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Glazier investigates the ways in which computer technology has influenced and transformed the writing and dissemination of poetry.

In Digital Poetics, Loss Pequeño Glazier argues that the increase in computer technology and accessibility, specifically the World Wide Web, has created a new and viable place for the writing and dissemination of poetry. Glazier’s work not only introduces the reader to the current state of electronic writing but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium.

Glazier examines three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable media. He considers avant-garde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between web “pages” and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. With convincing alacrity, Glazier argues that the materiality of electronic writing has changed the idea of writing itself. He concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate “space of poesis.”

Digital Poetics will attract a readership of scholars and students interested in contemporary creative writing and the potential of electronic media for imaginative expression.
 

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.
 

This is the fifth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. 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 been largely ignored: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

This volume combines the surviving speeches of three orators who stand at the end of the classical period. Dinarchus was not an Athenian, but he was called on to write speeches in connection with a corruption scandal (the Harpalus affair) that put an end to the career of Demosthenes. His speeches thus raise many of the vital issues surrounding the Macedonian conquest of Athens and the final years of Athenian democracy. Hyperides was an important public figure who was involved in many of the events described by Dinarchus and Lycurgus. His speeches open a window into many interesting facets of Athenian life. Lycurgus was one of the leading politicians in Athens during the reign of Alexander the Great and put Athenian public finances on a more secure footing. He was also a deeply religious man, who tried to revive Athenian patriotism after the crushing defeat at Chaeronea.

An expert on the rhetoric of the mass media, John M. Sloop has written several books on how the spoken and written word can influence political and cultural debate. In Disciplining Gender, he turns his attention to a topic that has attracted widespread public discussion—the treatment of gender ambiguity in American culture. He offers critical readings of five cases, showing the extent to which, in each instance, public discourse and media representations have served to reinforce dominant norms and constrain or “discipline” any behavior that blurs or subverts conventional gender boundaries. 

The five cases include John/Joan or David Reimer, Brandon Teena, k.d. lang, Janet Reno, and Barry Winchell/Calpernia Addams. Sloop draws on queer theory and research in the field of critical rhetoric to examine representations of “gender trouble” in these much-publicized stories. In each case, he provides a comprehensive analysis of the public discussions of their significance. In short, rather than simply study the people and circumstances involved in each case, he examines the public meanings attached to them and the implications of those meanings for how contemporary culture comes to understand what “man” and “woman” mean and which sexual behaviors are appropriate and inappropriate. 

In highlighting the ideological constraints imposed by our society, Sloop also suggests the ways that these constraints might be loosened and understandings of gender and sexuality diversified.

In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses  or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE).

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.

A critical exploration of how Gothic tropes infiltrate wellness discourse, revealing the rhetorical forces behind our cultural obsession with food, health, and bodily control.

Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption unearths the darkness behind modern obsessions with food, health, and bodily optimization. In this provocative and richly interdisciplinary work, Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena argue that contemporary discourses around food, medicine, and the body are steeped in Gothic rhetoric—where the promise of purity and control is shadowed by monstrosity, abjection, and the uncanny.

From Soylent and nootropics to probiotics and lab-grown meat, Tirrell and Maddalena show how wellness discourse is haunted by Gothic tropes: body horror, hybridity, and existential dread. Wellness culture, they argue, is not merely pseudoscience or fraud but a complex, persuasive rhetoric that blurs science and myth, purity and decay, medicine and mysticism.

Disgustatory! offers a fresh framework: a “Gothic rhetoric of consumption” that explains why we are drawn to weird diets, digital detoxes, and miracle cures. Through case studies of strange substances and stranger practices—Reddit fasting rituals, magic dirt supplements, fecal transplants— Tirrell and Maddalena reveal how fear, fascination, and the fantasy of bodily control animate our health choices. Each chapter explores a rhetorical element—quantification, hybridity, abjection, optimization, and regulation—to show how food becomes a site of cultural anxiety and existential longing. This book will appeal to rhetoricians, scholars of science and technology studies, cultural theorists, and anyone interested in the strange intersections of health, horror, and persuasion.

Incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic.