California Press: 1495 books
Funny Pictures
Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood
Language: English
Release Date: July 21, 2011
This collection of essays explores the link between comedy and animation in studio-era cartoons, from filmdom’s earliest days through the twentieth century. Written by a who’s who of animation authorities, Funny Pictures offers a stimulating range of views on why animation became associated with...
An Invention without a Future
Essays on Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2014
In 1895, Louis Lumière supposedly said that cinema is "an invention without a future." James Naremore uses this legendary remark as a starting point for a meditation on the so-called death of cinema in the digital age, and as a way of introducing a wide-ranging series of his essays on movies...
I Too Have Some Dreams
N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2014
I Too Have Some Dreams explores the work of N. M. Rashed, Urdu's renowned modernist poet, whose career spans the last years of British India and the early decades of postcolonial South Asia. A. Sean Pue argues that Rashed’s poetry carved out a distinct role for literature in the maintenance of doubt,...
Class Acts
Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels
Language: English
Release Date: January 17, 2007
In this lively study, Rachel Sherman goes behind the scenes in two urban luxury hotels to give a nuanced picture of the workers who care for and cater to wealthy guests by providing seemingly unlimited personal attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extended ethnographic research in a range...
by Charles Tilly
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 1998
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 1998
Charles Tilly, in this eloquent manifesto, presents a powerful new approach to the study of persistent social inequality. How, he asks, do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances arise, and how do they come to distinguish members of different socially defined categories of persons? Exploring...
Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens
Video Spectatorship From VHS to File Sharing
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2013
Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse...
by Jacob Smith
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: June 5, 2015
The negative environmental effects of media culture are not often acknowledged: the fuel required to keep huge server farms in operation, landfills full of high tech junk, and the extraction of rare minerals for devices reliant on them are just some of the hidden costs of the contemporary mediascape....
Spoken Word
Postwar American Phonograph Cultures
Language: English
Release Date: February 7, 2011
From the 1940s to the 1970s, the phonograph industry experienced phenomenal growth, both in sales and in cultural influence. Along with hugely popular music recordings, spoken word LPs served a multitude of functions and assumed an important place in the American home. In this book, Jacob Smith surveys...
The Iliad
A New Translation by Peter Green
Language: English
Release Date: May 14, 2015
One of the oldest extant works of Western literature, the Iliad is a timeless epic poem of great warriors trapped between their own heroic pride and the arbitrary, often vicious decisions of fate and the gods. Renowned scholar and acclaimed translator Peter Green captures the Iliad in all its surging...
by Virgil
Language: English
Release Date: July 13, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: July 13, 2011
These delightful poems—by turns whimsical, beautiful, and vulgar—seem to have primarily survived because they were attributed to Virgil. But in David R. Slavitt’s imaginative and appealing translations, they stand firmly on their own merits. Slavitt brings to this little-known body of verse...
Seeing through Zen
Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2004
The tradition of Chan Buddhism—more popularly known as Zen—has been romanticized throughout its history. In this book, John R. McRae shows how modern critical techniques, supported by recent manuscript discoveries, make possible a more skeptical, accurate, and—ultimately—productive assessment...
The Poems of Exile
Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
Language: English
Release Date: January 18, 2005
In the year A.D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant, brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile—permanently, as it turned out—at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's...
The Homeric Hymns
A Translation, with Introduction and Notes
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2004
The Homeric Hymns have survived for two and a half millennia because of their captivating stories, beautiful language, and religious significance. Well before the advent of writing in Greece, they were performed by traveling bards at religious events, competitions, banquets, and festivals. Thirty-four...
by Apollonios Rhodios
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2008
The Argonautika, the only surviving epic of the Hellenistic era, is a retelling of the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece, probably the oldest extant Greek myth. Peter Green's lively, readable verse translation captures the swift narrative movement of Apollonios's epic Greek. This expanded paperback...