Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods.
An exploration of what it means to be fabulous-and why eccentric style, fashion, and creativity are more political than everPrince once told us not to hate him 'cause he's fabulous.
A compact and accessible edition of Hume’s political and moral writings with essays by a distinguished set of contributors A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume was a major influence on thinkers ranging from Kant and Schopenhauer to Einstein and Popper, and his writings continue to be deeply relevant today.
How we build our invisible libraries Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading.
Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts.
How Robespierre's career and legacy embody the dangerous contradictions of democracyMaximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other protagonist of those dramatic and violent events.
Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature.
A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons from its greatest midcentury proponentsToday, liberalism faces threats from across the political spectrum.
The Cylinder investigates the surprising proliferation of cylindrical objects in the nineteenth century, such as steam engines, phonographs, panoramas, rotary printing presses, silos, safety locks, and many more.
Iconic images of medieval pilgrims, such as Chaucer's making their laborious way to Canterbury, conjure a distant time when faith was the only refuge of the ill and infirm, and thousands traveled great distances to pray for healing.
Set against the cultural and political backdrop of interwar Europe and the Americas, Poetry in Pieces is the first major study of the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) to appear in English in more than thirty years.
Countering impressions of Moses reinforced by Sigmund Freud in his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism, this concise, engaging work begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multicultural of all foundation narratives.
The emergent culture of crime writings in late 19th century colonial Bengal (India) is an interesting testimony to how literature is shaped by various material forces including the market.
The emergent culture of crime writings in late 19th century colonial Bengal (India) is an interesting testimony to how literature is shaped by various material forces including the market.
Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as 'modern' (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism).
This Routledge Revival, first published in 1985, gives detailed attention to the bearing of literary theory on questions of truth, meaning and reference.
Winner of the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA)World-renowned filmmaker and feminist, postcolonial thinker Trinh T.
A unique look at Thomas Mann's intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United StatesIn September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States.
The image of surfing is everywhere in American popular culture - films, novels, television shows, magazines, newspaper articles, music, and especially advertisements.
Through a series of case studies spanning the bounds of literature, photography, essay, and manifesto, this book examines the ways in which literary texts do theoretical, ethical, and political work.
The idea of the "e;mamma italiana"e; is one of the most widespread and recognizable stereotypes in perceptions of Italian national character both within and beyond Italy.
In this book, Simmons argues that class, as much as race and gender, played a significant role in the development of Gothic and Horror fiction in a national context.
This book examines eyewitness travel reports of atrocities committed in European-funded slave regimes in the Congo Free State, Portuguese West Africa, and the Putumayo district of the Amazon rainforest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
This study considers cultural representations of "e;brown"e; people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards.
This is the first book to explore the phenomenon of glamour and celebrity in contemporary Russian culture, ranging across media forms, disciplinary boundaries and modes of inquiry, with particular emphasis on the media personality.
Nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of secularism, the development of a modern capitalist economy, multi-party democracy, and an explosive growth in technological, scientific and medical knowledge.
Paul de Man - literary critic, literary philosopher, "e;American deconstructionist"e; - changed the landscape of criticism through his rigorous theories and writings.
Wild Anthropocene examines four key areas-the politics of deep time, neoliberalism's socio-ecological impacts, global population growth and inter-species entanglement-to demonstrate how literature illuminates progressive solutions to Anthropocene challenges.
From early photographs of disfigured slaves to contemporary representations of bullet-riddled rappers, images of wounded black men have long permeated American culture.
This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture.
This book examines the way young adult readers are constructed in a variety of contemporary young adult fictions, arguing that contemporary young adult novels depict readers as agents.
What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics?