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A collection of essays in which a dozen historians and novelists present their impressions and concerns about "end of the century Nevada." Human expectations and illusions are seen as a backdrop for today's Nevada as a new human frontier. As an overview of Nevada society, this study deals with culture as well as economics, with tradition as well as rapid population growth. The essayists inquire whether the friction between acquisition and preservation, quick wealth and refined sensitivity, will build a more humane and enlightened society.

Through a series of variations on the theme of love—unrequited, polyamorous, monogomous, scandalous, adulterous—Desirae Matherly’s Echo’s Fugue explores love in all its failures and delusions. Patterned on the unfinished The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach which has been a mystery for centuries, Echo’s Fugue undertakes Bach’s project in prose—the tantalizing numerical correspondences throughout, the repetition of a single theme, the unfinished final piece.
 
Matherly’s essays appear as letters, indexes, narrative, or sentence diagrams, each defying the rules of the blank page. Song lyrics, obsession, Greek mythology, psychology, game theory, and human sexuality form a fragmented narrative about loss and unhealthy attachments. Mimicry of Bach’s fugues leads the author to questions about love, sex, desire, the “Bach or Stravinsky” paradigm in game theory, and relationships considered taboo by mainstream standards.
What authority speaks clearest with regard to love, sex, and desire—and is objectivity even possible? The final essay attempts to resolve this question while echoing the puzzle of Bach’s final unfinished fugue.
 

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume’s essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others. 

Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers—from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists’ collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability. 

This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as “coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics,” rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today. 
Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Petra Kuppers, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Joan Retallack, Joshua Schuster, Jonathan Skinner.
 

This compelling anthology gathers together personal impressions of the Malheur-Steens country of southeastern Oregon, known for its birding opportunities, its natural beauty and remoteness, and, more recently, for the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Contributors of poetry and narrative nonfiction include biologists, students, tourists, birders, and local residents, thus reflecting the perspectives of both visitors and residents.

Edge of Awe celebrates the immense variety of human experience in the Malheur-Steens region. This high-desert marsh country has long been a place of human habitation, work, and recreation, but this compendium is weighted toward the writing of visitors over the past one hundred years. It encompasses a wide range of experiences, such as fishing the Blitzen River, attending the Steens Running Camp, leading a mule train on Steens mountain, looking for rare migrant birds, boating on the great marshes, and much more.

Anyone who has visited the awe-inspiring Malheur-Steens country or plans to do so, and anyone with an interest in the region, will find inspiration in this literary companion.

CONTRIBUTORS
Chas Biederman
Charles E. Bendire
Greg Bryant
Sean Burns
Alan L. Contreras
Harry Fuller
Ira N. Gabrielson
Quinton Hallett
Ada Hastings Hedges
David Hedges
Hendrik Herlyn
Meli Hull
William Kittredge
Ursula K. Le Guin
Maitreya
David B. Marshall
John F. Marshall
Tom McAllister
Thomas C. Meinzen
Peter Pearsall
Dallas Lore Sharp
William Stafford
Noah K. Strycker
Peter Walker
Ellen Waterston
C.E.S. Wood

Tintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James—how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton’s confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially for The Age of Innocence.

Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton’s work. Wharton’s response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton’s sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti’s revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home in The Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton’s use of Tiepolo’s fresco in the church of Scalzi.

Tintner concludes by considering Wharton’s literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton’s personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.

"A major accomplishment in the study of Burke." —Choice

More than 200 years after his death, Edmund Burke remains among the most influential conservative writers in the Anglophone world. Burke’s relevance has only grown as the nature of what it means to be a conservative has become hotly contested.

And yet Burke is often discussed more than he is read. Worse, his rhetoric is often pressed into the service of other ideologies. In Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue, Stephen Browne of Pennsylvania State University subjects Burke’s work to the close textual analysis it has never received.

The result of Browne's study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the link between rhetoric and action that is key to understanding Burke, his career, his work, and his influence on contemporary conservatism.

Readers interested in the development of conversative philosophy, politics, and writing from its earliest roots will value this rare and illuminating work.

Education for Democracy was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.“The Greek ideal of the citizen realizing himself in the state” is the heart of Dean Johnston’s philosophy developed in this book. He is concerned not merely with education, but with our current economic, political, social, and ethical problems, which education directed toward service to the state may help to solve.This is a book in which an ideal rather than a theory of education is clearly stated at the beginning, and developed like a theme in music. The author, speaking from a long and varied experience as scientist, teacher, and college administrator, sees the only hope of a future democratic state in the selection and training of competent and unselfish leaders.This selection, he firmly believes, is the task of the schools and especially of the colleges. By “selection” he means – he is careful to point out – not the exclusion of any capable person from higher education, but a careful fitting of every individual for the occupation in which he will be most happy and will render the best service to society.The papers collected here all deal with some variation of this theme. They draw up a striking indictment of many current educational practices, while pointing the way, as this prominent educator sees it, toward the alleviation of that “social manic-depressive insanity” with which our civilization is now afflicted.

Media do not simply portray places that already exist; they actually produce them. In exploring how world populations experience "place" through media technologies, the essays included here examine how media construct the meanings of home, community, work, nation, and citizenship.

Tracing how media reconfigure the boundaries between public and private-and global and local-to create "electronic elsewheres," the essays investigate such spaces and identities as the avatars that women are creating on Web sites, analyze the role of satellite television in transforming Algerian neighborhoods, inquire into the roles of radio and television in Israel and India, and take a skeptical look at the purported novelty of the "new media home."

Contributors: Asu Aksoy, Istanbul Bilgi U; Charlotte Brunsdon, U of Warwick; Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, York U (Toronto); Tamar Liebes-Plesner, Hebrew U; David Morley, Goldsmiths, U of London; Lisa Nakamura, U of Illinois; Arvind Rajagopal, New York U; Kevin Robins, Goldsmiths, U of London; Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern U; Marita Sturken, New York U; and Shunya Yoshimi, U of Tokyo.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world.

The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation).

Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

Assesses past and future generations of poets and examines the standards by which they should be measured

Janet Burroway followed in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, she was an earlyMademoiselle guest editor in New York, an Ivy League and Cambridge student, an aspiring poet-playwright-novelist in the period before feminism existed, a woman who struggled with her generation's conflicting demands of work and love. Unlike Plath, Janet Burroway survived.

In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life—divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlight the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.

“Ordinary life is more dangerous than war because nobody survives,” Burroway contemplates in the essay “Danger and Domesticity,” yet each of her meditations reminds us that it's our daily rituals and trials that truly keep us alive.

Embers of the Past is a powerful critique of historicism and modernity. Javier Sanjinés C. analyzes the conflict between the cultures and movements of indigenous peoples and attention to the modern nation-state in its contemporary Latin American manifestations. He contends that indigenous movements have introduced doubt into the linear course of modernity, reopening the gap between the symbolic and the real. Addressing this rupture, Sanjines argues that scholars must rethink their temporal categories. Toward that end, he engages with recent events in Latin America, particularly in Bolivia, and with Latin American intellectuals, as well as European thinkers disenchanted with modernity. Sanjinés dissects the concepts of the homogeneous nation and linear time, and insists on the need to reclaim the indigenous subjectivities still labeled "premodern" and excluded from the production, distribution, and organization of knowledge.

Applying critical research on healing and the body to Asian studies, the articles in Empires of Hygiene challenges assumptions about the universality of medical truth. This special issue of positions investigates how medicine, the craft of healing, also acts as a sort of hygiene—a disciplinary agent against the unruly forces of nature and culture. Assuming the complicity of scientific medical practice with forms of domination and exclusion, the contributors not only demonstrate how medicine has been used as a tool of empire but also the ways in which events and institutions have literally transformed bodily life in Asia.
Featuring a variety of topics and methods, essays in Empires of Hygiene compare the disease that is physically suffered to that which is scientifically classified and identified as a social problem. Diseases such as leprosy and STDs, which have biomedical identities in Western settings but in Asia emerge as inseparable from certain colonial regimes, are examined. Spermatorrhea—a disease that compromises the male body’s ability to reproduce—is discussed in relation to the disarray of the Chinese Republic during the mid-twentieth century. The collection also addresses imperial themes of prewar Japan in the literary works of Mori Rintaro and Shimazaki Tison.

Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Michael Bourdaghs, Judith Farquhar, Marta Hanson, Thomas LaMarre, Philippa Levine, Hugh Shapiro, Nathan Sivin

A deeper understanding of contemporary environmental problems requires us to know where we come from, and the study of environmental history will help us in that quest. Environmental history, in short, may be described as an attempt to study the interaction between humans and nature in the past. How have human societies affected their environment and vice versa? What does history tell us about ecological change?

The essays in Encountering the Past in Nature provide various approaches to the new discipline. Experts with diverse educational backgrounds tackle important issues in environmental history, ranging from the intellectual formation of environmental concepts to case studies of forest history and animal extinction. Most essays in the collection focus on the issue of wilderness and the various uses of forest resources. Encountering the Past in Nature also offers introductory essays on the historiography and methodology of this field of historical study.

Encountering the Past in Nature is a useful addition to the introductory texts currently available in the United States.

As biological diversity continues to shrink at an alarming rate, the loss of plant species poses a threat seemingly less visible than the loss of animals but in many ways more critical. In this book, one of America's leading ethnobotanists warns about our loss of natural vegetation and plant diversity while providing insights into traditional Native agricultural practices in the Americas.

Gary Paul Nabhan here reveals the rich diversity of plants found in tropical forests and their contribution to modern crops, then tells how this diversity is being lost to agriculture and lumbering. He then relates "local parables" of Native American agriculture—from wild rice in the Great Lakes region to wild gourds in Florida—that convey the urgency of this situation and demonstrate the need for saving the seeds of endangered plants. Nabhan stresses the need for maintaining a wide gene pool, not only for the survival of these species but also for the preservation of genetic strains that can help scientists breed more resilient varieties of other plants.

Enduring Seeds is a book that no one concerned with our environment can afford to ignore. It clearly shows us that, as agribusiness increasingly limits the food on our table, a richer harvest can be had by preserving ancient ways.

This edition features a new foreword by Miguel Altieri, one of today's leading spokesmen for sustainable agriculture and the preservation of indigenous farming methods.

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa.

Contributors:
Jane Carruthers
Mara Goldman
Amanda Hammar
Jonathan Highfield
David McDermott Hughes
Roderick P. Neumann
Rob Nixon
Anthony Vital
Laura Wright

In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species?

Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.”

The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

Contemporary scholarship has given rise to several modes of understanding biophysical and human nature, each entangled with related notions of science and religion. Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion represents the culmination of three years of collaboration by an international group of fourteen natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, and theologians. The result is an intellectually stimulating volume that explores how the ideas of nature pertain to science and religion.

 

Erotikon brings together leading contemporary intellectuals from a variety of fields for an expansive debate on the full meaning of eros. Renowned scholars of philosophy, literature, classics, psychoanalysis, theology, and art history join poets and a novelist to offer fresh insights into a topic that is at once ancient and forever young. Restricted neither by historical period nor by genre, these contributions explore manifestations of eros throughout Western culture, in subjects ranging from ancient philosophy and baroque architecture to modern literature and Hollywood cinema.

An idea charged with paradox, eros has always defied categorization, and yet it cannot—it will not—be ignored. Erotikon aims to raise the difficult question of what, if anything, unifies the erotic manifold. How is eros in a sculpture like eros in a poem? Does the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche still speak meaningfully to modern readers, and if so, why? Is Plato's eros the same as Freud's? Or Proust's? And what is the erotic dimension in Nietzsche's thought? While each essay takes on a specific issue, together they constitute a wide-ranging conversation in which these broader questions are at play. A compilation of the latest, best efforts to reckon with eros, Erotikon will appeal not just to scholars and educators, but also to artists and critics, to the curious and the disillusioned, to the prurient and the prudent.

“There is nothing out there.” Such is the claim, at least, of politicians and oil company executives, amazed that anyone would fight to protect the miles of plateaus and canyon bottoms that stretch across southern Utah. Even tourists see this region as an empty spot on the map—an excuse to drive directly from Capitol Reef to Arches National Park. But it is precisely this—nothing—that writer Brooke Williams and photographer Chris Noble find captivating about Escalante. In this thoughtful and exquisitely illustrated rumination, the authors tour the network of chasms and gorges that began forming millions of years ago on the Colorado Plateau and today constitute a desert paradise of mesas, buttes, and boundless solitude. At the center of this landscape is the region known as Escalante, 1.7 million mostly roadless acres, where silence, darkness, and emptiness have no intrusions. With refreshing originality and a haunting rhythm to his prose, Williams reflects on the notion of space and seclusion both internally and externally. Williams also celebrates the landscape: its geology, flora and fauna, its people from the ancient Fremont to its Mormon pioneers, hiking aficionados and recluses such as Everett Ruess, and the controversial politics involved with the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Chris Noble’s photographs break down the distinction often felt even in very fine photos, that between the observer and the place. These images pull the reader into the landscape, seamlessly merging the experience and the setting. Part narrative, part poetry, and part meditation, this book charts the quiet places where the human spirit delights in solitude. It reminds us of our intimate connection with the wild and of the landscape’s powerful pulse especially when there is nothing to be found.

