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Sidney Kingsley was a playwright, but through his writing he played many other parts as well—a social and political activist, a health care reformer, an advocate for children, a patriot, a visionary. Of his nine professionaly produced plays, five garnered major awards. This collection of Kingsley’s award-winning plays fills a void in American dramatic publishing and provides the definitive edition of the plays, each with an introduction by the playwright. Although critical statements on Kingley’s work do appear in significant studies of American theatre, and though his plays continue to be produced, there has never been a standard edition of his major works.

Strong threads weave these plays inextricably into the fabric of twentieth-century American theatre—their meticulous, gut-wrenching, yet inspiring realism; their roles of great breadth for actors; their masterfully constructed scripts that in combination with outstanding design provide first-rate theatrical presentations; and perhaps most importantly, their unswerving attention to grave human issues.

At a time when abortion may again become illegal and the inadequacy of the health care system is a daily topic, when children facing hopelessness and poverty stare at us from the evening news, when police brutality cases are before the courts, and when issues of individual patriotism and the position of the United States as a democracy in a rapidly changing world arise—in a time, in fact, when all the human rights issues and social problems dealt with in these plays are still, or again, with us—Sidney Kingsley has proven to be a playwright whose work is timely as well as timeless.

Includes: Men in White, Dead End, The Patriots, Detective Story, and Darkness at Noon.

Written a generation apart and rarely treated together by scholars, Little Women (1868) and The House of Mirth (1905) share a deep concern with materialism, moral development, and self-construction. The heroines in both grapple with conspicuous consumption, an aspect of modernity that challenges older beliefs about ethical behavior and core identity. 

Placing both novels at the historical intersection of modern consumer culture and older religious discourse on materialism and identity, Sarah Way Sherman analyzes how Alcott and Wharton rework traditional Protestant discourse to interpret their heroines' struggle with modern consumerism. Her conclusion reveals how Little Women's optimism, still buoyed by otherworldly justice, providential interventions, and the notion of essential identity, ultimately gives way to the much darker vision of modern materialistic culture in The House of Mirth.

The term “secular” inspires thinking about disenchantment, periodization, modernity, and subjectivity. The essays in Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare argue that Shakespeare’s plays present “secularization” not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular. These transactions shape ideas about everything from pastoral government and performative language to wonder and the spatial imagination.

Thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare’s medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies today. These essays reject a necessary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” and instead analyze how such categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from Hamlet and The Tempest to All’s Well that Ends Well and All Is True, secularization emerges as an interpretive act that explores the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare’s plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught.

The volume’s diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts.

A long-awaited reevaluation of Chaucer through the lens of sacrifice by a major figure in medieval studies

Historicism and its discontents have long been central to the work of Louise Fradenburg, one of the world’s most original and provocative literary medievalists. Sacrifice Your Love brings this interest to bear on Chaucer’s writing and his world, rethought in light of a theory of sacrifice and its part in cultural production. Fradenburg writes the "history of the signifier"—a way of reading change in the symbolic order—and its role in making sacrifice enjoyable.

A new model for examining Sade and his creations.

A new model for examining Sade and his creations.

A comprehensive treatise on the life and works of Idah Meacham Strobridge, an American writer and bookbinder known primarily for a trio of works about the Great Basin.

Approachable translations and discussions of Lucian that reveal his world-building, world-bending, and multiversal thinking. 

Lucian of Samosata was ahead of his time. A rhetorician and writer active in the second century CE, he was one of the earliest known worldbuilders and science-fiction enthusiasts. Popular and prolific in antiquity—more than eighty texts attributed to him have come down to us today, including satires, dialogues, and part of a fictional work called True History—Lucian crafted astonishing tales that unfold on the surface of the moon or other planets, high above in Earth’s atmosphere, or through the eyes of underworld inhabitants or other entities who view mortal humans as otherworldly beings.

Ideal for readers interested in science fiction, fantasy, and mythology, this accessible collection offers a guided journey through Lucian’s many worlds. Bringing together fresh vernacular translations of eight works with substantial discussion, this selection showcases Lucian as a proto-multiversal thinker, presenting multiform narratives that herald developments in modern genres ranging from literature and film to gaming and fan fiction. Translator and editor Cynthia Polsley introduces each with a short excerpt from another piece of classical literature, showing how other ancient authors—including Homer, Ovid, and Vergil—influenced Lucian’s literary landscapes or were inspired by him in turn.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma.

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition. This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume confirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

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

Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural moment where Hip-hop theater hits such as Hamilton offer glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black people through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles and embodied performance, people around the world are adopting a Blackness that is at once connected to African American culture--and assumed and shed by artists and consumers as they please. As Black people around the world live a racial identity that is not shed, in a cultural moment of social unrest against anti-blackness, this book asks how such engagements with Hip-hop in performance can be both dangerous and a space for finding cultural allies. Featuring the work of some of the visionaries of Hip-hop theater including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sarah Jones and Danny Hoch, this book explores the work of groundbreaking Hip-hop theater and performance artists who have engaged Hip-hop's Blackness through popular performance. The book challenges how we understand the performance of race, Hip-hop and Blackness in the age of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. In a cultural moment where racial identity is performed through Hip-hop culture's resistance to the status quo and complicity in maintaining it, Hodges Persley asks us to consider who has the right to claim Hip-hop's blackness when blackness itself is a complicated mixtape that offers both consent and resistance to transgressive and inspiring acts of performance.

Satire, the use of criticism cloaked in wit, has been employed since classical times to challenge the established order of society. In colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, many writers used satire to resist Spanish-imposed social and literary forms and find an authentic Latin American voice. This study explores the work of eight satirists of the colonial period and shows how their literary innovations had a formative influence on the development of the modern Latin American novel, essay, and autobiography.

The writers studied here include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, Cristóbal de Llerena, and Eugenio Espejo. Johnson chronicles how they used satire to challenge the "New World as Utopia" myth propagated by Spanish authorities and criticize the Catholic church for its role in fulfilling imperialistic designs. She also shows how their marginalized status as Creoles without the rights and privileges of their Spanish heritage made them effective satirists. From their writings, she asserts, emerges the first self-awareness and national consciousness of Spanish America.

By linking the two great periods of Latin American literarure—the colonial writers and the modern generation—Satire in Colonial Spanish America makes an important contribution to Latin American literature and culture studies. It will also be of interest to all literary scholars who study satire.

Virtually all theories of satire define it as a criticism of contemporary society. Some argue that satire criticizes the present in favor of a standard of values that has been superseded, and thus that satire is generally backward-looking and conservative. While this is often true of poetic satire, in this study Frank Palmeri asserts that narrative satire performs a different function, that it parodies both the established view of the world and that of its opponents, offering its own distinctive critical perspective.

This theory of satire builds on the idea of dialogical parody in the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, while revising Bakhtin's estimate of carnival. In Palmeri's view, the carnivalesque offers only an inverted mirror image of authoritative discourse, while parodic narrative satire suggests an alternative to both the official world and its inverted opposite.

Palmeri applies this theory of narrative satire to five works of world literature, each of which has generated sharp controversy about the genre to which it rightly belongs: Petronius' Satyricon, Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. He analyzes the features that link these works and shows how the changing pairs of alternatives that are parodied in these satires reflect changes in the terms of social and cultural oppositions.

Satire in Narrative will appeal to comparatists, specialists in eighteenth-century and American literature, and others interested in theories of genre and the relations between literary forms and social history.

Makes the case for close readings of small scenes appearing in works of literature, scholarship, film, and visual art, showing how close attention to details can reveal the meaningful sociological action that often occurs on the margins.

Why do certain images, stories, and scenes impress upon us so strongly, inviting us to linger over the nuances of their meaning? In Scenes and Their Senses, sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici seeks to uncover the deeper meaning behind twenty “scenes” that have captured her theoretical imagination over her lifetime. Some of these come from classics of sociological theory or literature—Geertz, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Zola—and some are more contemporary, including the films Good Will Hunting and Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom ofLiberty. She seeks here to understand each scene less as examples of a given condition or conundrum and more as worlds in themselves.

As Wagner-Pacifici shows, close attention to the forms and flows of these minor, often quiet scenes reveals how meaningful action occurs in what might appear to be the margins or interstices of the bigger, noisier story being told. Providing an entry point to larger social conditions, relations, and change, the scenes analyzed here evoke sociological themes of belonging and exile, strength and weakness, cleanliness and pollution, reality and fantasy, courage and cowardice, and vision and obscurity, among others. As an ethnography of texts recalled from previous readings and revisited by the author, the scenes highlight the role of memory in sense-making. Furthermore, the activation of the scenes as a focused point of sustained contemplation functions as a remarkable bridge between method and theory.