Methods, Digital Memory,” offer critical reflections on the utility of digital methods in scholarly, pedagogic, and public engagement with the Holocaust.

Although the chapters differ markedly in their embrace or eschewal of digital methods, they share several themes: a preoccupation with the experiences of persecution, escape, and resistance at different scales (individual, group, and systemic); methodological innovation through the adoption and tracking of micro- and mezzohistories of movement and displacement; varied approaches to the practice of Saul Friedländer’s “integrated history”; the mainstreaming of oral history; and the robust application of micro- and macrolevel approaches to the geographies of the Holocaust. Taken together, these chapters incorporate gender analysis, spatial thinking, and victim agency into Holocaust studies. In so doing, they move beyond existing notions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to portray the Holocaust as a complex and multilayered event.

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The Necropolitical Theater
Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage
Jeffrey K. Coleman
Northwestern University Press, 2020
The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage demonstrates how theatrical production in Spain since the early 1990s has reflected national anxieties about immigration and race. Jeffrey K. Coleman argues that Spain has developed a “necropolitical theater” that casts the non-European immigrant as fictionalized enemy—one whose nonwhiteness is incompatible with Spanish national identity and therefore poses a threat to the very Europeanness of Spain. The fate of the immigrant in the necropolitical theater is death, either physical or metaphysical, which preserves the status quo and provides catharsis for the spectator faced with the notion of racial diversity. Marginalization, forced assimilation, and physical death are outcomes suffered by Latin American, North African, and sub-Saharan African characters, respectively, and in these differential outcomes determined by skin color
Coleman identifies an inherent racial hierarchy informed by the legacies of colonization and religious intolerance.
 
Drawing on theatrical texts, performances, legal documents, interviews, and critical reviews, this book challenges Spanish theater to develop a new theatrical space. Jeffrey K. Coleman proposes a “convivial theater” that portrays immigrants as contributors to the Spanish state and better represents the multicultural reality of the nation today.
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Charles Deering and Ramón Casas / Charles Deering y Ramón Casas
A Friendship in Art / Una amistad en el arte
Isabel Coll Mirabent
Northwestern University Press, 2012

This lavishly illustrated, bilingual art book presents drawings by Ramón Casas in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at the Northwestern University Library and oil paintings by Casas from private collections and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Charles Deering and Ramón Casas follows the development and dramatic dissolution of a three-way friendship that connected the Spanish painter Ramón Casas (1866–1932); the Chicago industrialist Charles Deering (1852–1927), who was a collector and admirer of Casas’s work as well as a patron of Northwestern University; and the Spanish artist Miguel Utrillo (1862–1934), Casas’s lifelong friend and the father of the French painter Maurice Utrillo.

Casas introduced Deering to Sitges, a beach town near Barcelona, Spain, where the latter created a palatial estate with a museum to house his art collection. Miguel Utrillo served as director of the museum. The text explores the treasures housed at Maricel and what happened among the three men that led Casas to abandon Utrillo and Deering to depart Spain, taking his art collection with him.

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A Small-Town Marriage
La Marchesa Colombi
Northwestern University Press, 2002
"This 1885 novella, which reappeared in 1973 under the editorship of the late Italo Calvino, was the most celebrated work of a pseudonymous Italian writer who may remind contemporary readers of an edgier, funnier George Sand . . . A trailblazing work, in its way, and a most welcome rediscovery." —Kirkus Reviews

Denza Dellara is a clumsy Cinderella too big for her hand-me-downs, saddled with a family that frustrates her hopes, and in love with a gargantuan Prince Charming who woos and then betrays her. An engaging Frog Prince appears, and though he has an enormous wart on his forehead, he can end her daydreaming and save her from impending spinsterhood . . . if she lets him.
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promised instruments
poems
Kristiana Rae Colón
Northwestern University Press, 2013
Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s declaration that "language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names" Kristiana Colón’s promised instruments stitches its own definitions for what is granted, what is surrendered, what is pilfered, and what is reclaimed. Her poems plumb the problem of woman’s sexuality, sexual agency, mental health, and consent with piercing musicality and disarming vulnerability. promised instruments invites its readers to interrogate their own complicity in these issues and share in the healing process.
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Endings
Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger
Rebecca Comay
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In this collection of essays, leading scholars provide a variety of models from which to view the unique relationship between the bodies of thought of Heidegger and Hegel, revealing how these philosophers offer ways of thinking historically that understand such thinking not merely as extensions and elaborations of a given paradigm but as actively engaged in the critical and transformative revisioning of the world.

