2335 books match the query 'Modern' and 63 start with d

cover of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Domestications

American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Hosam Aboul-Ela

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Domestications traces a genealogy of American global engagement with the Global South since World War II. Hosam Aboul-Ela reads American writers contrapuntally against intellectuals from the Global South in their common—yet ideologically divergent—concerns with hegemony, world domination, and uneven development. Using Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a model, Aboul-Ela explores the nature of U.S. imperialism’s relationship to literary culture through an exploration of five key terms from the postcolonial bibliography: novel, idea, perspective, gender, and space.

Within this framework the book examines juxtapositions including that of Paul Bowles’s Morocco with North African intellectuals’ critique of Orientalism, the global treatment of Vietnamese liberation movements with the American narrative of personal trauma in the novels of Tim O’Brien and Hollywood film, and the war on terror’s philosophical idealism with Korean and post-Arab nationalist materialist archival fiction.

Domestications departs from other recent studies of world literature in its emphases not only on U.S. imperialism but also on intellectuals working in the Global South and writing in languages other than English and French. Although rooted in comparative literature, its readings address issues of key concern to scholars in American studies, postcolonial studies, literary theory, and Middle Eastern studies.

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cover of Don't Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture

Don't Act, Just Dance

The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture

Catherine Gunther Kodat

Rutgers University Press, 2014

At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told “don’t act, dear; just dance.” The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to do justice to the steps—but its implication that to dance is already to act in a manner both complete and sufficient resonates beyond stage and studio. 

Drawing on fresh archival material, Don’t Act, Just Dance places dance at the center of the story of the relationship between Cold War art and politics. Catherine Gunther Kodat takes Balanchine’s catch phrase as an invitation to explore the politics of Cold War culture—in particular, to examine the assumptions underlying the role of “apolitical” modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy. Through close, theoretically informed readings of selected important works—Marianne Moore’s “Combat Cultural,” dances by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Yuri Grigorovich, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, and John Adams’s Nixon in China—Kodat questions several commonly-held beliefs about the purpose and meaning of modernist cultural productions during the Cold War. 

Rather than read the dance through a received understanding of Cold War culture, Don’t Act, Just Dance reads Cold War culture through the dance, and in doing so establishes a new understanding of the politics of modernism in the arts of the period. 
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cover of Don't Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises

Don't Forget to Live

Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises

Pierre Hadot

University of Chicago Press, 2023

The esteemed French philosopher Pierre Hadot’s final work, now available in English.
With a foreword by Arnold I. Davidson and Daniele Lorenzini.

 
In his final book, renowned philosopher Pierre Hadot explores Goethe’s relationship with ancient spiritual exercises—transformative acts of intellect, imagination, or will. Goethe sought both an intense experience of the present moment as well as a kind of cosmic consciousness, both of which are rooted in ancient philosophical practices. These practices shaped Goethe’s audacious contrast to the traditional maxim memento mori (Don’t forget that you will die) with the aim of transforming our ordinary consciousness. Ultimately, Hadot reveals how Goethe cultivated a deep love for life that brings to the forefront a new maxim: Don’t forget to live.
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cover of Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form: Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters

Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form

Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters

Greta Matzner-Gore

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Three questions of novelistic form preoccupied Fyodor Dostoevsky throughout his career: how to build suspense, how to end a narrative effectively, and how to distribute attention among major and minor characters. For Dostoevsky, these were much more than practical questions about novelistic craft; they were ethical questions as well. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form traces Dostoevsky’s indefatigable investigations into the ethical implications of his own formal choices. Drawing on his drafts, notebooks, and writings on aesthetics, Greta Matzner-Gore argues that Dostoevsky wove the moral and formal questions that obsessed him into the fabric of his last three novels: Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov. In so doing, he anticipated some of the most pressing debates taking place in the study of narrative ethics today.
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cover of Dr. Koop: The Many Lives of the Surgeon General

Dr. Koop

The Many Lives of the Surgeon General

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

The first full biography of Reagan's famous Surgeon General, who put science before politics—cutting smoking by 25%, leading the fight against AIDS, and shocking both liberals and conservatives on abortion.

