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Title: Money, expense, and naval power in Thucydides' History 1-5.24 
Author: Kallet-Marx, Lisa
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | Economics and Business | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Thucydides has been found guilty of indifference toward financial matters without a consideration of all the evidence. Now Lisa Kallet-Marx examines Thucydides' treatment of financial resources by studying his comments on finance in the context of the whole work and scrutinizes other, chiefly epigraphic, evidence as well. Her comprehensive inspection of the Archaeology, Pentekontaetia, and history of the Archidamian War demonstrates that the role of financial resources is central to Thucydides' ideas about naval power and figures prominently in his speeches and narrative.Kallet-Marx's research reveals an important stage in the historical development of thought about state power, wealth, and imperialism. Her book will greatly interest scholars of ancient economics and classicists alike.   [brief]
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Title: Monster/beauty: building the body of love
Author: Frueh, Joanna
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | Art Theory | Gender Studies | Art Theory | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This daring, intensely personal book challenges both conventional and feminist ideas about beauty by asking us to take pleasure in beauty without shame, and to see and feel the erotic in everyday life. Bringing together her varied experiences as a poet, art historian, bodybuilder, and noted performance artist, Joanna Frueh shows us how to move beyond society's equation of youth with beauty toward an aesthetic for the fully erotic human being. A lush combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this book continues to develop the ideas about the erotic, beauty, older women, sex, and pleasure that Frueh first addressed in Erotic Faculties. Monster/Beauty examines these issues using a provocative, often explicit, set of examples. Frueh admiringly looks at the bodies and mindsets of midlife female bodybuilders, rethinks the vampire, and revises our ideas about traditional models of beauty, such as Aphrodite. Above all, she boldly brings her personal experience into the text, weaving her reflections on female sensuality with contemporary theory. These linked essays are as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.   [brief]
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Title: Montaigne's unruly brood: textual engendering and the challenge to paternal authority 
Author: Regosin, Richard L 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Perhaps as old as writing itself, the metaphor of the book as child has depicted textuality as an only son conceived to represent its father uniformly and to assure the integrity of his name. Richard L. Regosin demonstrates how Montaigne's Essais both departs from and challenges this conventional figure of textuality. He argues that Montaigne's writing is best described as a corpus of siblings with multiple faces and competing voices, a hybrid textuality inclined both to truth and dissimulation, to faithfulness and betrayal, to form and deformation. And he analyzes how this unruly, mixed brood also discloses a sexuality and gender dynamic in the Essais that is more conflicted than the traditional metaphor of literary paternity allows.Regosin challenges traditional critics by showing how the "logic" of a faithful filial text is disrupted and how the writing self displaces the author's desire for mastery and totalization. He approaches the Essais from diverse critical and theoretical perspectives that provide new ground for understanding both Montaigne's complex textuality and the obtrusive reading that it simultaneously invites and resists. His analysis is informed by poststructuralist criticism, by reception theory, and by gender and feminist studies, yet at the same time he treats the Essais as a child of sixteenth-century Humanism and late Renaissance France. Regosin also examines Montaigne's self-proclaimed taste for Ovid and the role played by the seminal texts of self-representation and aesthetic conception (Narcissus and Pygmalion) and the myth of sexual metamorphosis (Iphis).   [brief]
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Title: The moon and the zither: the story of the western wing
Author: Wang, Shifu fl. 1295-1307
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | China | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: China's most important love comedy, Wang Shifu's Xixiangji , or The Story of the Western Wing , is a rollicking play that chronicles the adventures of the star-crossed lovers Oriole and Student Zhang. Since its appearance in the thirteenth century, it has enjoyed unparalleled popularity. The play has given rise to innumerable sequels, parodies, and rewritings; it has influenced countless later plays, short stories, and novels and has played a crucial role in the development of drama criticism. This translation of the full and complete text of the earliest extant version is available in paperback for the first time. The editors' introduction will inform students of Chinese cultural and literary traditions.   [brief]
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Title: Moral communities: the culture of class relations in the Russian printing industry, 1867-1907 
Author: Steinberg, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: This valuable study offers a rare perspective on the social and political crisis in late Imperial Russia. Mark D. Steinberg focuses on employers, supervisors, and workers in the printing industry as it evolved from a state-dependent handicraft to a capitalist industry. He explores class relations and the values, norms, and perceptions with which they were made meaningful. Using archival and printed sources, Steinberg examines economic changes, workplace relations, professional organizations, unions, strikes, and political activism, as well as shop customs, trade festivals, and everyday life. In rich detail he describes efforts to build a community of masters and men united by shared interests and moral norms. The collapse of this ideal in the face of growing class conflict is also explored, giving a full view of an important moment in Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: Moral vision in the Histories of Polybius
Author: Eckstein, Arthur M
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Classics | History | Classical Politics | Political Theory | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Arthur Eckstein's fresh and stimulating interpretation challenges the way Polybius' Histories have long been viewed. He argues that Polybius evaluates people and events as much from a moral viewpoint as from a pragmatic, utilitarian, or even "Machiavellian" one. Polybius particularly asks for "improvement" in his audience, hoping that those who study his writings will emerge with a firm determination to live their lives nobly. Teaching by the use of moral exemplars, Polybius also tries to prove that success is not the sole standard by which human action should be judged.   [brief]
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Title: Morality tales: law and gender in the Ottoman court of Aintab
