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Title: American literary realism and the failed promise of contract 
Author: Thomas, Brook
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | American Studies | Law | United States History
Publisher's Description: In law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order - one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu.As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters.   [brief]
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Title: The American musical landscape 
Author: Crawford, Richard 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this refreshingly direct and engaging historical treatment of American music and musicology, Richard Crawford argues for the recognition of the distinct and vital character of American music. What is that character? How has musical life been supported in the United States and how have Americans understood their music? Exploring the conditions within which music has been made since the time of the American Revolution, Crawford suggests some answers to these questions.Surveying the history of several musical professions in the United States - composing, performing, teaching, and distributing music - Crawford highlights the importance of where the money for music comes from and where it goes. This economic context is one of his book's key features and gives a real-life view that is both fascinating and provocative. Crawford discusses interconnections between classical and popular music, using New England psalmody, nineteenth-century songs, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin to illustrate his points.Because broad cultural forces are included in this unique study, anyone interested in American history and American Studies will find it as appealing as will students and scholars of American music.   [brief]
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Title: American sensations: class, empire, and the production of popular culture 
Author: Streeby, Shelley 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | American Literature | Californian and Western History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States.   [brief]
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Title: American urban architecture: catalysts in the design of cities 
Author: Attoe, Wayne
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Conceiving of urban design in terms of architectural actions and reactions, Attoe and Logan propose a theory of "catalytic architecture" better suited to specifically American circumstances than the largely European models developed in the last thirty years for the remaking of cities.After exploring instances of failed attempts to impose European visions on American cities, the authors examine urban design successes that illustrate the principles and goals of catalytic architecture. With a series of case studies they characterize urban design as a controlled evolution, one that must also be strategic, responding to existing elements and guiding those that follow. The authors argue that the failure of American cities to control and guide the energies released in urban development can be prevented by "design guidance". From their own combined experience as urban architects and scholars, they provide a taxonomy of methods to guide urban design toward higher standards and better results.   [brief]
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Title: Analogies between analogies: the mathematical reports of S.M. Ulam and his Los Alamos collaborators 
Author: Ulam, Stanislaw M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | Mathematics | Physical Sciences
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Title: And now my soul is hardened: abandoned children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 
Author: Craft, Christopher 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love .   [brief]
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Title: Appeasement or resistance and other essays on New Testament Judaism 
Author: Daube, David
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Religion
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Title: Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 
Author: Kayalı, Hasan
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Arabs and Young Turks provides a detailed study of Arab politics in the late Ottoman Empire as viewed from the imperial capital in Istanbul. In an analytical narrative of the Young Turk period (1908-1918) historian Hasan Kayali discusses Arab concerns on the one hand and the policies of the Ottoman government toward the Arabs on the other. Kayali's novel use of documents from the Ottoman archives, as well as Arabic sources and Western and Central European documents, enables him to reassess conventional wisdom on this complex subject and to present an original appraisal of proto-nationalist ideologies as the longest-living Middle Eastern dynasty headed for collapse. He demonstrates the persistence and resilience of the supranational ideology of Islamism which overshadowed Arab and Turkish ethnic nationalism in this crucial transition period. Kayali's study reaches back to the nineteenth century and highlights both continuity and change in Arab-Turkish relations from the reign of Abdulhamid II to the constitutional period ushered in by the revolution of 1908. Arabs and Young Turks is essential for an understanding of contemporary issues such as Islamist politics and the continuing crises of nationalism in the Middle East.   [brief]
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Title: An archaeology of Greece: the present state and future scope of a discipline 
Author: Snodgrass, Anthony M
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Classics | Archaeology | European History
Publisher's Description: Classical archaeology probably enjoys a wider appeal than any other branch of classical or archaeological studies. As an intellectual and academic discipline, however, its esteem has not matched its popularity. Here, Anthony Snodgrass argues that classical archaeology has a rare potential in the who . . . [more]
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Title: Aristocratic experience and the origins of modern culture: France, 1570-1715 
Author: Dewald, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations.Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Modern French culture, Dewald argues, emerged from this conflict between tradition and the individual's inner life.   [brief]
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Title: Aristotle on the goals and exactness of ethics 
Author: Anagnostopoulos, Georgios
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Classical Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Philosophers as diverse as Socrates, Plato, Spinoza, and Rawls have sometimes argued that ethics can be an exact discipline whose propositions can match the exactness we associate with mathematics. Yet for Aristotle, knowledge of ethical matters is essentially inexact, and his perceptive criticisms of the Socratic-Platonic ideal of ethical knowledge and its metaphysical presuppositions remain of enduring interest to contemporary moral theorists.Georgios Anagnostopoulos offers the most systematic and comprehensive critical examination to date of Aristotle's views on the exactness of ethics. Combining rigorous philosophical argument and close analysis of the philosopher's treatises on human conduct, he gives form to Aristotle's belief that knowledge of matters of conduct, not unlike knowledge of most natural phenomena, can never be free of certain kinds of inexactness. He concludes that according to Aristotle, ethics constitutes a mode of knowledge that is neither totally nondemonstrative on account of its inexactness nor free of the important epistemological difficulties common to all nonmathematical disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: The Arnolfini betrothal: medieval marriage and the enigma of Van Eyck's double portrait 
Author: Hall, Edwin 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Criticism | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: Commonly known as the "Arnolfini Wedding" or "Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride," Jan van Eyck's double portrait, painted in 1434, is probably the most widely recognized panel painting of the fifteenth century. One of the great masterpieces of early Flemish art, this enigmatic picture has also aroused intense speculation as to its precise meaning. Edwin Hall's accessible study - firmly grounded in Roman and canon law, theology, literature, and the social history of the period - offers a compelling new interpretation of this wonderful painting.Instead of depicting the sacrament of marriage, Hall argues, the painting commemorates the alliance between two wealthy and important Italian mercantile families, a ceremonious betrothal that reflects the social conventions of the time. Hall not only unlocks the mystery that has surrounded this work of art, he also makes a unique contribution to the fascinating history of betrothal and marriage custom, ritual, and ceremony, tracing their evolution from the late Roman Empire through the fifteenth century and providing persuasive visual evidence for their development. His illuminating view of Van Eyck's quintessential work is a striking example of how art continues to endure and engage us over the centuries.   [brief]
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Title: Asceticism and society in crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern saints 
Author: Harvey, Susan Ashbrook
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Classics | Classical Religions | Classical History
Publisher's Description: John of Ephesus traveled throughout the sixth-century Byzantine world in his role as monk, missionary, writer and church leader. In his major work, The Lives of the Eastern Saints , he recorded 58 portraits of monks and nuns he had known, using the literary conventions of hagiography in a strikingly personal way. War, bubonic plague, famine, collective hysteria, and religious persecution were a part of daily life and the background against which asceticism developed an acute meaning for a beleaguered populace. Taking the work of John of Ephesus as her guide, Harvey explores the relationship between asceticism and society in the sixth-century Byzantine East.Concerned above all with the responsibility of the ascetic to lay society, John's writing narrates his experiences in the villages of the Syrian Orient, the deserts of Egypt, and the imperial city of Constantinople. Harvey's work contributes to a new understanding of the social world of the late antique Byzantine East, skillfully examining the character of ascetic practices, the traumatic separation of "Monophysite" churches, the fluctuating roles of women in Syriac Christianity, and the general contribution of hagiography to the study of history.   [brief]
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Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
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Title: Athenian democracy in transition: Attic letter-cutters of 340 to 290 B.C 
Author: Tracy, Stephen V 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: Furthering his masterful new approach to classifying and interpreting epigraphical data presented in Attic Letter-Cutters of 229 to 86 B.C. , Stephen V. Tracy has produced a masterful study of the inscriptions from the time of King Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, and Demetrios. Detailed study of the hands in this largest group of primary documents has enabled him to offer a number of new insights, such as reassessing the career of Demetrios of Phaleron and taking issue with the commonly accepted view that Athenian democracy ended in 322 B.C. with the defeat by the Macedonians at Krannon.Tracy pieces together stone documents and shows that the "handwriting" of individual stonecutters can be identified by the way particular letters are cut into the stone. He offers new readings, redatings, joins and associations, as well as initial publication of some fragments from the excavations in the Athenian agora.   [brief]