From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form.

This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.

Essays in Ancient Philosophy was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

To understand ancient philosophy "in its concrete, complex detail," Michael Frede says, "one has also to look at all the other histories to which it is tied by an intricate web of casual connections which run both ways." Frede's distinctive approach to the history of ancient philosophy is closely tied to his specific interests within the field - the Hellenistic philosophers and those of late antiquity, who are the primary subjects of this book. Long ignored or even maligned, the Stoics and Skeptics, medical philosophers, and grammarians are extremely interesting once their actual views are reconstructed and it is possible to recognize their ties to earlier and later philosophical thought. Refusing to study them as paradigms of achievement, or to seek purely philosophical explanations for their views, Frede draws instead upon those "other histories"—of religion, social structure, law and politics—to illuminate their work and to show how it was interpreted and transformed by succeeding generations.

On 31 May - 3 June 1995, more than 200 participants gathered in Sydney and at Fortress Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, for the 21st annual conference of the French Colonial Historical Society. Essays in French Colonial History contains seventeen of the best articles presented at this meeting. It is a wide-ranging collection that explores many new and innovative facets of the French experience outre mer. The contributors, a mix of established experts and younger scholars, examine French activity in North America, the West Indies, Africa, and South America and focus on issues military, social, cultural, native, and political history. 
     Among the subject areas explored are: the 16th century French colonies in Brazil and Florida; Victor Hugues and the Reign of Terror on Guadeloupe; commerce and the distinctiveness of Louisbourg; the importance of letter-writing and compagnonnage; unresolved territory of the Creek Nation; case studies in the area of transition patrimonial; French colonial interests and policies in Atlantic Canada, Africa, and South America; attitudes among African Americans in post-French St. Louis; and a research report on the Historical Atlas of Quebec.

"Raymond and Russell have fashioned a lively, useful volume. . . . The ability and integrity of the contributors make much of the difference, but the editors have given the book direction by soliciting state of the art essays in three fields . . . dialectology (the articles represent area linguistics at its best), grammar and usage (Algeo on usage shibboleths is particularly fine), and lexicography (a delight)."

—Choice

"These essays are quietly unassuming in tone but highly useful."

—Language in Society

"Stimulating, provocative, often infuriating, but well worth reading."—Peter Newman, Economica

"His critical blast blows like a north wind against the more pretentious erections of modern economics. It is however a healthy and invigorating blast, without malice and with a sincere regard for scientific objectivity."—K.E. Boulding, Political Science Quarterly

"Certainly one of the most engrossing volumes that has appeared recently in economic theory."—William J. Baumol, Review of Economics and Statistics

Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of “Elia” allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination. The resulting essays touch upon a wide range of compelling subjects from the deliciously humorous “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” to the poignantly reflective “New Year's Eve.” Yet collectively they also comprise a fascinating personal memoir, veiled under the pseudonymous disguise of Elia. Now back in print with a new foreword by the distinguished personal essayist Phillip Lopate and with useful annotations, Essays of Elia will provide a delicious stylistic treat for all readers.

This volume of articles written by Naguib Mahfouz between 1971 and 1981 serves as a portrait of a volatile period in Egypt’s history, which began with the Corrective Revolution and the Yom Kippur War with Israel and ended with the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat.

In these essays of the Sadat era, published in the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper, Mahfouz seems an unreliable narrator. The tension between an author who rails against censorship, yet is bound within its confines, runs through this fascinating body of nonfiction writing. Nonetheless, Mahfouz’s own thoughts are unmistakably present. We gain his insight into diverse political topics, such as socioeconomic class, democracy and dictatorship, and Islam and extremism, topics which still seem highly pertinent to the situation in Egypt today.

A vital accompaniment to his literature, this collected work is contemporaneous with Mahfouz’s fictional works such as Karnak Café, The Harafish, and Arabian Nights and Days. Essays of the Sadat Era is the second of four volumes in which Mahfouz’s nonfiction work is translated into English for the first time.