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Examining subjectivity and narrative perception in Hawthorne’s literary art.

The Style of Hawthorne’s Gaze is an unusual and insightful work that employs a combination of critical strategies drawn from art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary aesthetic and literary theory to explore Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative technique and his unique vision of the world. Dolis studies Hawthorne’s anti-technological and essentially Romantic view of the external world and examines the recurring phenomena of lighting, motion, aspectivity, fragmentation, and imagination as they relate to his descriptive techniques.

Dolis sets the world of Hawthorne’s work over and against the aesthetic and philosophical development of the world understood as a “view”, from its inception in the camera obscura and perspective in general, to its 19th-century articulation in photography. In light of this general technology of the image, and drawing upon a wide range of contemporary critical theories, Dolis begins his study of Hawthorne at the level of description, where the world of the work first arises in the reader’s consciousness. Dolis shows how the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida can provide fresh insights into the sophisticated style of Hawthorne’s perception of and system for representing reality.

An exploration of magical realism’s contemporary resurgence, as writers attempt to capture the realities of climate change.

What literary mode could possibly convey the extent of today’s climate catastrophes? In The Surprising New Life of Magical Realism, Charlotte Rogers argues that the answer is magical realism, a genre whose defining characteristic is to make the unbelievable an unremarkable part of everyday life. She pairs classic works by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Rosario Ferré with contemporary novels by Carlos Fonseca, Fernanda Melchor, and Rita Indiana to show how the techniques of magical realism enable new approaches to scenes of environmental collapse and social injustice. Challenging widespread accounts of the genre’s decline, Rogers shows that the signature aesthetics of magical realism—the marvelous, the amazing, the strange—are integral to twenty-first-century fiction.

This new translation of Plato’s dialogue on love avoids the cumbersome locutions of Victorian versions and presents Plato’s ancient drinking party in a vigorous contemporary idiom. The character of Socrates emerges with unexpected wit and humor, adding new dimensions to his familiar irony. A poet and philosopher have collaborated to give an English version that is fresh and clear, and accurately renders the ideas of the speakers.  

A detailed internal analysis of the structure of the dialogue is given in the introduction. The afterword presents an historical interpretation of the two ways of love, eros and agapé, an a reinterpretation of eros in Plato.

Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), a writer of world renown, grew up in a culturally refined family with diverse interests. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich (1870–1922), was a distinguished jurist and statesman at the turn of the twentieth century. He was also a great connoisseur and aficionado of literature, painting, theater, and music as well as a passionate butterfly collector, keen chess player, and avid athlete. This book, the first of its kind, examines Vladimir Nabokov’s life and works as impacted by his distinguished father. It demonstrates that V. D. Nabokov exerted the most fundamental influence on his son, making this examination pivotal to understanding the writer’s personality and his world perception, as well as his literary, scholarly, and athletic accomplishments. The book contains never heretofore published archival materials. It is appended with rare articles by Nabokov and his father and is accompanied by old photographs. In addition, the book constitutes a survey of sorts of Russian civilization at the turn of the twentieth century by providing a partial view of the multifaceted picture of Imperial Russia in its twilight hours. The book illumines the historical background, political struggle, juridical battles, and literary and artistic life as well as athletic activities during the epoch, rich in cultural events and fraught with sociopolitical upheavals.

Cover illustration: Vladimir Nabokov and his father, 1906. The Nabokov family photographs. Copyright © The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC; and of The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.

A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.

A groundbreaking collection that bridges linguistics and literature, offering powerful tools to uncover how language shapes meaning, identity, and power in literary texts.

The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics, edited by Cynthia Bernstein, presents a groundbreaking collection of essays that demonstrate how linguistic tools can enrich literary analysis. The volume brings together scholars who explore the intersections of language, literature, and culture—examining how syntax, discourse, gender, power, and regional dialects shape meaning in texts. From Tennessee Williams to Harry Crews, from Dickens to immigrant literature, the essays offer models for integrating linguistic theory with literary interpretation. This book is essential for scholars of stylistics, discourse analysis, and anyone interested in the evolving relationship between language and literature.