When Ronald Reagan chose C. Everett Koop to be Surgeon General of the United States in 1981, liberal politicians, women's groups, and even the public health community opposed the nomination because of his conservative social views and strong anti-abortion beliefs. By the time he left office in 1989, the same people who had vilified him as “Dr. Kook” were singing his praises, and many conservative politicians and activists who had championed his nomination were criticizing him as a traitor. He had also become “the only surgeon general [who was] a household name,” according to the Associated Press, because of his ubiquitous media exposure around the HIV/AIDS crisis, his unique look, and his savvy with the press. How had Koop remade himself and this once major government office, which sounded grand but in the 1960s had been stripped to a minor advisory role?

As Nigel M. de S. Cameron shows, Koop was, above all, guided in his decisions by his unwavering physician’s commitment to saving lives. Even in the face of political pressures and what many expected to be his personal beliefs, he focused on science and public health. On smoking, abortion, and AIDS he openly defied Republican politicians and alienated New Right conservatives because his reading of the science did not support their ideologies. It was this adherence to science, health, and office that led him to refuse to campaign on abortion, seek compromise on the disabled “Baby Doe” case, relentlessly go after Big Tobacco, and finally reach out to the gay community as AIDS and fear of AIDS exploded. Both supporters and detractors consistently misjudged him.

This first full biography of Koop draws on thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and colleagues to tell the story of the precocious boy from Brooklyn who was already the world’s most celebrated pediatric surgeon when he became Surgeon General and one of the most recognizable public figures in late-20th century America. Koop remains a sterling example—to both left and right—of how public officials should conduct themselves.

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cover of Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays

Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts

Watching, Reading, Changing Plays

Laura Estill

University of Delaware Press, 2015

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences.

Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts.


Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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cover of Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics

Dreaming the Graphic Novel

The Novelization of Comics

Paul Williams

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the Best Book Award in Comics History from the Grand Comics Database 
Honorable Mention, 2019-2020 Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize

The term “graphic novel” was first coined in 1964, but it wouldn’t be broadly used until the 1980s, when graphic novels such as Watchmen and Maus achieved commercial success and critical acclaim. What happened in the intervening years, after the graphic novel was conceptualized yet before it was widely recognized?
 
Dreaming the Graphic Novel examines how notions of the graphic novel began to coalesce in the 1970s, a time of great change for American comics, with declining sales of mainstream periodicals, the arrival of specialty comics stores, and (at least initially) a thriving underground comix scene. Surveying the eclectic array of long comics narratives that emerged from this fertile period, Paul Williams investigates many texts that have fallen out of graphic novel history. As he demonstrates, the question of what makes a text a ‘graphic novel’ was the subject of fierce debate among fans, creators, and publishers, inspiring arguments about the literariness of comics that are still taking place among scholars today.
 
Unearthing a treasure trove of fanzines, adverts, and unpublished letters, Dreaming the Graphic Novel gives readers an exciting inside look at a pivotal moment in the art form’s development.
 
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cover of Dutch Marine Painting in the Nineteenth Century

Dutch Marine Painting in the Nineteenth Century

Cécile Bosman

Amsterdam University Press, 2026

Marine painting is a four hundred year old specialism of the traditional Dutch school of painting. Painting ships and the sea requires both nautical knowledge and great artistic talent. Cécile Bosman examines the background, training and subject matter of nineteenth-century marine painters. She also describes how marine paintings were viewed by the marine painters themselves, by their peers in the artists' associations, by art theorists and by art critics.
It turns out that throughout the nineteenth century, marine painting was seen in Dutch art circles as a vehicle for patriotism. This kind of cultural nationalism was rooted in the country's historical connection with the water and, in particular, the glorification of the Netherlands as a seafaring nation. An enduring myth that is now the subject of intense public debate. This beautifully illustrated book fills a gap in art and cultural-historical knowledge of marine painting, while offering an insightful look at the still influential nineteenth century.
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cover of Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America

Dwelling in Fiction

Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America

Ashley R. Brock

Northwestern University Press, 2023

Explores the affective, ethical, and political demands that difficult reading places on readers of midcentury Latin American literature

The radical formal experiments undertaken by writers across Latin America in the mid-twentieth century introduced friction, opacity, and self-reflexivity to the very act of reading. Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America explores the limitations and the possibilities of literature for conveying place-specific forms of life. Focusing on authors such as José María Arguedas, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan José Saer, who are often celebrated for universalizing regional themes, Ashley R. Brock brings a new critical lens to Latin American writers who were ambivalent toward their era’s “boom.”
 
Beyond mere resistance to or critique of the commodification and political instrumentalization of rural topics and types, this countertrend of critical regionalism positions readers themselves as outsiders, pushing them to engage their senses, to train their attention, and to learn to dwell in unknown textual landscapes. Dwelling in Fiction draws on a transnational community of thinkers and writers to show how their midcentury aesthetic practices of sensorial pedagogy anticipate contemporary turns toward affect, embodiment, decoloniality, and ecological thought.
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cover of Dynamics of Reason

Dynamics of Reason

Michael Friedman

CSLI, 2001

This book introduces a new approach to the issue of radical scientific revolutions, or "paradigm-shifts," given prominence in the work of Thomas Kuhn. The book articulates a dynamical and historicized version of the conception of scientific a priori principles first developed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. This approach defends the Enlightenment ideal of scientific objectivity and universality while simultaneously doing justice to the revolutionary changes within the sciences that have since undermined Kant's original defense of this ideal.

Through a modified Kantian approach to epistemology and philosophy of science, this book opposes both Quinean naturalistic holism and the post-Kuhnian conceptual relativism that has dominated recent literature in science studies. Focussing on the development of "scientific philosophy" from Kant to Rudolf Carnap, along with the parallel developments taking place in the sciences during the same period, the author articulates a new dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles. This idea applied within the physical sciences aims to show that rational intersubjective consensus is intricately preserved across radical scientific revolutions or "paradigm-shifts and how this is achieved.
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cover of Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature

Dysfluent in Fiction

Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature

Riley McGuire

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

Honorable Mention, 2025 Victorian Popular Fiction Association First Book Prize

In Dysfluent in Fiction, Riley McGuire unspools a literary history of vocal disability in the nineteenth century, arguing that this underexamined literary trope helps us to understand vocal hierarchies that still structure our present. Adopting the term “dysfluency” to show departure from normative expectations of pace, pitch, and fluency, McGuire reveals how dysfluent speech populates an enormous number of nineteenth-century texts and played a formative role in the lives of some of the period’s most influential writers.

Dysfluent in Fiction examines anglophone literature during the long nineteenth century in both England and America by authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Frederick Douglass. Examples of dysfluencies across genres include lisping lovers, a baby-talking fairy, a mute detective, various disabilities in narratives of enslavement, and more. These representations show how disabled speech was both stigmatized and celebrated in ways that clarify our contemporary response to the spectrum of human articulation and that are a vocal corollary to current notions of neurodiversity. Dysfluency’s power, McGuire contends, lies in its denial that a single mode of articulation is possible, let alone desirable.

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cover of Dystopias in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature

Dystopias in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Literature

Elías J. Palti

Bucknell University Press, 2027

How did nineteenth-century Latin American novelists respond to moments when history itself seemed to come undone? Rather than treating dystopia as a futuristic genre, Palti traces its emergence from concrete political crises in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, as writers confronted national defeat, dictatorship, and revolutionary uncertainty. Reading Mexican fiction written after the U.S. occupation; Argentine texts produced under Juan Manuel de Rosas, including works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and José Mármol; and Brazilian novels from the transition from Empire to Republic, with particular attention to Machado de Assis, the book shows how narrative form begins to falter. Plots stall, identities fragment, and stories resist closure. These breakdowns constitute early dystopian modes—atopia-atropia, heterotopia, and transtopia—through which literature registers the collapse of historical intelligibility. By locating dystopia in narrative form rather than theme, Palti offers a rich new account of literature under political catastrophe.

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

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cover of Dystopias of Infamy: Insult and Collective Identity in Early Modern Spain

Dystopias of Infamy

Insult and Collective Identity in Early Modern Spain

Javier Irigoyen-García

Bucknell University Press, 2022

Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.
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