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Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA tells the story of how students at Foshay Learning Center, a public school in South Los Angeles, studied Charles Dickens as part of their AP English curriculum, and how, in that journey, a fellow traveler emerged: the city itself.

Jacqueline Jean Barrios confronts the cultural challenges that big canonical books pose to new generations of readers. Instead of erasing the differences between Dickens’s implied audiences and his current ones, Barrios demonstrates how youth can serve as the visionaries who bridge the gap. By placing literature in everyday surroundings, students at any school and in any location can learn from the embodied and the poetic and even question the universalism that masks unexamined reverence for the Western canon.

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES

A philosophical and formally inventive inquiry into the experimental terrains of American speculative fiction, where meaning emerges through ambiguity, rupture, and critical refusal.

Dear Incomprehension: On American Speculative Fiction is a thought-provoking exploration of the fascinating field of contemporary speculative fiction, a genre that transcends boundaries and encompasses science fiction, fabulist tales, modern fairy tales, and experimental narratives that challenge the very essence of storytelling and reading.

Written as a philosophical essay that mirrors the unorthodox nature of the texts it analyzes, Dear Incomprehension examines American works that defy traditional narrative devices such as plot, character, logic, and even legibility. Drawing on a number of philosophical theories, among them object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, Vanderhaeghe argues that these unconventional works resist the standard tools of criticism, demanding instead a novel perspective and approach.

An in-depth resource for scholars and students of contemporary literature, philosophy, and digital literary studies, Dear Incomprehension offers a fresh framework for analyzing experimental fiction and alternative modes of meaning-making. It is a must-read for those seeking to grasp the complexities and nuances of American experimental and speculative fiction.

Henry James was not only a prolific novelist but also a prolific letter writer. This edition of 150 previously unpublished letters to four of his female contemporaries reveals James to be a warm, witty, and astute commentator on a world now lost. The James revealed in these engaging letters is a vital, clever, and lively man with an intense interest in affairs of his day. The letters present a delightful picture of Victorian-Edwardian culture, including health cures (Fletcherizing and going to health spas), literary scandals (he feared writer Edith Wharton would be destroyed by her mad husband Teddy), domestic affairs (the marriage market, child rearing, antiquing, decorating, and gardening), and historical events (the Civil War, Queen Victoria's funeral, England's great Coal Strike, the Dreyfus case, and World War I).Susan Gunter has selected and annotated correspondence between James and four women in his social milieu: Alice Howe Gibbens James, wife of William James; Mary Cadwalader Jones, wife of Frederic Rhinelander Jones (New York socialite and Edith Wharton's brother); Mary Frances Prothero, wife of Cambridge academic Sir George Prothero; and Lady Louisa Wolseley, wife of Viscount Garnet Wolseley, commander-in-chief of the British Forces. Of the 10,000 extant letters by James, over two-thirds of them have never been published. The selection presented here is designed to reveal the writer's human side, his humorous and warm views of Anglo-American life over a fifty-year span, as well as his intimate participation in nineteenth-century women's daily lives. Editor Susan Gunter has provided an introduction that offers a helpful historical overview of nineteenth-century women's roles, a biographical register of people mentioned in the letters, a chronology, and brief biographies of the four women correspondents. Readers interested in gender studies, biography, intellectual and cultural history, and literary history will find this book fascinating.

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

While the novelist Henry James never formed a permanent relationship with a single individual, in the last decades of his life he increasingly formed passionate attachments to younger men of diverse talents and traits. Dearly Beloved Friends collects carefully edited texts of an ample selection of the writer's personal and often intimate letters -- many of them long withheld from publication -- to four of those men: the sculptor Hendrik Andersen (1872-1940), the dilettante Dudley Jocelyn Persse (1873-1943), and the writers Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920) and Sir Hugh Walpole (1884-1941). These letters reveal the humourous, warm side of the literary "Master," and document as never before the depth and eroticism of his love for a number of his friends. Witty, poignant, and passionate, the letters reveal a man in full control of both his rhetoric and his relationships.

Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.

Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.

Donald Hall believes that American poetry, at the present moment, thrives both in quality and in leadership. In his latest collection of essays, reviews, and interviews, Hall counters the increasingly publicized view that poetry has an ever-diminishing importance in contemporary American culture. He resents the endlessly repeated cliché that finds poetry unpopular and losing popularity. Thus: Death to the Death of Poetry.

