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The author of Centuries of Childhood and other landmark historical works, Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) was a singular figure in French intellectual life. He was both a political reactionary and a path-breaking scholar, a sectarian royalist who supported the Vichy regime and a founder of the new cultural history—popularly known as l'histoire des mentalités—that developed in the decades following World War II. In this book, Patrick H. Hutton explores the relationship between Ariès's life and thought and evaluates his contribution to modern historiography, in France and abroad. 

According to Hutton, the originality of Ariès's work and the power of his appeal derived from the way he drew together the two strands of his own intellectual life: his enduring ties to the old cultural order valued by the right-wing Action Française, and a newfound appreciation for the methodology of the leftist Annales school of historians. A demographer by training, he pioneered a new route into the history of private life that eventually won him a wide readership and in late life an appointment to the faculty of the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At the same time, he fashioned himself as a man of letters in the intellectual tradition of the Action Française and became a perspicacious journalist as well as a stimulating writer of autobiographical memoirs. In Hutton's view, this helps explain why, more than any other historian, Philippe Ariès left his personal signature on his scholarship.

The first English translation of On Anger

This latest volume in the Writings from the Greco-Roman World series provides a translation of a newly edited Greek text of Philodemus’s On Anger, now supplemented with the help of multispectral imaging. As our sole evidence for the Epicurean view of what constitutes natural and praiseworthy anger as distinguished from unnatural pleasure in vengeance and cruelty for their own sake, this text is crucial to the study of ancient thought about the emotions. Its critique of contemporary Stoic and Peripatetic theories of anger offers crucial new information for the history of philosophy in the last two centuries BCE. The introduction and commentary also make use of newly revised texts and readings from several other ancient treatises on anger.

Features

• An apparatus representing work on the text since the papyrus was opened in 1805
• A full explication of the Epicurean theory of natural anger as an emotion without pleasure
• One of the Herculaneum papyri that survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE

A freshly translated critical edition of the infamous eighteenth-century sadist’s sprawling work of eroticism that endures today as a serious philosophical argument.

The infamous libertine Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), from whose name we derive the word sadism, wove into his pornographic writings many strands of philosophical brilliance whose insights, interspersed between appalling descriptions of sexual deviance, have perplexed readers for centuries. First published in 1795, Philosophy in the Boudoir remains one of the most influential of these works, containing a powerful essay that distills Sade’s most illicit ideas into a compelling argument for personal freedom. In it, Sade experiments with forms drawn from sentimental fiction, pornography, philosophical dialogue, and drama to both satirize his contemporaries and champion the virtues of the heroic libertine—an important intellectual precursor to ideas further developed by Nietzsche, Freud, and others. 

This new critical edition is freshly translated into contemporary English and includes a scholarly introduction and extensive notes that illuminate Sade’s myriad allusions and cultural connections, particularly to the larger world of Enlightenment Europe. 

Comics and childhood have had a richly intertwined history for nearly a century. From Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie to Hergé’s Tintin (Belgium), José Escobar’s Zipi and Zape (Spain), and Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (Germany), iconic child characters have given both kids and adults not only hours of entertainment but also an important vehicle for exploring children’s lives and the sometimes challenging realities that surround them.

Bringing together comic studies and childhood studies, this pioneering collection of essays provides the first wide-ranging account of how children and childhood, as well as the larger cultural forces behind their representations, have been depicted in comics from the 1930s to the present. The authors address issues such as how comics reflect a spectrum of cultural values concerning children, sometimes even resisting dominant cultural constructions of childhood; how sensitive social issues, such as racial discrimination or the construction and enforcement of gender roles, can be explored in comics through the use of child characters; and the ways in which comics use children as metaphors for other issues or concerns. Specific topics discussed in the book include diversity and inclusiveness in Little Audrey comics of the 1950s and 1960s, the fetishization of adolescent girls in Japanese manga, the use of children to build national unity in Finnish wartime comics, and how the animal/child hybrids in Sweet Tooth act as a metaphor for commodification.

In this richly illustrated book, Robert Macieski examines Lewis W. Hine's art and advocacy on behalf of child laborers as part of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) between 1909 and 1917. A “social photographer”—as he called himself—Hine created images that documented children at work throughout New England, revealing their exploitation in the North as he had for rural working children in the South. Hine staged his images, highlighting particular types of labor in specific places: the “newsies” in Connecticut cities; sardine canners in Eastport, Maine; cranberry pickers in Cape Cod bogs; industrial homeworkers in Boston and Providence; and cotton textile workers throughout the region. His association with the NCLC connected him to a network of local and national reformers, social workers, and child welfare professionals, a broad coalition he supported in their fight to end this unethical labor practice. Macieski also chronicles Hine's efforts to mount major exhibitions that would help move public opinion against child labor.

