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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.

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.

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party (CP) in San Francisco survived an ineffectual early period to become a force in the trade union heyday of the 1930s. Robert Cherny uses the lives and careers of more than fifty members to tell the story of the city’s CP from its founding through 1958.

Cherny draws on FBI files, the records of the CP at the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, interviews, and memoirs to follow male and female party and union leaders, rank-and-file members, and others. His history reveals why people joined the CP while charting the frequent changes in policy, constant member turnover, and disruptive factionalism that limited party aims and successes. Cherny also follows his subjects through their resignations, expulsions, or other reasons for departure and looks at the CP’s influence on their lives in subsequent years.

Vivid and exhaustively researched, San Francisco Reds is a long view account of the personal motivations and activism of an Old Left generation in a West Coast city.

This indispensable and unique volume is at once a history of and a pathfinder for the future of the Great Law, the governing principles behind the long-standing Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Focused on the Duck Creek Oneida people of Wisconsin, Seeds of Tomorrow draws together a wide range of tribal voices, from elders and community members to young people and academic experts. This collection chronicles the history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s revolutionary governing principles, outlines the current state of tribal government, and proposes a vision for a political future that draws on traditional Indigenous practices and knowledge. This guide toward stronger sovereignty, revitalized community ties, and a healthier and more self-determined future based on traditional structures of governance is indigenization in practice: a model not just for Duck Creek Oneida but for Indigenous nations everywhere.

Contributors: Kenzie Allen, Marley Atkinson, Marena Bridges, Robert “Bob” Brown, Breann Clark, Julie Clark, Carol Cornelius, Margaret Cornelius, Randy Cornelius, Michele Doxtater, Richard “Lotni” Elm-Hill, Jennifer “Jen” Falck, William Gollnick, Joie Guiterrez, Gerald L. Hill, Jo Anne House, Toni M. House, Nicholas Metoxen, Paul Ninham, Saniya Ninham, John III Powless, Mark Powless, Nina Powless, Artley Skenandore, Lois Stevens, Vernon Stevens, Amelia “Mia” Webster, Grace Webster, Hunter D. Webster, Rebecca M. Webster, Arthur Wilbur, Jameson Wilson

Seeing to See focuses on two American authors who are notoriously hard to classify: Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau. Dickinson proves challenging due to her short and obscure poems and Thoreau due to his insistence on capturing even the most seemingly mundane information. Daniel A. Nelson uncovers evidence that the works of these authors are often intentionally and painstakingly without aim or purpose. He argues that in their texts there is in fact an avoidance of teleological structures of writing and thinking, whereby a thing’s—or a word’s, or a text’s—value hinges on its relation to the world or other contexts.

In Nelson’s reading, Thoreau and Dickinson seem to be able to set aside all thought of distinct personal and professional goals, through which readers typically try to make an overarching sense out of, and to derive some form of profit from, disparate experiences, events, actions, and feelings. Further, both authors seem to be able to get outside of the worldview according to which the value and meaning of something, be it a natural object, a word, or an experience, is a function of its participation in a larger system. Examples of such systems include an ecosystem, taxonomic system, or syntactic system; a writer’s career, or life, or philosophy; even a single poem or journal entry. In the absence of such connections to broader categorical spheres, both writers force readers to contemplate the ineffable, constantly changing relation between words and the natural world. This contemporary reading of two iconic writers reframes their work and how readers think of nature, accepting, as these authors did, the potential freedom of the unknown.

Rita Felski’s new work brings literary studies into conversation with more affirmative and democratic forms of critical theory.

Literary critics associate the phrase “Frankfurt School” with early twentieth-century thinkers like Adorno or Benjamin, but contemporary German critical theory remains largely unknown. In this new book, Rita Felski draws on the work of a group of important philosophers and social theorists to offer fresh readings of literary texts by Robert Walser, Didier Eribon, Zadie Smith, Magda Szabo, John Williams, and Dionne Brand. 

Through five key concepts derived from her reading of German theory—disclosure, recognition, self-realization, lifeworld, and resonance—Felski asks how these literary texts articulate the relationship between intellectuals and others. Contrary to critical theories that discount everyday experience, new German thought reveals the ethical, existential, and political richness of such experience. Through this framework, Felski shows that literature, theory, and experience are not opposed but mutually constitutive.