Author: Peirce, Leslie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this skillful analysis, Leslie Peirce delves into the life of a sixteenth-century Middle Eastern community, bringing to light the ways that women and men used their local law court to solve personal, family, and community problems. Examining one year's proceedings of the court of Aintab, an Anatolian city that had recently been conquered by the Ottoman sultanate, Peirce argues that local residents responded to new opportunities and new constraints by negotiating flexible legal practices. Their actions and the different compromises they reached in court influenced how society viewed gender and also created a dialogue with the ruling regime over mutual rights and obligations. Locating its discussion of gender and legal issues in the context of the changing administrative practices and shifting power relations of the period, Morality Tales argues that it was only in local interpretation that legal rules acquired vitality and meaning.   [brief]
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Title: More equal than others: women and men in dual-career marriages 
Author: Hertz, Rosanna
Published: University of California Press,  1986
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems
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Title: More than night: film noir in its contexts
Author: Naremore, James
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Literature
Publisher's Description: "Film noir" evokes memories of stylish, cynical, black-and-white movies from the 1940s and 1950s - melodramas about private eyes, femmes fatales, criminal gangs, and lovers on the run. In More Than Night , James Naremore discusses these pictures, but he also shows that the central term is more complex and paradoxical than we realize. Film noir refers both to an important cinematic legacy and to an idea we have projected onto the past.This lively, wide-ranging cultural history offers an original approach to the subject, as well as new production information and fresh commentary on scores of films, including such classics as Double Indemnity , The Third Man , and Out of the Past , and such "neo noirs" as Chinatown , Pulp Fiction , and Devil in a Blue Dress . Naremore discusses film noir as a term in criticism; as an expression of artistic modernism; as a symptom of Hollywood censorship and politics in the 1940s; as a market strategy; as an evolving style; as a cinema about races and nationalities; and as an idea that circulates across all the information technologies. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book has valuable things to say not only about film and television, but also about modern literature, the fine arts, and popular culture in general. In a field where much of what has been published is superficial and derivative, Naremore's work is certain to be received as a definitive treatment.   [brief]
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Title: The morning after: sexual politics at the end of the Cold War
Author: Enloe, Cynthia H 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | American Studies | Sociology | Politics
Publisher's Description: Cynthia Enloe's riveting new book looks at the end of the Cold War and places women at the center of international politics. Focusing on the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the politics of militarism, Enloe charts the changing definitions of gender roles, sexuality, and militarism at the end of the twentieth century.In the gray dawn of this new era, Enloe finds that the politics of sexuality have already shifted irrevocably. Women glimpse the possibilities of democratization and demilitarization within what is still a largely patriarchal world. New opportunities for greater freedom are seen in emerging social movements - gays fighting for their place in the American military, Filipina servants rallying for their rights in Saudi Arabia, Danish women organizing against the European Community's Maastricht treaty. Enloe also documents the ongoing assaults against women as newly emerging nationalist movements serve to reestablish the privileges of masculinity.The voices of real women are heard in this book. They reach across cultures, showing the interconnections between military networks, jobs, domestic life, and international politics. The Morning After will spark new ways of thinking about the complexities of the post-Cold War period, and it will bring contemporary sexual politics into the clear light of day as no other book has done.   [brief]
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Title: The most beautiful girl in the world: beauty pageants and national identity
Author: Banet-Weiser, Sarah 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Sarah Banet-Weiser complicates the standard feminist take on beauty pageants in this intriguing look at a hotly contested but enduringly popular American ritual. She focuses on the Miss America pageant in particular, considering its claim to be an accurate representation of the diversity of contemporary American women. Exploring the cultural constructions and legitimations that go on during the long process of the pageant, Banet-Weiser depicts the beauty pageant stage as a place where concerns about national identity, cultural hopes and desires, and anxieties about race and gender are crystallized and condensed. The beauty pageant, she convincingly demonstrates, is a profoundly political arena deserving of serious study.Drawing on cultural criticism, ethnographic research, and interviews with pageant participants and officials, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World illustrates how contestants invent and reinvent themselves while articulating the female body as a national body. Banet-Weiser finds that most pageants are characterized by the ambivalence of contemporary "liberal" feminism, which encourages individual achievement, self-determination, and civic responsibility, while simultaneously promoting very conventional notions of beauty. The book explores the many different aspects of the Miss America pageant, including the swimsuit, the interview, and the talent competitions. It also takes a closer look at some extraordinary Miss Americas, such as Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America; Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America; and Heather Whitestone, the first Miss America with a disability.   [brief]
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Title: Mother without child: contemporary fiction and the crisis of motherhood 
Author: Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | American Literature | Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today.   [brief]
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Title: Movies as politics
Author: Rosenbaum, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | American Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this new collection of reviews and essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum focuses on the political and social dynamics of the contemporary movie scene. Rosenbaum, widely regarded as the most gifted contemporary American commentator on the cinema, explores the many links between film and our ideological identities as individuals and as a society. Readers will find revealing examinations of, for example, racial stereotyping in the debates surrounding Do the Right Thing , key films from Africa, China, Japan, and Taiwan, Hollywood musicals and French serials, and the cultural amnesia accompanying cinematic treatments of the Russian Revolution, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. From Schindler's List, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Piano , and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to the maverick careers of Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Nicholas Ray, Chantal Akerman, Todd Haynes, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Rosenbaum offers a polemically pointed survey that makes clear the high stakes involved in every aspect of filmmaking and filmgoing.   [brief]
