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From 1890 to 1960, some of Anglo-America's most heated cultural contests over books, sex, and censorship were staged not at home, but abroad in the City of Light. Paris, with its extraordinary liberties of expression, became a special place for interrogating the margins of sexual culture and literary censorship, and a wide variety of English language “dirty books” circulated through loose expatriate publishing and distribution networks. 

A Publisher's Paradise explores the political and literary dynamics that gave rise to this expatriate cultural flourishing, which included everything from Victorian pornography to the most daring and controversial modernist classics. Colette Colligan tracks the British and French politicians and diplomats who policed Paris editions of banned books and uncovers offshore networks of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers. She looks closely at the stories the “dirty books” told about this publishing haven and the smut peddlers and literary giants it brought together in transnational cultural formations. The book profiles an eclectic group of expatriates living and publishing in Paris, from relatively obscure figures such as Charles Carrington, whose list included both The Picture of Dorian Gray and the pornographic novel Randiana, to bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, famous for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922.

A Publisher's Paradise is a compelling exploration of the little-known history of foreign pornography in Paris and the central role it played in turning the city into a modernist outpost for literary and sexual vanguardism, a reputation that still lingers today in our cultural myths of midnight in Paris.

Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts.

Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave.

Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor.

From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.

In this lively and original book, the distinguished Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki tells the story of a century-long Polish dispute over the merits and demerits of the Western model of liberal progress and industrial civilization. 

As in several countries of Europe, also in Poland, intellectuals--conservatives, liberals, and (later) socialists--quarrelled about whether such a model would suit and benefit their nation, or whether it would spell the ruin of its distinctive cultural features.

This heated debate revolved around several pairs of opposing ideas: native cultures v. cosmopolitan civilization; natural v. artificial ways of economic development; Christian morals v. capitalist laissez-faire; traditional customs v. mobile society; romanticism v. scientism, and so on. It is these various aspects of the main issue which the author analyzes and links together here. He describes how difficult and painful the process of modernization was in a nation deprived of its political independence and cultural autonomy.

On June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan delivered a historic address to the British Parliament, promising that the United States would give people around the world “a voice in their own destiny” in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. While British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher celebrated Reagan’s visit and thanked him for putting “freedom on the offensive,” over 100,000 Britons marched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to protest his arrival and call for nuclear disarmament. Reagan’s homecoming was equally eventful, with 1,000,000 protesters marking his return with a rally for nuclear disarmament in Central Park—the largest protest in American history up to that point.

Employing a wide range of previously unexamined primary sources, Anthony M. Eames demonstrates how the Reagan and Thatcher administrations used innovations in public diplomacy to build back support for their foreign policy agendas at a moment of widespread popular dissent. A Voice in Their Own Destiny traces how competition between the governments of Reagan and Thatcher, the Anglo-American antinuclear movement, and the Soviet peace offensive sparked a revolution in public diplomacy.

Theorizes how treating lives as “representative” has been used, in and beyond the novel, to frame the problems and paradoxes of modernity.

Claims that someone or something is “representative” newly saturated nineteenth-century culture; readers were asked to accept that the “representative” particular could stand in for and reflect a wider unit to which it belongs—specifically because it illustrates the relevant attributes, experiences, or behaviors of that wider unit. Heather Brink-Roby considers why this discourse of representativeness surged in nineteenth-century Britain: why it became insistent and examined in domains ranging from philosophical logic and astronomy to literary criticism and the novel. Fiction offered an especially inventive site for using the dynamics of representativeness to frame certain key nineteenth-century concerns, including isolation, freedom, and modern yearning, even as representativeness developed the novel’s dual and contradictory status as both the genre of the individual and the genre of society.

Brink-Roby theorizes the complex restructuring of thought involved in the nineteenth century turn to representativeness and examines how the dynamics of representativeness itself—in addition to the content treated as representative—have shaped the way that modern existence is imagined. Offering fresh readings of novelists including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Thomas Martin Wheeler and drawing on a variety of other sources such as natural history monographs, logic textbooks, and medical articles, A Wider Reality shows how representativeness became the basis of a new economy of meaning, seeing, and knowing.  

An in-depth study of contemporary novels through the lens of affect theory and ideology critique. 

Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment offers a comparative critical study of contemporary fiction. It intervenes in discussions about contemporary fiction in its literary-historical relationship to postmodernism and in its socio-historical relationship to neoliberalism, arguing that contemporary literature is dominated by affective questions that are rooted in neoliberalism. Whereas previous research focused on either a literary-historical or a socio-historical approach, this study examines eighteen novels from various parts of the world in both their diachronic relation to postmodernism and in their synchronic relation to neoliberal society.

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

Recounts Kojève’s key role in the pivotal exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals in the early twentieth century

This book shines critical new light on the story of Alexandre Kojève’s intellectual origins and his role in the emigration of Russian philosophy into the West in the early twentieth century. Trevor Wilson illustrates how Kojève, at once adversarial to the insular communities of émigré philosophy and yet dependent on their networks and ideas for professional success, navigated the specters of the Russian tradition in pursuit of an autonomous self-definition as a philosopher and intellectual.

Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy analyzes the philosopher’s complicated relationship to the interwar diaspora and the complex role played by the Russian tradition in his intellectual formation. Wilson examines Kojève’s early writings in the émigré press on Russian religious philosophy, Soviet politics, and Eurasianism and argues for their enduring relevance for understanding Kojève in his mature period. Crucially, he contextualizes Kojève’s famed seminars on Hegel and examines how Kojève’s thought became embedded in the politics of the Cold War. Based on newly transcribed and translated archival material, he highlights a previously unacknowledged, transnational exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals and shows how it played a pivotal role in twentieth-century intellectual history—and its legacy in the twenty-first.