Beginning at the point where Heidegger encountered Hegel, this volume of provocative essays addresses the respective philosophies of the two men. Leading scholars provide a variety of models from which to view the unique relationship between the bodies of thought of Heidegger and Hegel: bodies of thought that cannot be taken as two objects to be compared, contrasted, and finally evaluated but that must be viewed in dynamic terms, as a relationship in which self-transformations lead to mutual transformations and vice versa.
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Tapping Out
Poems
Nandi Comer
Northwestern University Press, 2020
The relentless motions and blinding colors of lucha libre, the high-flying wrestling sport, are the arresting backdrop to Nandi Comer’s collection Tapping Out. Mexican freestyle wrestling becomes the poet’s lyrical motif, uncovering what is behind the intricate masks we wear in society and our search for place within our personal histories. Comer’s poetic narratives include explorations of violence, trauma, and identity. The exquisite complications of the black experience in settled and unsettled spaces propel her linear explorations, which challenge the idea of metaphor and cadence.  

The harsh realities of being migrant and immigrant, being birthright and oppressed, are as hard-pressed as the plancha move to the body. Each poem in Tapping Out is a “freestyle movement” of language and complexity put on full display, under the bright lights and roars of survival. Comer’s splendid and barbed, Detroit style of language melts the masks with searing words.
 
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Provincetown and Other Poems
Leo Connellan
Northwestern University Press, 1995
In Provincetown and Other Poems, Leo Connellan masterfully depicts the New England landscape while capturing the afflicted spirit of those filled “with wonder / and fear that we are being forever left yearning / malcontent.” In his accessible and characteristic style, Connellan empathizes with the impoverished and disparaged, as well as criticizes the roles big industries have in producing adverse circumstances for the region. With its focus on the working class, Provincetown offers a grim and unforgettable look at the place where “Death sings to life . . . where / life style has no code.”
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Cinema of Confinement
Thomas J. Connelly
Northwestern University Press, 2019

In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. 

Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.

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Journalism and Realism
Rendering American Life
Thomas B. Connery
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Both newspaper and magazine journalism in the nineteenth century fully participated in the development and emergence of American Realism in the arts, which attempted to accurately portray everyday life, especially in fiction. Magazines and newspapers provided the raw material for American Realism, but were also its early and vocal advocates. This symbiotic relationship reached its peak from 1890 to 1910, when writers who might be called the first literary journalists (or, much later, “new journalists”) closed the circle by more fully adopting the fiction writer’s style of attempting to “show the reader real life,” as their literary progeny Tom Wolfe would put it many years later. Journalism and Realism fills a much-needed gap in the scholarship of American Realism.
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Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading"
A Critical Companion
Julian W. Connolly
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Julian W. Connolly's companion to Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading includes a general introduction discussing the work in the context of Nabokov's oeuvre as well as its place within the Russian literary tradition. Also included are primary sources and other background materials, as well as discussions of the work by leading scholars and an annotated bibliography. Combining the highest order of scholarship with accessibility, this critical companion illuminates a great work of literature, and will enhance is appreciation by both teachers and students.
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The Mirror of the Sea
Joseph Conrad
Northwestern University Press, 1988
First published in 1906, The Mirror of the Sea was the first of Joseph Conrad's two autobiographical memoirs. Discussing it, he called the book "a very intimate revelation. . . . I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life; went on full of love's delight and love's anguish, facing them in open-eyed exultation without bitterness and without repining, from the first hour to the last."
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A Personal Record
Joseph Conrad
Northwestern University Press, 1982
Long unavailable, A Personal Record, the second of Conrad's autobiographical memoirs, originally appeared in 1912. These "reminiscent pages" retrace the author's East European origins, his years at sea, his passionate adoption of English, and the emergence of his career as one of the key figures in modern literature.
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Human Nature in Utopia
Zamyatin's We
Brett Cooke
Northwestern University Press, 2002
"""Engaging, provocative in the best sense, Cooke's is an excellent book."" --George Gutsche, University of Arizona ""The virtuoso merging of sociobiological ideas and standard critical techniques is an important vindication for the whole idea of a sociobiological literary criticism. This is a highly accomplished piece of literary scholarship. It will long stand as a landmark."" --Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri "
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American Photojournalism
Motivations and Meanings
Claude Cookman
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Photojournalism has long been the medium of urgency and social change. It has profoundly affected American public opinion, going back at least to Mathew Brady's images from the Civil War. In American Photojournalism: Motivations and Meanings, Claude Cookman explores the history and future of the medium through the work of such exemplary photojournalists as Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks, Rich Clarkson, and Carol Guzy, among others. The traditional approach to studying American photojournalism explains the what and who of photojournalism--what events and developments occurred, what notable images were taken, and who took them. Without neglecting these concerns, American Photojournalism emphasizes the why. Cookman argues convincingly that contemporary photojournalism is grounded in the desire to witness and record history, and the embrace of a universal humanism. Unafraid to engage questions of truth and intentionality, American Photojournalism will only become more relevant as the medium evolves.