Discusses the process of the economic annihilation of the Jews in Hungary, who– from the economic point of view – were more influential than any other Jewish community in Europe. Following the German occupation in March 1944 the collaborating Hungarian government attempted to assert its claim concerning the complete confiscation of Jewish assets at all stages of the road leading to the extermination camps. The cooperation with the Germans proved to be the most problematic in this area.

The story of the Jewish Gold Train is a relatively small but all the more emblematic chapter of the economic annihilation. The circumstances of the freight’s assembling, the German-Hungarian conflicts concerning the train, the looting attempts, the fate of the assets seized by the Allies (double victimization of the survivors) provide the reader with an insight into the history of the repeated looting of the Hungarian Jewry

The book analyzes the role played by SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt Becher, one of the most controversial and mysterious figures in the Hungarian and universal history of the Holocaust. Becher, delegated to Hungary by Himmler, administered and benefited from the confiscation of an enormous amount of Jewish assets.

In 1937, Josef and Marie Baum, of Bamberg, Germany, sent their seventeen-year-old son Kurt to begin a new life in America. Their letters, provided here in both the original German and English translation, recount the story of this middle-class Jewish family during the Nazi era. Kurt’s struggles to adapt to his new circumstances were met with little understanding from his parents, who were enduring a steadily worsening existence at the hands of the Nazis. The father’s desperate pleas prior to his forced deportation and murder constitute a final rupture in this poignant story. 

Bridging the Holocaust experience from both sides of the Atlantic, Separated by Worlds sheds light both on life in Nazi Germany and on the refugee experience in the United States. Unlike traditional exile literature focused on intellectual and cultural elites, the book documents the experiences of average citizens navigating escape and assimilation. The fifty letters at the center of the book, which communicate the parents’ needs, fears, and hopes to their son, offer an unusually intimate window into daily life under Nazi rule. The book is richly illustrated, and the letters are annotated and contextualized by several essays.

Drawing on an extraordinary wealth of court records from Middlesex County of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, Sex in Middlesex offers a richly revisionist account of social and moral life in seventeenth-century New England. Social historian Roger Thompson brings to life the forgotten men and women of colonial Massachusetts to challenge some of the most entrenched assumptions about Puritan society. Examining cases of fornication, adultery, breach of promise, premarital pregnancy, and sexual deviance recorded between 1649 and 1699, Thompson argues that the Puritan social system was far less rigid, and the relations between the sexes far less coercively regulated, than the dominant historiographical tradition, shaped by scholars such as Perry Miller and Lawrence Stone, has suggested.

Rather than a community defined by patriarchal tyranny and punitive moral control, Thompson discovers in the Middlesex records a society characterized by a striking degree of tolerance, mutual regard, and practical common sense, animated by a genuinely popular Puritan piety. The goal of the courts was not punishment and exclusion, but confession, reform, and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Structured with methodological rigor and written with narrative verve, Sex in Middlesex is at once a work of quantitative social history and a gallery of vivid individual portraits.

PROSE Awards Subject Category Finalist—Biological Anthropology, Ancient History, and Archaeology, 2021

Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award, Latin American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section, 2021​

Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality.

The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie) reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential.

Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all.

Sexology and Translation is the first study of the contemporaneous emergence of sexology in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Heike Bauer and her contributors—historians, literary and cultural critics, and translation scholars—address the intersections between sexuality and modernity in a range of contexts during the period from the 1880s to the 1930s. 

From feminist sexualities in modern Japan to Magnus Hirschfeld’s affective sexology, this book offers compelling new insights into how sexual ideas were formed in different contexts via a complex process of cultural negotiation. By focusing on issues of translation—the dynamic process by which ideas are produced and transmitted—the essays in Sexology and Translation provide an important corrective to the pervasive idea that sexuality is a “Western” construct that was transmitted around the world. 

This volume deepens understanding of how the intersections between national and transnational contexts, between science and culture, and between discourse and experience, shaped modern sexuality.