Throughout the pages of this latest offering in the Poets on Poetry series, Hall returns again and again to the theme of poetry's health, and offers essays praising contemporary poets, who serve as examples of poetry's thriving condition. In addition, Death to the Death of Poetry collects interviews in which Hall discusses the work of poetry--revisions, standards, the psychology and sociology of the poet's life.

The collection will be warmly received by Donald Hall's large readership, enhanced in 1993 by publication of two exemplary volumes: The Museum of Clear Ideas, his eleventh book of poetry; and his essay Life Work, which brought him both new and returning readers.

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan’s criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces.

In Debate of the “Romance of the Rose,” David Hult collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan’s supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice.  The resulting volume affords a rare look at the way people read and thought about literature in the period immediately preceding the era of print.

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins.
 
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.
 

Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Through a variety of media, including novels, graphic narratives, and curatorial discourse, this book explores four key contexts at the intersection of care and colonialism: care-focused gender roles, domestic service, nurturing human life and environments, and curation as caring. Decolonial Care argues that to imagine caregiving in the context of the French Caribbean means reckoning with intrinsically uncaring practices inherited from colonial rule that show disregard for human life and environments. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism, showing how media and narratives about the French Caribbean document the damaging impact of colonialism but also help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

A critical examination of the environmental movement and the Latinx voices that are shifting how to think about a future shaped by climate change.

In Decolonial Environmentalisms, David Vázquez argues that the mainstream environmental movement is implicated in racial capitalism, not least through its ignorance of environmental justice as it pertains to Latinx people. Through close readings of eco-minded novels, films, visual art, and short stories by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban American, Peruvian, and Central American culture makers, Vázquez surfaces diverse Latinx visions for an equitable and sustainable humanity.

In the creations of Helena María Viramontes, Ester Hernández, Salvador Plascencia, the printmaking collective Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA, and others, Vázquez locates a bracing critique of racist elisions and assumptions in hegemonic environmentalist thought. At the same time, he shows that the roles of Latinx people in the exploitation of the US West and the ruin of Indigenous communities are ripe for self-examination, in hopes of sparking reform. Indeed, Decolonial Environmentalisms is a work of guarded optimism, finding glimmers of possibility even in dystopic science fiction. The overlooked experiences of Latinx people, Vázquez suggests, can inspire environmental movements capable of transformative advocacy.

Decolonial Topophilia: Nature, Place, and History in Puerto Rican Poetry examines how four major poets—Luis Lloréns Torres, Luis Palés Matos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos—address the ecological and human consequences of colonial domination in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Their poetry raises questions about the capitalist transformation of land through monocultures like sugarcane, the reduction of nature to exploitable resources, and the ties between attachment to place and nationalism. In tracing these connections, this pathbreaking book reveals how poetic visions of place can challenge colonial histories and imagine more reciprocal ways of inhabiting the world.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Winner, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies 

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another.

Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.

This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

From the beginning, the superhero genre has revolved around narratives of transformation. Through traumatic experiences, physical disabilities evolve into super strength and invulnerability; mental disabilities grant telekinesis and foresight. Characters considered “outsiders” are tasked with lead roles in saving the world. All of these attributes appeal to the marginalized fan. Yet, the default fan is often assumed to be white, Anglo-American, and able-bodied.

Decolonizing Media Fandom focuses on the globally diverse fan base of a massively popular Western text: the Marvel superhero universe. Drawing on fanworks from Archive of Our Own, a survey spanning sixteen countries, and one-on-one interviews with Marvel fans who identify as non-white and/or having a disability, Divya Garg examines the strengths and limitations of fandom from the perspective of those who are often relegated to the margins.
 

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830–1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for this destruction. Taking up the unfinished work of decolonization since 1962, Algerian writers have played a crucial role in forging historical memory and nurturing political resistance—their work helps to make possible what state violence has rendered almost unthinkable. Drawing together readings of multilingual texts by Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Samira Negrouche alongside theoretical, juridical, visual, and activist texts from both Algeria’s national liberation war (1954–1962) and war on civilians (1988–1999), this book challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly organized studies of cultural memory around Euro-American reference points. Jarvis shows how this literature rewrites history, disputes state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivates a multilingual archive for imagining decolonized futures.