In Picturing Class, Macieski explores the historical context of Hine's photographs and the social worlds of his subjects. He offers a detailed analysis of many of the images, unearthing the stories behind the creation of these photographs and the lives of their subjects. In telling the story of these photographs, their creation, and their reception, Macieski demonstrates how Hine worked to advance an unvarnished picture of a rapidly changing region and the young workers at the center of this important shift.

Pierre Guyotat est une figure majeure, avant même Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats et bien au-delà, de la mémoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne. Idiotie est l’une des œuvres récentes les plus importantes sur ce sujet. C’est le fait de la guerre, vécue en appelé jugé récalcitrant et mis au cachot, mais aussi des voyages post-indépendance, de la rencontre avec la langue, la géologie, la faune et la flore algériennes, de la défense publique de Mohamed Laïd Moussa. Les fictions, les carnets sont marqués par l’empreinte de la terre, des langues, des corps algériens.

Guyotat contribua aussi à établir, dans la création et l’action publique, des relations nouvelles avec l'Algérie, ses auteurs, comme avec celles et ceux qui, en France, venaient de ce pays.

Cet ouvrage offre la parole à des figures de la recherche et de la création issues d’Algérie, de France et d’ailleurs. Il permet de découvrir un regard unique sur l’Algérie, affectueux et savant, celui d’un des plus grands auteurs de langue française.

Contributions de Ferroudja Allouache, Amina Azza Bekkat, Catherine Brun, Donatien Grau, Denis Hollier, Karima Lazali, Gérard Nguyen Van Khan, Philippe Roger, Tiphaine Samoyault, Nadia Sebkhi, Todd Shepard, Noura Wedell.

This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey’s remarkable—and still provocative—early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the volume’s contributors interrogate Macherey’s work on a range of pressing issues, including the development of a theory of reading and criticism, the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken, the labor of poetic determination and of literature’s resistance to ideological context, the literary relevance of a Spinozist materialism, the process of racial subjectification and the ontology of Blackness, and a theorization of the textual surface. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production also includes three new texts by Macherey, presented here in English for the first time: his postface to the revised French edition of A Theory of Literary Production; “Reading Althusser,” in which Macherey analyzes the concept of symptomatic reading; and a comprehensive interview in which Macherey reflects on the historical conditions of his early work, the long arc of his career at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and the ongoing importance of Louis Althusser’s thought.
 
Recent translations of Macherey’s work into English have introduced new readers to the critic’s enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.

For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice.

In Piety and Dissent, Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition—parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority—that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. 

What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined, and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives.

For many Americans, eating ethnic food is so commonplace as to be taken for granted. Yet, whether we acknowledge it or not, such foods create a powerful social language that speaks of cultural traditions and tastes that have been handed down from one generation to the next and, in some cases, appropriated and commodified by American commercial culture. Ethnic cooking represents both a source of sustenance and a complex form of communication. 

In this volume, eleven scholars explore the role of ethnic food in American culture, with a particular focus on women. The first six chapters offer personal accounts of the ways in which ethnic meals are embedded in women's memories and fortify their connections to one another. From a Sicilian-born mother who affirms her allegiance to her heritage through the loving preparation of traditional tomato sauce and pasta, to a Swedish American woman whose dozens of boxes of recipe cards document a process of cultural assimilation, to an Armenian American who uses a shared passion for cooking to forge a relationship with her lover's family—these essays speak in a personal voice about the power of food as a marker of women's identity. The final five chapters take a more analytic approach, scrutinizing the social and political aspects of ethnic food and the phenomenon of “culinary tourism.” One essay offers a brilliant meditation on the gendered discourse of cooking in the Mexican American community, showing how food preparation provides many Chicanas with a vital language of self-expression. Another essay probes the author's penchant for Thai food and other cuisines from economically dominated cultures, situating it in the context of a larger system of privilege and oppression and as a form of cultural colonialism. By going beyond the obvious, these essays challenge our assumptions and expand our understanding of the significance of ethnic food in women's lives. 

Contributors include Meredith E. Abarca, Arlene Voski Avakian, Linda Murray Berzok, Benay Blend, Lynn Z. Bloom, Paul Christensen, Cathie English, Doris Friedensohn, Lisa Heldke, Heather Schell, and Leanne Trapedo Sims.

From Tony Hillerman's Navajo Southwest to Martin Cruz Smith's Moscow, an exotic, vividly described locale is one of the great pleasures of many murder mysteries. Indeed, the sense of place, no less than the compelling character of the detective, is often what keeps authors writing and readers reading a particular series of mystery novels.

This book investigates how "police procedural" murder mysteries have been used to convey a sense of place. Gary Hausladen delves into the work of more than thirty authors, including Tony Hillerman, Martin Cruz Smith, James Lee Burke, David Lindsey, P. D. James, and many others. Arranging the authors by their region of choice, he discusses police procedurals set in America, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Europe, Moscow, Asia, and selected locales in other parts of the world, as well as in historical places ranging from the Roman Empire to turn-of-the-century Cairo.