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Offering a new history of a formative cultural and political era through the cosmic phenomena that captured the public’s imagination

In the winters of 1664–65 and 1680–81, the French public was galvanized by two bright comets whose elliptical orbits could not be mapped with contemporary geometry and that thus seemed to appear in random and unpredictable locations. Bookending the period during which Louis XIV’s sun king mythology was created, these comets defied the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. As Claire Goldstein demonstrates, literary texts, cultural institutions, and architecture inspired by comets offer a different perspective on the relationship between sensory experience, ideology, and artistic form.

In the Sun King’s Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France presents an alternative view of a formative era in cultural and political history, when distinctly modern forms of power and control were established through a regime of the spectacular. Goldstein shows how comets allow us to see the seventeenth century in ways that complicate the narrative of a race toward rationalization, classicism, and modernity, indexing instead a messy period in which the spectacular was sometimes also inscrutable.

A comprehensive guide to creating inclusive and accessible musical theater at the high school level. 

This book is a comprehensive guide that presents a research-backed curriculum and strategies for creating an inclusive and accessible musical theater rehearsal and performance process for high schoolers. It draws on the author's doctoral research and extensive teaching experience to provide practical tools, assessments, and process modifications to support students of all learning needs and backgrounds.

The book begins by exploring the historical context and legal frameworks surrounding special education in public schools, as well as the intersection of drama education and disability studies. It then delves into an in-depth analysis of traditional actor training methods, highlighting their ableist origins and the need for adaptations to foster radical inclusion.

The core of the text outlines a twenty-nine-week rehearsal and performance curriculum, broken into three distinct phases, that is designed to scaffold skill development, promote ensemble collaboration, and empower diverse learners. Accompanying the unit plans are detailed assignments, assessments, and grading rubrics that align with national and state arts standards. Additionally, the author provides a wealth of supporting documents, such as student contracts, production resources, and a sample warm-up guide. 

By championing inclusive practices rooted in the principles of Universal Design for Learning and culturally responsive pedagogy, this book equips drama educators with the tools to create transformative theatrical experiences for all students.

A wide-ranging study of the ideology of population control in early modern England

Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a growing notion of the value of a large populace created a sense of urgency about reproduction; accordingly, a wide array of English writers of the time voiced the need not merely to add more people but also to ensure that England had an abundance of the right kinds of people. This need, in turn, called for a variety of institutions to train—and thus make, through a kind of nonbiological procreation—pious, enterprising, and dutiful subjects. In Increase and Multiply, David Glimp examines previously unexplored links between this emergent demographic mentality and Renaissance literature.

Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced by women from the Age of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the Romantic era. At the same time, it makes a claim for and explores the ramifications of understanding interiority as a feminine discourse. Contributors investigate the works of women authors who searched to find rescue from their cultural and personal entrapment via creative spaces and various modes of interiority in theatrical performances, poetic writings, letters, biographical narratives, prose, and fairy tales. From the case studies and literary analyses in the volume, interiority emerges as a spectrum of approaches to defining, resisting, and transforming the innermost self. 

Intimate Positions offers the first sustained study of Sino-Italian writing, foregrounding the ways in which cultural belonging is imagined through love. Beginning from the premise that intimacy is never merely private, the book examines literary works written in both Chinese and Italian by authors of Chinese origin living in Italy, showing how romantic and familial attachments become charged sites where wider social and political questions take shape. In dialogue with affect theory, Intimate Positions approaches intimacy as both a literary theme and a force that binds individuals to families, communities, nations, and inherited ideas of identity.

Across five chapters, Intimate Positions traces a movement from normative attachments towards increasingly unstable and transformative forms of belonging. Chapters examine works in which romantic intimacy reinforces collective and patriotic visions of Chineseness; working-class narratives in which precarious lives and fragile solidarities fracture the image of a unified Chinese community in Italy; family and marriage in writing by first- and second-generation authors; interracial relationships as unsettled spaces shaped by gendered power, desire, and inequality; and queer forms of self-representation, in which Chineseness and Italianness emerge as fluid positions that can be performed and remade.

At once an interdisciplinary contribution to Sinophone studies, Italian studies, cultural studies, and mobility studies, Intimate Positions combines close textual analysis with interviews with writers, artists, activists, and cultural mediators. It illuminates a field underexplored by scholarship, and offers a relational understanding of belonging as an ongoing process of affective positioning, continually made and remade through intimacy.
 

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text—three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften—but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives.

Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the body’s volatility.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

An exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition

Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.

Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.

A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.