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities.
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Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.
 

England’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.

Defects brings together essays on the emergence of the concept of monstrosity in the eighteenth century and the ways it paralleled the emergence of notions of sexual difference. Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things, "neither more or less than Monsters" (Beauty's Triumph 1758). This alliance of monstrosity with misogyny, along with the definition of sexual difference as aberration, is the starting point for this volume's investigation of monstrosity's cultural work in the eighteenth century and its simultaneous mapping and troubling of the range of differences. This collection investigates the conceptual and geographical mapping of early modern and Enlightenment ideas of monstrosity onto a range of differences that contested established categories. The essays consider the representations and material dimensions of phenomena as diverse as femininity and disfigurement, the material imagination and monstrous birth, ugliness as an aesthetic category, deafness and theories of sign language, and the exotic, racialized deformed. Collectively, they demonstrate that the emergence of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a category of the human that is imagined and deformed, monstrous, and ugly.

The Weight of Words Series continues with Daniel Defoe, as historian Jeremy Black uses this writer to interpret Britain in the late 1600s, and likewise looks to the times to interpret the fiction. As seen in previous studies on Christie, Smollett, Fielding, and the Gothic novelists, Black tells the story of the story-teller, and presents the picture of British nationalism that "was the product, history, and record of struggle––collective and individual––as well as its defence. Defoe provides particular accounts of this struggle, both in foreign seas and lands, and at home. This struggle had a moral character that is difficult to capture today."
 
Defoe was an outsider, a man of many interests whom Black asserts evades too precise a portrait or coherent description of character and career. But he is a traveler, in the literal and imaginative senses, and in his engagement with life and its issues and willingness to associate with 'low-life' prefigures later literary giants like Smollett and Fielding. More than the establishment of genre, Defoe created the writer "whose business is observation." Black's account of this parcel of the British past is impeccable because it is in fact an account that the past, in Defoe, gives of itself. "As a writer, Defoe brought together a reality usually presented as, and endorsed by, history, with the imaginative focus of storytelling, and the direction of, variously, propaganda, analysis, and exemplary tale." 

Glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union revolutionized Russian society. What effects, however, did they have on the status, role, and image of women in Russian culture? Examining the past turbulent decade of transition to "democracy" and a market economy, Dehexing Sex traces the ways in which Russia's concept of womanhood both changed and remained the same, taking into account dominant ideologies and social philosophies, sociopolitical organizations, women's writings, literary criticism, film, and popular cultural forms such as pornography. The lively, engaging chapters of this book examine texts by contemporary women writers in the context of the political, social, economic, biological, psychological, and aesthetic transformations that helped define them. Goscilo reveals that the Russian cultural revolution has reshaped the female image in varied and often contradictory ways. While increased interaction with the West fostered gender awareness, it also introduced imported Western sexist practices--especially the exploitation of female bodies--formerly proscribed by a puritanical censorship. Popular magazines, newspapers, and television propagated the image of woman as mother, ornament, and sexual object, even as women's fiction conceived of womanhood in complex psychological terms that undermined the gender stereotypes which had ruled Soviet thinking for more than 70 years. With the aid of feminist and cultural theory, Dehexing Sex investigates the overt and internalized misogyny that combined with the genuinely liberalizing forces unleashed by Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika. It exposes Russia's repressive romance with womanhood as a metaphor for nationhood and explores Russian women's ironic recasting of national mythologies. "Impressive . . . an important contribution to Russian studies and to women's studies. The author is an outstanding scholar, an energetic and original thinker, and her writing sparkles with imagination and wit." --Stephanie Sandler, Amherst College Helena Goscilo is Associate Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh.

In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion.

Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

The first work to combine literary criticism with other forms of death penalty–abolitionist writing, Demands of the Dead demonstrates the active importance of literature and literary criticism to the struggle for greater justice in the United States. Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars.

After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other.

Raja argues that the lack of understanding of Muslim responses to the poetics of incitement in the West is the result of a lack of cross-cultural knowledge. He claims metropolitan universities often do not teach the proper social, historical, and religious context required for effectively reading these texts with any form of cultural knowledge. To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes “democratic reading practices” and new ways for students to engage with texts. A genealogy of the Muslim Sacred is included, thereby giving readers the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts, a subject who should be imagined and empathized with when those in the West read works of the poetics of incitement. 