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Title: Athens from Cleisthenes to Pericles 
Author: Fornara, Charles W
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: By the mid fifth century B.C., Athens had become the most powerful city-state in Greece: a rich democracy led by Pericles that boldly gained control of an empire. Athens's strength under Pericles was the result of a complex interaction of events from the time of Cleisthenes. Fornara and Samons unravel the intricacies of the conflicting ancient sources to show how the development of both democracy and empire were interdependent in Athens's multifaceted evolution. The authors trace and contrast four stands of development: the history of the Alcmeonid family of Cleisthenes and Pericles, the nature and development of Athenian democracy, the growth of Athenian empire, and the burgeoning antagonism between Athens and Sparta. The fresh perspective thus afforded by this clear presentation will intrigue those with interests in both ancient economics and politics.The figure of Pericles is central to all four avenues of inquiry. His decision to create the enmisthos polis marked a fateful turn. Henceforth the democracy and the empire presupposed each other. Ultimately, Pericles's policies fueled Sparta's growing insecurity, resulting in her declaration of war on Athens in 431 B.C. and Athens's eventual fall.   [brief]
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Title: The attic: memoir of a Chinese landlord's son 
Author: Cao, Guanlong 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Autobiography | Literature in Translation | China | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Novelist Guanlong Cao's autobiographical account of growing up in urban Shanghai affords a rare glimpse into daily life during the forty turbulent years following the Communist Revolution. Forced to the bottom of Chinese society as "class enemies," Cao's family eked out a meager existence in a cramped attic. The details of their day-to-day existence - the endless quest for enough food, its preparation, Cao's schooling and friends, the stirrings of sexual desire, his dreams and fantasies - are brought brilliantly to life in spare yet evocative prose. The memoir illuminates a world largely unknown to Westerners, one where human pettiness, cruelty, joy, and tenderness play themselves out against a backdrop of political upheaval and material scarcity.Reminiscent of the concise style of classical Chinese memoirs, Cao's lean, elegant prose heightens the emotional intensity of his story. Perceptive and humorous, his voice is deeply original. It is a voice that demands to be heard - for the historical moment it captures as well as for the personal revelations it distills.   [brief]
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Title: Aunt Safiyya and the monastery: a novel 
Author: Ṭāhir, Bahāʾ 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Middle Eastern Studies | Literature in Translation | Fiction
Publisher's Description: This brief, beautifically crafted novel introduces one of the finest contemporary Arab novelists to English-speaking audiences. In it, Bahaa' Taher, one of a group of Egyptian writers - including the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz - noted for their revealing portraits of Egyptian life and society, tells the dramatic story of a young Muslim who, when his life is threatened, finds sanctuary in a community of Coptic monks. It is a tale of honor and of the terrible demands of blood vengeance; it probes the question of how a people or nation can become divided against itself.Taher has a magical gift for evoking the village life of Upper Egypt - a vastly different setting than urban Cairo and a landscape that tourists usually glimpse only from the windows of trains and buses taking them to the Pharaonic sites. Here, where Christians and Muslims have coexisted peacefully for centuries, where the traditions of the Coptic Church are as powerful as those of the Muslims, Taher crafts an intricate and compelling tale of far-reaching implications. With a powerful narrative voice and a genius for capturing the complex nuances of human interaction, Taher brilliantly depicts the poignant drama of a traditional society caught up in the process of change.   [brief]
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Title: Authors of their own lives: intellectual autobiographies 
Author: Berger, Bennett M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: All students and scholars are curious about the human faces behind the impersonal rhetoric of academic disciplines. Here twenty of America's most prominent sociologists recount the intellectual and biographical events that shaped their careers. Family history, ethnicity, fear, private animosities, extraordinary determination, and sometimes plain good fortune are among the many forces that combine to mold the individual talents presented in Authors of Their Own Lives . With contributions from women and men, young and old, native-born Americans and immigrants, quantitative scholars and qualitative ones, this book provides a fascinating source for students and professional sociologists alike.Some of the autobiographies maintain their reserve, others are profoundly revealing. Their subjects range from childhood, educational, and intellectual influences, to academic careerism and burnout, to the history of American sociology. Authors stands alone as a deeply personal autobiographical account of contemporary sociology.   [brief]
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