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The Idea of a Free Press
The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy
David Copeland
Northwestern University Press, 2006
With the introduction of the printing press in England in 1476, a struggle over its control--and its potential for interrupting power--was joined. The written word, once the domain of the upper levels of society that controlled politics, economics, and religion, could be seen passing into the hands of anyone throughout the social strata who wished to voice opinions on any topic of interest or importance. How the advent of printing led to the idea of a free press is the story told by David Copeland in this book, which traces a confrontation that began with issues of religion and gradually expanded into the realm of political freedom.

The rise of a free press was, in many ways, a legacy of the Reformation and Enlightenment. Copeland describes a discourse centered on questions of religion--a discussion that the government, with all its religious authority, could not suppress because of the belief that the ability to reason for oneself was God-given. In this account we see how the debate moved from religion to the purely political sphere, and how, through the increased use of the printing press, it was opened to a multiplicity of voices and opinions. Spanning nearly four centuries in Britain and America, Copeland's book reveals how the tension between government control and the right to debate public affairs openly ultimately led to the idea of a free press; in doing so, it documents an intellectual development of unparalleled relevance and importance to the history of journalism.
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Franz Kafka
The Ghosts in the Machine
Stanley Corngold
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine adds an original critical framework to the work begun by Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner in their monumental collection Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (2008). It is widely acknowledged that Kafka’s daytime occupation as a specialist in industrial accident insurance contributed in a significant way to his fiction. 

Corngold and Wagner frame Kafka’s writings as cultural events, each work reflecting the economic and cultural discourses of his epoch. In pursuing Kafka’s avowed interest in the theory and practice of insurance, the authors view the two systems of his literary worlds—the official and the personal—as a “bundling” together of the various cultural accidents of Kafka’s time. The work of two of the leading scholars of the single most influential writer of literary modernity, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine constitutes a breathtakingly original advance in the study of both the more famous and less well-known works of this enigmatic master.
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Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self
Yuri Corrigan
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic. 

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The IdiotDemons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche.

Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.
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A Feast of Astonishments
Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s
Lisa Graziose Corrin
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Charlotte Moorman was a bold, barrier-breaking musician and performance artist and a tireless champion of experimental art, whose avant-garde festivals in New York City brought new art forms to a broad public. To date, recognition of Moorman has been limited mostly to her collaborations with other artists, including composer John Cage and pioneering multimedia artist Nam June Paik, and to her 1967 performance of Paik’s "Opera Sextronique," for which she became known as the "topless cellist" after being arrested on indecency charges. A Feast of Astonishments looks deeper to portray Moorman as a leading international figure in her own right.

With more than 150 color images and essays by art historians, curators, and musicologists, this catalog will offer a fresh perspective and complement an exhibition that opens at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in January 2016 before traveling to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria. The exhibition will feature original sculptures, photographs, video, props and costumes, annotated music scores, archival materials, film clips, and audio recordings, many drawn from the Charlotte Moorman Archive at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library. The exhibition is a partnership between the Block Museum and the Northwestern University Libraries.

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My Family's Role in the World Revolution
and Other Prose
Bora Cosic
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Bora Ćosić's My Family's Role in the World Revolution enjoyed a successful run as a play, but the film version was closed immediately and ultimately caused Ćosić's publications to be for over four years.