Democratic Criticism encourages Western readers to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning-making processes of the Islamic world while at the same time encouraging the Muslim readers to read representations of the Islamic world with a more expansive understanding. It will be a helpful tool in creating reading practices that allow both teachers and students of literature to transcend their mode of reading as universal and to read from the perspective of the Other, and allow readers to engage meaningfully with these texts. Students and scholars of world literature, history, and religious studies will find this book insightful and valuable.

An inspector of schools as well as a professor of poetry, Matthew Arnold was an educator in the true sense of the word. Watching democracy breed self-satisfied Philistines, he relized that not all the liberty and industry in the world would insure the rule of right reason. If we are to survive, he said, we must seize on the best and make it prevail. The fate of civilization depends on our schools. Unfailingly relevant, his essays on education include Democracy, The Popular Education of France, and A French Eton, as well as three essays discovered by the editor in the pages of the London Review and republished here for the first time. They form a crucial chapter in the history of education, setting forth the standards upon which Arnold's literary criticism was to be based and from which his political utterances were to come.

Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics.
 
With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy.
 
Ancient comedy has been underplayed in the study of Greek drama. Yet, with the irrepressible energy of the comic swarm, it provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. Using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, duBois augments tragic thought with the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy, and she connects the lively anti-authoritarianism of the ancient comic chorus with the social justice movements of today.
 

2006 — Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of a Book, Texas Institute of Letters

This is the ninth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, law and legal procedure, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have recently been attracting particular interest: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

Demosthenes is regarded as the greatest orator of classical antiquity. The two speeches translated here grew out of his longtime rivalry with the orator Aeschines. In Speech 19 (On the Dishonest Embassy) delivered in 343 BC, Demosthenes attacks Aeschines for corruption centered around an ultimately disastrous embassy to Philip of Macedon that both men took part in. This speech made Demosthenes the leading politician in Athens for a time. Speech 18 (On the Crown or De Corona), delivered in 330 BC, is Demosthenes' most famous and influential oration. It resulted not only in Demosthenes receiving one of Athens' highest political honors but also in the defeat and disgrace of Aeschines, who retired from public life and left Athens forever.

This is the fourteenth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, law and legal procedure, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have recently been attracting particular interest: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

This volume contains translations of all the surviving deliberative speeches of Demosthenes (plus two that are almost certainly not his, although they have been passed down as part of his corpus), as well as the text of a letter from Philip of Macedon to the Athenians. All of the speeches were purportedly written to be delivered to the Athenian assembly and are in fact almost the only examples in Attic oratory of the genre of deliberative oratory. In the Olynthiac and Philippic speeches, Demosthenes identifies the Macedonian king Philip as a major threat to Athens and urges direct action against him. The Philippic speeches later inspired the Roman orator Cicero in his own attacks against Mark Antony, and became one of Demosthenes' claims to fame throughout history.

This is the twelfth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, law and legal procedure, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have recently been attracting particular interest: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

Demosthenes is regarded as the greatest orator of classical antiquity. This volume contains three important speeches from the earliest years of his political career: Against Leptines, a prosecution brought against a law repealing all exemptions from liturgies; Against Meidias, a prosecution for aggravated insult (hybris) brought against an influential politician; and Against Androtion, an indictment of a decree of honors for the Council of Athens. Edward M. Harris provides contemporary English translations of these speeches, two of which (Leptines and Androtion) have not been translated into English in over sixty years, along with introductions and extensive notes that take account of recent developments in Classical scholarship.

This is the fifteenth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today’s undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, law and legal procedure, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have recently been attracting particular interest: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

This volume provides introductions, translations, and notes for four speeches found in the Demosthenic corpus that have not been translated in recent times. Against Aristocrates deals with matters of foreign policy involving a mercenary general, Charidemus, and is a valuable source for Athenian homicide law. Against Timocrates involves domestic politics and provides important information about Athenian procedures for enacting legislation. In both speeches, the litigants stress the importance of the rule of law in Athenian democracy and emphasize key ideas, such as the monopoly of legitimate force by the state, the need for consistency in statutes, and the principle of no punishment without a written law. The remaining two speeches, Against Aristogeiton, are forgeries composed in the Hellenistic period, as Edward Harris demonstrates conclusively through a study of laws and legal procedures and an analysis of style and vocabulary.