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Title: Moving places: a life at the movies 
Author: Rosenbaum, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: Moving Places is the brilliant account of a life steeped in and shaped by the movies - part autobiography, part film analysis, part social history. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America's most gifted film critics, began his moviegoing in the 1950s in small-town Alabama, where his family owned and managed a chain of theaters.Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of "screen memories," making us aware of movies as markers of the past - when and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly of Rear Window , a meditation on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with On Moonlight Bay .Originally published in 1980, Moving Places is reissued now both as a companion volume to the author's latest book and as a means of introducing a new generation of film buffs to this unique, often humorous exploration of one man's life at the movies.   [brief]
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Title: Murder in New York City
Author: Monkkonen, Eric H 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: American Studies | Psychology | Criminology | United States History
Publisher's Description: Murder in New York City dramatically expands what we know about urban homicide, and challenges some of the things we think we know. Eric Monkkonen's unprecedented investigation covers two centuries of murder in America's biggest city, combining newly assembled statistical evidence with many other documentary sources to tease out the story behind the figures. As we generally believe, the last part of the twentieth century was unusually violent, but there have been other high-violence eras as well: the late 1920s and the mid-nineteenth century, the latter because the absence of high-quality weapons and ammunition makes that era's stabbings and beatings seem almost more vicious. Monkkonen's long view allows us to look back to a time when guns were rarer, when poverty was more widespread, and when racial discrimination was more intense, and to ask what difference these things made. With many vivid case studies for illustration, he examines the crucial factors in killing through the years: the weapons of choice, the sex and age of offenders and victims, the circumstances and settings in which homicide tends to occur, and the race and ethnicity of murderers and their victims. In a final chapter, Monkkonen looks to the international context and shows that New York - and, by extension, the United States - has had consistently higher violence levels than London and Liverpool. No single factor, he says, shapes this excessive violence, but exploring the variables of age, ethnicity, weapons, and demography over the long term can lead to hope of changing old patterns.   [brief]
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Title: Music as cultural practice, 1800-1900 
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In Music as Cultural Practice , Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society.In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.   [brief]
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Title: Music drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-1828
Author: Everist, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Opera | French Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Parisian theatrical, artistic, social, and political life comes alive in Mark Everist's impressive institutional history of the Paris Odéon, an opera house that flourished during the Bourbon Restoration. Everist traces the complete arc of the Odéon's short but highly successful life from ascent to triumph, decline, and closure. He outlines the role it played in expanding operatic repertoire and in changing the face of musical life in Paris. Everist reconstructs the political power structures that controlled the world of Parisian music drama, the internal administration of the theater, and its relationship with composers and librettists, and with the city of Paris itself. His rich depiction of French cultural life and the artistic contexts that allowed the Odéon to flourish highlights the benefit of close and innovative examination of society's institutions.   [brief]
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Title: Music in other words: Victorian conversations Ruth A. Solie
Author: Solie, Ruth A
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Music | Classical Music | Musicology | Women's Studies | Victorian History
Publisher's Description: Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, Ruth A. Solie examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. Her essays, giving voice to "what goes without saying" on the subject - that cultural information so present and pervasive as to go unsaid - fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history. This much-anticipated collection, bringing together new and hard-to-find pieces by an acclaimed musicologist, mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people - English and others - experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. Solie's essays start from topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes - including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility - and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas.   [brief]
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Title: Musical meaning: toward a critical history
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of the controversial new musicology, integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues. This accessible and eloquently written book continues and deepens the trajectory of Kramer's thinking as it boldly argues that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. Kramer draws on a broad range of music and theory to show that the problem of musical meaning is not just an intellectual puzzle, but a musical phenomenon in its own right. How have romantic narratives involving Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata affected how we hear this famous piece, and what do they reveal about its music? How does John Coltrane's African American identity affect the way we hear him perform a relatively "white" pop standard like "My Favorite Things"? Why does music requiring great virtuosity have different cultural meanings than music that is not particularly virtuosic? Focusing on the classical repertoire from Beethoven to Shostakovich and also discussing jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Kramer's writing, clear and full of memorable formulations, demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. In addition to providing theoretical advances and insights on particular pieces and repertoires, Musical Meaning will be provocative reading for those interested in issues of identity, gender, and cultural theory. This book includes a CD of Kramer's own composition, Revenants: 32 Variations in C Minor, which he discusses in his final chapter.   [brief]
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Title: Musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music scholarship
Author: Solie, Ruth A
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most . . . [more]
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