During the German occupation of Belgrade, a family—including an alarmist mother, an eternally drunk father, two young aunts who swoon over American movie stars, and a playboy uncle—attempt to find any kind of work they can do at home. When the postwar Socialist society is being ushered in after the war, the narrator becomes the slogan-spouting ideological leader of the household, while his family tries—and often fails miserably—to take part in the "great change."

This volume also includes several Ćosić short stories, and recent essays on the war in the former Yugoslavia.
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The Night of the Hunter
A Biography of a Film
Jeffrey Couchman
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, this detailed exploration of The Night of the Hunter examines the genesis and the eclectic form of each work and the process of transformation by which the novel became a motion picture. It provides the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee and confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. This is a story of artistic convergence on many levels--of novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and tastes. The novel, a 1953 debut from Davis Grubb, was a popular and critical success, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for four months. Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism, and in the hands of first time director Charles Laughton, the book became a film that is equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. On the set, Laughton functioned both as an auteur and a collaborator to create his vision of the book, mixing cinematic flourishes both realistic and abstract in sometimes tense situations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie make the final film a product of rich stylistic contradiction and rewarding complexity. Through biography, production history, and critical analysis of the novel and film, author Jeffrey Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself.

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1,001 Days in the Bleachers
A Quarter Century of Chicago Sports
Ted Cox
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Loyal sports fans follow their teams through peaks and valleys, but in no other city have fans experienced the highs and lows of Chicagoans in the past generation. This collection of Ted Cox’s greatest hits writing "The Sports Section" for the Chicago Reader from 1983 to 2008 constitutes an intimate history of Chicago teams during these years. From the triumphs—the six titles won by the Bulls, the Super Bowl champion 1985 Bears, and the White Sox winning the World Series in 2005—to the regularly occurring collapses of the Cubs, Cox puts his audience on the scene. He evokes the fan’s experience with a level of vivid detail now nearly extinct from sports journalism. Cox writes like an ordinary observer who just happens to have excellent seats and easy access to the players and coaches. 1,001 Days in the Bleachers stands not only as a chronicle of Chicago’s teams but also as a portrait of the evolution of professional sports and their place in the life of the city.

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The Grand Prize and Other Stories
Daniela Crasnaru
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Daniela Crasnaru is one of the most prominent poets and short story writers in her native Romania. Once a vocal foe of the Ceauçescu regime, Crasnaru was influenced by the political repression of the communist period; but her short stories depart from those of the many Eastern European writers who use literature purely as a forum for political expression. She also focuses her sympathetic eye on the human foibles of ordinary people whose lives are limited by feelings of helplessness and failure.

Crasnaru portrays the lives of people so used to hardship that it never occurs to them to surrender. An unhappily married woman waits in vain for a call from a potential lover. A foul-mouthed mother of seven accuses a war hero of conning her out of her life savings. A lawyer is lured to a forest by a dead coworker's stories of a beautiful woman. Those with drab lives use fantasy to endure and those who believe themselves happy are forced to face grim realities. Crasnaru mixes elements of the ridiculous, the fanciful, and the grotesque with vivid realism and her remarkable stories, while taking place in a dark era in her nation's history, are about the human as well as the Romanian condition.
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H. G. Adler
Life, Literature, Legacy
Julia Creet
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Winner, 2016 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the Jewish Thought and Culture category

H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to the life and work of German-language author H. G. Adler. Among the international scholars of German, Jewish, and Holocaust literature and history who reveal the range of Adler’s legacy across genres are Adler’s son, Jeremy Adler, and Peter Filkins, translator of Adler’s trilogy, Panorama, (The Journey). Together, the essays examine Adler’s writing in relation to his life, especially his memory as a survivor of the Nazi death camps and his posthumous recognition for having produced a Gesamtkunstwerk, an aesthetic synthesis of the Shoah. The book carries the moral charge of Adler’s work, moving beyond testimony to a complex dialectic between fact and fiction, exploring Adler’s experiments with voice and the ethical work of literary engagement with the Shoah.
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Postmodern Pooh
Frederick Crews
Northwestern University Press, 2006
Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh convened at the Modern Language Association's annual convention, this sequel of sorts to the classic send-up of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex, brilliantly parodies the academic fads and figures that held sway at the millennium. Deconstruction, poststructuralist Marxism, new historicism, radical feminism, cultural studies, recovered-memory theory, and postcolonialism, among other methods, take their shots at the poor stuffed bear and Frederick Crews takes his well-considered, wildly funny shots at them. His aim, as ever, is true.
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Fort Dearborn
A Novel
Jerry Crimmins
Northwestern University Press, 2008