Tim Hunt’s The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Proseexamines Kerouac’s work from a new critical perspective with a focus on the author’s unique methods of creating and working with text. Additionally, The Textuality of Soulwork delineates Kerouac’s development of “Spontaneous Prose” to differentiate the preliminary experiment of On the Road from the more radical experiment of Visions of Cody, and to demonstrate Kerouac’s transition from working within the textual paradigm of modern print to the textual paradigm of secondary orality. From these perspectives, Tim Hunt crafts a new critical approach to Beat poetics and textual theory, marking an important contribution to the current revival of Kerouac and Beat studies underway at universities in the U.S. and abroad, as reflected by a growing number of conferences, courses, and a renewal in scholarship.

During the 1960s, the SNCC Freedom Singers, The Living Theatre, the Diggers, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group fused art and politics by staging unexpected and uninvited performances in public spaces. Through their activism and the response it provoked, art, theater, and politics began to converge and assume a new visibility in everyday life. While their specific political visions varied, these groups shared the impulse to stage performances and actions publicly—"in the streets"—eschewing museums, theaters, and other conventional halls of culture. Bradford D. Martin offers detailed portraits of each of these groups and examines why they embraced public performance as a vehicle to express and advance their politics. 

At a time when the New Left and the counterculture were on the rise, these artists reflected the decade's political and cultural radicalism and helped to define a new aesthetic. Civil rights activists mobilized singing in the struggle for desegregation, introducing a vibrant musical form into the public space. The Living Theatre culminated an arduous quest to mesh artistic and political goals, leading audiences from theaters into the streets to begin the “beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution.” The Diggers playfully engaged San Francisco's counterculture in politics with their carnivalesque public actions. The Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Action Art Group sought to disrupt the conventional art world, mounting protests in and around New York City museums.

By questioning the values and assumptions that separated art from politics, these groups not only established public performance as a legitimate aesthetic but also provided a new creative vocabulary for future generations of artists. Their continued involvement with the women's liberation movement, rural communes, and political street theater into the 1970s and beyond challenges the popular myth that activists disengaged from politics after the 1960s.

The relationship between actors and spectators has been of perennial interest to playwrights. The Roman playwright Plautus (ca. 200 BCE) was particularly adept at manipulating this relationship. Plautus allowed his actors to acknowledge freely the illusion in which they were taking part, to elicit laughter through humorous asides and monologues, and simultaneously to flatter and tease the spectators.

These metatheatrical techniques are the focus of Timothy J. Moore's innovative study of the comedies of Plautus. The first part of the book examines Plautus' techniques in detail, while the second part explores how he used them in the plays Pseudolus, Amphitruo, Curculio, Truculentus, Casina, and Captivi. Moore shows that Plautus employed these dramatic devices not only to entertain his audience but also to satirize aspects of Roman society, such as shady business practices and extravagant spending on prostitutes, and to challenge his spectators' preconceptions about such issues as marriage and slavery. These findings forge new links between Roman comedy and the social and historical context of its performance.

This book discusses some rituals of justice—such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s execution speech, and King Charles I’s treason trial—in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events’ multiple voices, I analyze the rituals’ genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them.

The execution ritual, like such cultural forms as plays and films, is a collaborative production that can be understood only, and only incompletely, by being alert to the presence of its many participants and their contributions. Each of these participants brings a voice to the execution ritual, whether it is the judge and jury or the victim, executioner, sheriff and other authorities, spiritual counselors, printer, or spectators and readers. And each has at least one role to play. No matter how powerful some institutions and individuals may appear, none has a monopoly over authority and how the events take shape on and beyond the scaffold. The centerpiece of the mid-seventeenth-century’s theatre of death was the condemned man’s last dying utterance. This study focuses on the words and contexts of many of those final speeches, including King Charles I’s (1649), Archbishop William Laud’s (1645), and the Earl of Strafford’s (1641), as well as those of less well known royalists and regicides. Where we situate ourselves to view, hear, and comprehend a public execution—through specific participants’ eyes, ears, and minds or accounts—shapes our interpretation of the ritual. It is impossible to achieve a singular, carefully indoctrinated meaning of an event as complex as a state-sponsored public execution.

Along with the variety of voices and meanings, the nature and purpose of the rituals of justice maintain a significant amount of consistency in a number of eras and cultural contexts. Whether the focus is on the trial and execution of the Marian martyrs, English royalists in the 1640s and 1650s, or the Restoration’s regicides, the events draw on a set of cultural expectations or conventions. Because rituals of justice are shaped by diverse voices and agendas, with the participants’ scripts and counterscripts converging and colliding, they are dramatic moments conveying profound meanings.

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