In a story that brings to life the founding of one of the world's great cities, Fort Dearborn takes us back to Chicago's early struggle of fire and blood. Through the eyes of two young boys and their fathers—one father a sergeant with the United States First Infantry, the other a Potawatomi warrior—we see the events that lead up to the Fort Dearborn Massacre. Using scores of letters, historical documents and maps, and long-forgotten Native American speeches, Jerry Crimmins breathes life into the little known drama that took place in the vicinity of the fort that once occupied what is now downtown Chicago. A suspenseful narrative, Fort Dearborn is also a remarkable historical account, minutely observed and meticulously documented, preserving a key moment in American history.

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Imagined Dialogues
Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature
Gordana Crnkovic
Northwestern University Press, 1999
By conducting "imagined dialogues" between selected literary works--Eastern Europeans like Kiš and Borowski on one hand, American and English writers like Cage and Ishiguro on the other--this book proposes an effective new way of reading literature, one that goes beyond the narrowing categories of contemporary critical trends. A new perspective on each of the works emerges, as well as a heightened sense of the liberating power of literature.
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The Tallgrass Prairie
An Introduction
Cindy Crosby
Northwestern University Press, 2017
More than a region on a map, North America's vast grasslands are an enduring place in the American heart. Unfolding along and beyond the Mississippi River, the tallgrass prairie has entranced and inspired its natives and newcomers as well as American artists and writers from Willa Cather to Mark Twain. The Tallgrass Prairie is a new introduction to the astonishing beauty and biodiversity of these iconic American spaces.
 
Like a walking tour with a literate friend and expert, Cindy Crosby's Tallgrass Prairie prepares travelers and armchair travelers for an adventure in the tallgrass. Crosby's engaging gateway assumes no prior knowledge of tallgrass landscapes, and she acquaints readers with the native plants they’ll discover there. She demystifies botanic plant names and offers engaging mnemonic tips for mastering Latin names with verve and confidence. Visitors to the prairie will learn to identify native plants using the five senses to discover what makes each plant unique or memorable. In the summer, for example, the unusual square stem of cup plant, Silphium perfoliatum, sets it apart from its neighbors. And its distinctive leaf cups water after the rain.
 
A gifted raconteur, Crosby tells stories about how humankind has adopted the prairie as a grocery, an apothecary, and even as a shop for love charms. Rounding out this exceptional introduction are suggestions for experiencing the American prairie, including journaling techniques and sensory experiences, tips for preparing for a hike in tallgrass landscapes, ways to integrate native prairie plants into home landscapes (without upsetting the neighbors), and a wealth of resources for further exploration.
 
An instant classic in the tradition of American naturalist writing, The Tallgrass Prairie will delight not only scholars and policy makers, but guests to tallgrass prairie preserves, outdoors enthusiasts and gardeners, and readers interested in American ecosystems and native plants.
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Chasing Dragonflies
A Natural, Cultural, and Personal History
Cindy Crosby
Northwestern University Press, 2020

Chasing Dragonflies: A Natural, Cultural, and Personal History is an engaging, beautifully illustrated introduction to these remarkable insects. Drawing on her experiences as a natural history instructor, dragonfly monitor, cancer survivor, grandmother, and steward, Crosby tells the stories of dragonflies: their roles in poetry and art, their fascinating sex life—unique within the animal kingdom—and their evolution from dark-water dwellers to denizens of the air. We follow Crosby and other citizen-scientists into the prairies, wetlands, and woodlands of the Midwest, where they observe the environment and chronicle dragonfly populations and migration to decipher critical clues about our changing waterways and climate.
 
Woven throughout are personal stories: reflections on the author’s cancer diagnosis and recovery, change, loss, aging, family, joy, and discovering what it means to be at home in the natural world. Crosby draws an intimate portrait of a landscape teeming with variety and mystery, one that deserves our attention and conservation. As warm as it is informative, this book will interest gardeners, readers of literary nonfiction, and anyone intrigued by transformation, whether in nature or our personal lives.

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Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning
Paths Toward Trancendental Phenomenology
Steven Galt Crowell
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Winner of 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize

In a penetrating and lucid discussion of the enigmatic relationship between the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Steven Galt Crowell proposes that the distinguishing feature of twentieth-century philosophy is not so much its emphasis on language as its concern with meaning. Arguing that transcendental phenomenology is indispensable to the philosophical explanation of the space of meaning, Crowell shows how a proper understanding of both Husserl and Heidegger reveals the distinctive contributions of each to that ongoing phenomenological project.
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Pleasures in Socialism
Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc
David Crowley
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Much has been written about the workings of communist governments in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, yet there is still a great deal to explore regarding their relationship to the everyday lives of the citizens living under them. This third volume builds on the editors’ Style and Socialism and Socialist Spaces, showing how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in these countries.

Essays from top scholars address topics ranging from fashion and game shows to smoking and camping. The authors of the essays in this collection investigate the ways in which pleasurable activities, like many other facets of daily life, were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority,

and also an opportunity for people to assert their individuality.

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Seven Trees Against the Dying Light
A Bilingual Edition
Pablo Antonio Cuadra
Northwestern University Press, 2007

Standing against the visible landscape—the mountainous volcanoes, the jungles and savannahs—the seven trees conjured in these narrative poems by one of Latin America's masters also evoke another, more mysterious terrain.  It is this other landscape, as invisible as poetry before it is written down but etched by history and animated by the collective memory of a people, that speaks through Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Seven Trees against the Dying Light.            

Storing experience as they exist, these tree-poems conserve local soil and memory in the place they inhabit. They are figures of life, stained by seawater and gun powder, by the bright red, bittersweet juice of the many life-giving plums that flourish in Nicaragua, and blood that has been spilled there.  And they offer a way of remembering who we are, where we come from, and, above all, where we are bound if we cannot learn to root language in the earth that sustains us.            

Printed here in Spanish with facing English translations, the edition includes an introduction with ecocritical focus, as well as complete notes on botanical, historical, mythological, and socio-political references.

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The Southern Press
Literary Legacies and the Challenge of Modernity
Doug Cumming
Northwestern University Press, 2009
The Southern Press suggests that the South’s journalism struck a literary pose closer to the older English press than to the democratic penny press or bourgeois magazines of the urban North. The Southern journalist was more likely to be a Romantic and an intellectual. The region’s journalism was personal, colorful, and steeped in the classics. News was less important than narrative. Neither "public" nor "opinion" had much meaning in a racially segregated South. Paradoxically, it was this non-reformist literary tradition that produced liberal southern editors, from Henry Grady to Ralph McGill, who were viewed in the North as both explainers of and dissidents from the South.
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Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Law and Distributed Selfhood
Kevin Curran
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices.
 
At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts.
 
The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource. 
 
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Imagining Otherwise
Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori
Andrew Cutrofello
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Andrew Cutrofello's book performs a psychoanalytic inversion of transcendental philosophy, taking Kant's synthetic a prior judgments and reading them in terms of a foreclosed Kantian category—that of the analytic a posteriori. Working primarily out of Freudian and Lacanian problematics, Cutrofello not only subjects Kantian thought to psychoanalytic questioning, but also develops a systematic critique of metapsychology itself, disclosing and assessing its own paralogisms, antinomies, ideal, and ethics. This is a provocative reflection on the tensions between the Enlightenment project of critique and psychoanalytic theory.
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The Tragedy of King Christophe
Aimé Césaire
Northwestern University Press, 2015
The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, revised 1970) is recognized as the Martiniquan writer and activist Aime Cesaire’s greatest play. Set in the period of upheaval in Haiti after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, it follows the historical figure of Henri Christophe, a slave who rose to become a general in Toussaint Louverture’s army. Christophe declared himself king in 1811 and ruled the northern part of Haiti until 1820. Cesaire employs Shakespearean plotting and revels in the inexhaustible possibilities of language to convey the tragedy of Christophe’s transformation from a charismatic leader sensitive to the oppression of his people to an oppressor himself. Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney’s nimble, accurate translation includes an introduction and explanatory notes to guide students, scholars, and general readers alike.
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